Bought any computing stuff today?

[chrisbainbridge]

I bought a series 5 iPad mini for a long cycling trip.  whilst the kindle app is not as good as the Kindle paper white, the better browser and all the other apps make me a lot happier.  I now have all my routes on Garmin, iPad and phone with maps in offline mode and with 2 different apps!

[phantasmagoriana]

Succumbed to Prime Day and bought a new Chromebook. Nothing fancy - just the newer version of my elderly Asus C202, which is now falling apart (it's been very well used and abused over the years). For £99, if the C204 lasts as long as this one has, I'll be very happy.

[Mr Larrington]

Fearing that an ancient and heavily used Seagate NAS is dying on its arse, so ordered a WD as a replacement, which will probably not arrive before I go to Battle Mountain chiz

Edit: Ancient & heavily used Seagate seems to have succumbed to droid rot in the space of a couple of hours

Edit 2: Seems to have come back to life at least temporarily after unplugging it from the mains for a bit…  Everything that ent already copied elsewhere has been copied elsewhere.

[Pickled Onion]

So I went down the mechanical keyboard rabbit hole, and and now have a Keychron k2, small form factor wireless keyboard with brown switches. The wife complained about the noise about 2 minutes into me setting up the keyboard, and requested that I don't use it at home. The brown switches are supposed to be relatively quiet compared to the blue and green switches that I had been considering.  The rest of the team are going to love me hotdesking in the office tomorrow.

I have a keyboard with brown keys at the office. A few others have also bought the same. I was a bit worried when I first got it (hence the brown keys) but there have been several comments about how nice it is to hear fluent typing on a proper keyboard.

When WFH started I bought one with black keys for home. It's nicer still to type on, but then I don't have a The Wife to complain about the noise.

Strictly speaking, we're not allowed to use anything other than the company keyboards unless we can prove to occupational health that we have a documented need, but it's tolerated as long as we don't bring it to anyone's attention. As my job is typing all day, I'd rather leave than spend 8 hours a day typing on what is basically a sheet of foam with jam on it.

[Afasoas]

The red silent keys seem to a fair compromise between a nice tactile keyboard and noise. Noise level comparable with a membrane keyboard unless people hammer them home on each key stroke as if using a mechanical typewriter.

The keyboard is probably the only 'expensive' piece of kit in my home office, other than the work lapdog.

[Kim]

The useless workshy twats finally delivered, so I'm now the proud owner of a 32" 4k monitor and an SSD that has enough breathing room to edit video and arse about with Windows VMs.

As suspected, I think I may need another pair of glasses.  It's brilliant for code, thobut.

[pcolbeck]

My new keyboard has been delivered.

A Cherry Stream rechargeable wireless keyboard and mouse set. Uses AAA (keyboard) and AA (mouse) rechargeable batteries which is good as the keyboard feels like it will last longer than inbuilt batteries would.

The keyboard is brilliant, not convinced about the mouse yet but we will see.

[Bledlow]

Its 2012 27" predecessor is DEDD.

Apple durability and fixability is 'disappointing'.

Lasted almost a decade; that is not too shabby.

Though it highlights the problem with all-in-one computers. If part of the computer fails, or just becomes obsolete, need to replace the whole thing.
Monitors usually last much longer. Or if you do want to upgrade to something bigger/better, can use the monitor with an old computer, or TV, or games console, or give it away.
A Mac Mini plus a monitor of your choice wouldn't take up much more desk space.

Indeed. I have a 2009 vintage monitor which is working perfectly. It was ex-display when bought, & was used with the main household desktop until that was relegated to reserve last year & the monitor went with it. Still used whenever Mrs B & I both want to use a computer.

There's an older monitor tucked away somewhere which was used a lot in the 2000s before becoming the spare, & then intermittently. Now it's the spare spare.

A laptop has to be all in one, but if a computer is going to sit on a desk, I'll go for separates. More comfortable keyboards, too.

