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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : The PC I never thought I would build....
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Grogster Admin Group  Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
So, here I am, freshly logged into the forums using Windoze 10 Home. I am using one of those new Intel NUC things - they are very dinky being only about 100 x 100, but some of them are very powerful. The one I have is a quad-core Pentium Silver @ 2.8GHz. LINK. I have 16GB of RAM running on this thing, despite the specs saying you can only run 8GB. Several YT videos have also run 16GB no problems. Having activated and settled down about six million things that W10 wants to do in the background, I am quite happy with this machine. I know I have rained on W10 before, but with modern hardware, it seems OK. Especially once you turn off all the telemetry and setup so that speed is king, and not the eye-candy. Weather this is a mistake or not, remains to be seen, but.....on we go. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| VK2MCT Senior Member  Joined: 30/03/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 120 |
What have you used for a SSD/HDD. John |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I used a 240GB Apacer SSD. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Phil23 Guru  Joined: 27/03/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1667 |
Using a couple on remote client sites; Sort of live job status screens. Win7 on i5's they are. They have been painless & trouble free. Am a little surprised they haven't added an M.2 SSD interface; Guess that will come in the future. Cheers Phil. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Yes, the You Tube videos I watched on this box did also mention the lack of an M.2 slot, which they thought would make the device fantastic. Oh well. I'm not bothered. A standard SSD of any kind of brand name will work well. This PC is much faster then my other one, and it also has two screens, which is a novelty for me.  I got so sick of trying to design PCB's while flicking back and forth to the PDF files, so now I can keep the PDF files up on one scree, while I design on the other one. Dual screens have been just about standard for years now, but I am slow to take up things like that.  As to turning things off on W10, a couple of the mandatory things for me was to: - Install Classic Shell to replace the tiled W10 start menu, which is like a hybrid of the W8 Metro start screen, and a normal start menu. This gives you back a much more standard start menu - so you can find things. - Turn off all visual effects. CONTROL PANEL/ADVANCED SYSTEM SETTINGS/PERFORMANCE/ADJUST FOR BEST PERFORMANCE. This turns off all the GUI annimations etc. The speed you get back is worth it IMHO. This is not for everyone, but I like my PC to just do the work, and I care more about speed then eye-candy. - While in there, click on START-UP AND RECOVERY, and UNCHECK 'Automatically Restart'. This will stop W10 from rebooting when it gets a BSOD. It is more helpful to have the BSOD error code, cos then you can at least research the code. Auto-restart means you never get to see the BSOD so have no idea what the problem might be. - If you are on a laptop, DISABLE the power-saving on the WiFi connection. It's a nice idea, but when it turns off the WiFi, often the Internet connection is dropped and many people don't know how to get it back again. - Install and periodically use SHUT UP 10 to disable all the recommended settings, including the three telemetry settings. These will often be silently re-enabled after W10 does any kind of update, so you need to re-run Shut Up 10 after any update. I'm sure I will think of others, but those are the mandatory ones. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Well, it begins....  I changed the password on one of my other machines on the LAN, now ALL but one machine are no longer visable on the network, including the one I changed the password on. Why the hell would Windoze totally hide several other machines that I could see fine before, when I change the password on one of the other machines? I changed the root password on one of my Linux boxes, now W10 will only talk to one of about six different machines I have on the LAN - all the others are not even visable anymore. Rebooted several times, not helping. Has anyone seen this before? It was all going so well up till this point.....  Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
OK, update - Powered down the Linux box I changed the password on, and rebooted the others, and now W10 sees the others fine. I.....don't......get it.....  However, the LAN obviously did not like what I did. I have a feeling I have corrupted that Linux box now(Puppy Linux), so I think I will take the chance to upgrade that puppy to the latest version anyway. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Phil23 Guru Joined: 27/03/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1667 |
That's sounding horribly like the Master Browser issue that can exist on Workgroups. PC's get together & "Elect" a Master? How fool proof can that be!!!! I can just see an engineering PC voting for the one in Accounts, because it's got nice blue lights.. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Do you know how to reset that or FORCE a certain machine to be the master browser then? I will google this..... Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Interesting thing, this 'Master Browser' thing.... Mr. Google has revealed that LOTS AND LOTS of people have this exact issue - where boxes that WERE visable on the LAN, now are not, cos they changed something on one of them. Bill.....dear oh dear.  However, one page recommended simply mapping a drive letter to the machine's shared drive, and I tried that with the backup server, and that worked just fine. I could map a drive letter to one of the drives in the backup server, by just stating it's network location, and clicking OK - despite Windows Network not showing it being there at all, and no amount of refreshing of the network would show the backup server.... Sigh. EDIT: Puppy box is still totally invisible to Windows, even if I try to map to it. I think I will reinstall Puppy and update to the latest version at the same time. I will keep the USB flash drive that the current one is on, so I can switch back to it later if I think of something else to try. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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Azure Guru Joined: 09/11/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 446 |