[ian]

I do like an all-in-one computer, it's just less faff and looks neater, there's already enough crap on my desk. That said, if Apple don't release another monster iMac then I might have to take the Mac Mini route (I don't think anything I use a computer for these days justifies a Mac Studio). This one is seven years old (I'm a tad surprised that it won't run Ventura) but still quite capable and the 27-inch 5k retina display lush so I'm not in a huge rush to upgrade. The sparkly new mothership Macbook Pro is quite sweet though, loving the keyboard even more than this Magic one, which I love quite a lot.

[Kim]

My budget doesn't stretch to Mega-Global Fruit Corporation computers, especially if I'm just going to end up running Linux on them, but the appeal of iMacs took a dive for me around whichever model it was that suffered from premature graphics card failure.  I looked up how to repair it, and the procedure for getting at the relevant components involved the sort of equipment normally used while hanging upside-down from a rope above a heavily alarmed display case in a museum.

The laptops are still lovely, thobut.

If your computing needs are modest there are plenty of small fanless machines that can be screwed to a VESA mount or otherwise hidden behind a standard monitor.


(Spare monitors seem to have a habit of breeding.  I currently count four that are old enough to still be square kicking around in here.  A couple of them have whistly power supplies or flickery back-lights and really ought to go in the WEEE pile.)

[ian]

That's fine, though back in the day I didn't mind building my own PC, these days if something pops, I'm not going to repair it, the man in the shop is. Which is one of the benefits of the Apple-verse. Of course, if you want to fix them yourself, there's not point in buying a machine that's basically a sealed unit.

[Mr Larrington]

Decided it was high time to pension off my teeny-weeny clockwork Asus laptop and a shiny new refurbished Dell Latitude with an i5/8GB/512GB will be mine all mine shortly   Then we can play a game called “Copy Stuffs to New Toy”.

Edit: if I start copying Stuffs to a network drive now it might be finished by the time the replacement arrives…

[Mr Larrington]

This post brought to you from my new laptop

[Pingu]

This post brought to you from my new laptop

We await it's first appearance here 

[Mr Larrington]

It’s already there

[CommuteTooFar]

I bought some components for an AMD 7700x computer for my brother.   Its not complete. I hope to buy one of the new graphics cards when they are released.

[Bledlow]

Decided it was high time to pension off my teeny-weeny clockwork Asus laptop and a shiny new refurbished Dell Latitude with an i5/8GB/512GB will be mine all mine shortly   Then we can play a game called “Copy Stuffs to New Toy”.

Edit: if I start copying Stuffs to a network drive now it might be finished by the time the replacement arrives…

This reply is typed on a refurbished Dell Latitude 5491 laptop with an i5, 8GB & 500 GB . . . . oh, & running Open Shell. Purchased a mere two moons ago.

Mrs B is currently using the main household desktop.

I decided I could do with another backup drive & this'd start faster with an SSD, so it's not quite as it was when I bought it.

[Wombat]

"Forgive me Father, for I have sinned"

Just bought (in stages, including some spotting of "Black Friday deals") a complete set of components for a new desktop PC. As this 10 year old one is managing with 4TB of storage which is getting stuffed (I manage 2 photo archives, and photos have typically been 42MP in recent years, now escalated to 50MP, so a fair bit of space is required) I'll have 2 nvme drives, one 2TB for most everyday stuff including the smaller photo archive, and one 4TB one for my main personal photo archive, which insists on being in one volume, for its 30k plus images.  Trying to avoid excessively "gaming" graphics cards, yet having enough grunt for rendering images, and processing photogrammetry is quite a juggle, and I'm very keen on keeping both noise and power consumption to a minimum, so there are some compromises.  I'm still £2k poorer, though!

I get fed up with everything being gaming orientated, I haven't played a game on any computer since I played "elite" on my brother's BBC micro.  Its a tool, I want it to do its job, without flashing multicolour lights and fancy windows in the case.

Ah, I do need to buy a fingerprint reader, as I utterly detest having to "sign in" to an OS on my own PC in my own office in my own locked house whenever I start it.  So far managed to convince this PC to stay sans login, but failed with the laptop when I had to rebuild it, and I gather Windows 11 insists.

[CommuteTooFar]

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

is your friend. String values of interest are called DefaultUserName and DefaultPassword.  Also DefaultDomain if you need it.

[Kim]

Ah, I do need to buy a fingerprint reader, as I utterly detest having to "sign in" to an OS on my own PC in my own office in my own locked house whenever I start it.  So far managed to convince this PC to stay sans login, but failed with the laptop when I had to rebuild it, and I gather Windows 11 insists.

Having been previously warned, I was able to set up the BHPC's new (less viscous) jam-filled Windows 11 Babbage engine to not require a login on boot or (and this is the best bit) a Microsoft account.

The whole plan hinged on being able to deny it an internet connection at the crucial moment during the setup process.  This was easily achieved, as the machine itself was selected for that increasingly rare feature - a wired Ethernet port.  But if you have to use WiFi you could maybe apply a firewall rule or turn the access point off or something.

[Wombat]

Aha, The new one will also be ethernet only, so denial of access is probably the favoured answer, but I'm sure I've seen something of what Commutetoofar suggests.  I do have something of an aversion to the Microsoft account.  I definitely subscribe to Kim's opinion that "yer can't beat a bit of wire" for internet connections, and the router is about 1.5 metres away from the PC, anyway. 

Currently playing with today's "toy", a thermal imaging module for the phone.  I sorely miss the thermal imager I always had access to at work, but that cost about £7.5K, and it seems the little module has higher resolution, and cost me £235 on an Amazon "deal". First discovery was exactly where all the central heating pipes are buried in the concrete floors of this place.  Even in 1985, that must have been a pretty stupid idea...

[DaveJ]

The latest version of Windows 11 is more insistent about the Microsoft account, and if you pull the ethernet out, or turn off the Wifi, it says it can't continue until you have an internet connection.

You can get around this by Ctrl and F10 for a command prompt, and then OOBE\BYPASSNRO

But....I've seen a couple of Windows 11 machines with local accounts recently, with Disk Encryption turned on, and buried in the control panel, a message to say "Sign in with a Microsoft account to complete the disk encryption set up".  Quite a lot of potential here for losing the whole contents of the C: drive, because the bit that it hasn't done is to save the encryption key.  These machines were Windows 11 Home, not Pro, and the owners had not intentionally turned on Disk Encryption.  I rebuilt Windows 11 from scratch on one of these machines (disk initialisation and installation from USB), and it after I had done that, the C: drive ended up with disk encryption turned on, and again, without a Microsoft account to save the key into, the possibility of losing the whole contents of the encrypted disk.

I don't like it, I think it should be the owner's choice to have a Microsoft account or not, but I think its too dangerous to have a local account now.  The encryption key needs to be saved somewhere, and there's a bit less chance of losing it if its saved in a the Microsoft account.

Earlier on this year, I saw three Microsoft Surface machines in a fortnight, that all started asking for the encryption key after a Windows update.  None of the data was recoverable, because either there wasn't a Microsoft account to recover the key from, or the the key wasn't in it.  My guess is that Microsoft bundled a BIOS update for the Surfaces into Windows Update, and thats what wiped the key from the machines.  Without the encryption key, the data was toast.

Anyway...bottom line, bite the bullet and accept that Windows 11 needs a Microsoft account and associated logon.   

[Polar Bear]

A Dell 2722QC monitor to replace the decade plus  old 28 inch Hanns-C monitor which has effectively worked full time over that period.  It is finally failing.

A great servant but it's shift is done.

I do hate waste though.  😔

[Polar Bear]

Quite surprised that it arrived this morning.  The due date was Saturday 11th.

All set up and working well.  Dell do make decent monitors.

It was fulfilled through Amazon yet again in spite of my ordering it elsewhere   must check that Prime was not somehow activated

[Jaded]

A Mesh network, to replace an ageing Airport network.

Should be thrown over the fence later...