Good idea, if you want data from the current drive (which you are not updating) you can just mount it on the updated setup. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Hi all. :) Just a little update for you: Clean install Slacko-64 6.3.2. Configure network IP address to static. Mount partitions Terminal: smbpasswd -a root and proceed. Terminal: passwd root and proceed. Exit terminal. Reboot. Windoze still refuses to talk to the box via networking(is still totally invisible), but I can connect to the location using the IP address of the Puppy box, the share-name, and entering in the Samba password, and Windoze linked to it easily then. I found that information in a very useful page here. It would seem that Windows 10 is a little touchy with Samba shares..... Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| JackRabbit Newbie  Joined: 21/07/2018 Location: United StatesPosts: 14 |
I'm interested in running PC's 24x7 for data collection and gave W10 a solid try but finally dumped it. You can tame the W10 MS forced re-boots after the MS forced updates by using Group Policy to set active hours and then turn off "auto-restart for updates during active hours" and "no auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations." to give you control over when it re-boots. If you have Home the Group Policy Editor is disabled by default but can be enabled easily. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I am using W10 Home x64. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| WhiteWizzard Guru Joined: 05/04/2013 Location: United KingdomPosts: 2944 |
Hi G, If you haven't done so already, I would strongly advise 'tweaking' Windows for use with an SSD. Literally spent the last 24hours building a replacement Windows Development box due to my 'old' SSD failing spectacularly. I hadn't fully set Windows to minimise write cycles to the SSD so within 3yrs my SSD was virtually 'killed'. Speed, quietness, and reduced temp were the initial reasons I installed it. Sounds like you have a great machine there after all your earlier rants about W10  |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
I fully expected that W10 would already be fully SSD-aware, and would configure itself to make best use of an SSD without my needing to configure it as such - I will now investigate this a little more. All parts were brand new, including the SSD, so it has not been stressed much - yet - so I will take a deeper look at this. My W10 rants were just that - rants. To be fair to W10 retrospectively, perhaps I was being a LITTLE unfair, as on any NEW hardware, I have found W10 runs great. Even better when you install things like Classic Shell and turn off all the eye candy as mentioned in page one of this thread. It is easily as fast and stable as my old W8 box was. However, the same CANNOT be said of many machines I had to try to fix up for clients, who had had their W7 or W8 auto-updated to W10, either by choice or not, as it would seem many, many of the slightly older machines just could not really cope with W10, and it turned those previously OK machines, back in to W95 machines speed wise! Like, many laptops that updated only had 2GB of RAM and a 5400RPM HDD in them. They ran W7 OK, albeit a little slowly. But put W10 on those machines, and they were like snails speed wise - REALLY bad performers. Anyway, it is fabulous to see you back on the forums WW. I hope everything is OK with you. This page shows some useful tools, so I have applied most of those that W10 would let me do. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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| PeterB Guru Joined: 05/02/2015 Location: AustraliaPosts: 655 |
As I said before, Grogster, you do come up with some lulus. Peter |
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| BrianP Senior Member Joined: 30/03/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 292 |
Hi Grogs Haven't posted for a while - still doing rehab after a forced hip replacement. I couldn't resist after seeing you weakening with Win 10! One thing you might like to do if you are running Win 10 v.1709 or later (use "Winver" to check) is go to "Network & Internet" in settings & in "Change Connection Properties" set your current connection to a "Metered Connection". This supposedly stops downloads of any large updates (other than "critical") & may be quite useful as you have the Home version of Win 10 & are a "Microsoft plaything" when it comes to forced updates. The above works for both WiFi & Ethernet network connections & I've found it very useful on mission critical machines that you don't want interrupted. You can still manually tell it to "download anyway" after you've taken a deep breath & plucked up enough courage. Another thing - some Win 10 machines seem to have System Restore turned off by default - either after a new install or major update. It's worth checking this as not having a "go back" can bite you in very uncomfortable places. Good luck with Win 10! Brian P. |
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| Grogster Admin Group Joined: 31/12/2012 Location: New ZealandPosts: 9610 |
Oh, that's not so good. Get well soon.  Weakening with W10, yes. There are still things I don't like about it, but then - the perfect OS is hard to find I think. MMBASIC comes close for embedded devices. Everything is up and running fine on this W10 machine, but every now and again, I will come back to the machine, and it wants me to login again - which I do, but ALL the running applications have been closed, which is odd. I just crank them up again, but it is a pest, as I often have Opera Browser, several PDF's, Multiple PCB layout files, Word and Excel files, GFXterm and other things all open at the same time. That was one of the reasons for installing 16GB of RAM on this thing, but so far, I have not exceeded about 7.5GB with all things running, so plenty of RAM left to work in. I have no idea why W10 is doing that. It's almost like it has had a BSOD and rebooted back to the login prompt. But I have disabled automatic reboot on BSOD, so if that HAD happened, I would expect to be greeted with some kind of BSOD message. At this point in time, I am putting it down to the forced W10 updates. Many of them require a restart, and if you DON'T cancel that within 60 seconds or so, then the machine just reboots and sits waiting at the login screen. That's my guess anyway. Smoke makes things work. When the smoke gets out, it stops! |
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MicroBlocks Guru Joined: 12/05/2012 Location: ThailandPosts: 2209 |
you can check the logs to find out what happened Microblocks. Build with logic. |
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