Can now accept credit card payments

I have finally made the move of PC-fix-IT being a cash or cheque business into a 21st century electronic payments one. Instead of signing up for a contract with an electronic payment company including consultation and other setup costs, I'm testing the water by using the pay-as-you-go Paypal Here card reader paired to my mobile phone.

The card reader arrived today so all I need now is a customer who is willing to be a guinea pig.

Mid-life upgrade

There was a time when increasing the RAM of a Windows XP computer from 512Mb to 1Gb gave a real noticeable performance improvement. Similarly adding an extra 1GB to a sluggish Windows Vista PC resulted in a performance boost. Now, adding extra memory to a Windows 7 system which is already has 2, 3 or 4Gb doesn't generally give a truly amazing responsive improvement.

I'm finding that adding an SSD gives the desired mid-life upgrade the WOW factor. Prices have continued to drop with 120Gb SSDs costing well under £40 plus 250Gb capacity for under £70. Performance and reliability of these devices have improved with newer motherboards having SATA3 (6Gb/s) ports as well. The majority of my customers do not have huge photo collections or music or film libraries and the PCs are used for email, Facebook, web surfing and document creation. Hence substituting the old HDD with a low capacity SSD is not an issue. And cloning the HDD does not take long. For a desktop system leave the HDD in place as a backup device is also a good practice.

The reboot of the upgraded system is a perfect way to show off the overall performance increase and give you a happy and satisfied customer.

Pentium G3258 and Windows 10

I've just built a basic gaming system with one of my favourite CPUs the Intel Pentium G3258.  I'd already loaded Windows 7 on it but wanted to upgrade to Windows 10. Every time and every which way I tried it failed to install giving the error 0xC1900191-0x20017 The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during the BOOT operation.

Further investigation revealed it was something to do with Windows Update KB3064209 and file C:\Windows\system32\mcupdate_genuineintel.dll. However all the fixes suggested didn't work. Then on www.reddit.com (a site I don't normally use for technical support) there was a post about the Intel Pentium G3258 CPU in particular having this problem. It was suggested to disable one core of the processor in the UEFI BIOS, then do the install and then delete or rename the mcupdate_genuineintel.dll file. This did work and the system is fine running Windows 10 as you can see. I trust that Microsoft will patch this strange bug in the not too distant future.

Learning Windows 10

With the release of Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 10, I've been very busy advising and helping people upgrade their existing systems and ordering new ones.

Even though I have had three systems in the workshop running the technical preview version for the last nine months, I'm still learning the problems of installing, running and using this new version.  Also helping people with the new apps and procedures.  I've only had to un-install it twice as most people are happy with it after the initial learning curve and UI differences.  A couple of old printers are no longer supported any more with drivers.

There are times now that when I use Windows 7 and try to do something that is only available in Windows 10.  Cortana seems a little reluctant to appear automatically here in the UK.

Anyway, I've certainly had more business in what is usually a quiet holiday month.

Back to Wolfenstein

For the last couple of months, I haven't been playing a regular game.  I've gone back to a few of the old ones but it is not the same excitement of discovering and achieving something new.  There was an offer recently for less than £4 so I thought that I'd give it a try.  Great fun!  Just like going back in time killing lots of weird Nazis with a variety of different weapons.


The graphics are good even though you travel a scripted path along corridors, halls and tunnels.  The gore is impressive and the tension is just as it was.  Well worth it.

Great new Windows 10 video

 

I just found this great Windows 10 video on the Microsoft website. Windows 10 is for people who do unexpected things.

Living with a cheap laptop

Almost one year ago I bought a brand new DELL Inspiron 15 laptop for just £166. You can see my original review here. So it was time to give an update especially after my recent disappointing review of the DELL Latitude E3550 laptop. What can you expect for just a quarter of the price?

Quite a lot actually. If you just want a basic, laptop for email, web-surfing, photo editing and 2D gaming it does really well. Boots up quickly, connects to the Internet and provided you don't expect it to do more than one thing at time it remains responsive. Battery life is excellent too. It did come with Windows 8.1 but with the prospect of Windows 10 coming out next month and a free upgrade that will help a lot. As the warranty will be out, I'll upgrade it with a cheap 128Gb SSD as well.

I love this laptop and it does brilliantly for the price. DELL must have sold containers of them over the last Christmas holiday period! However shortly after that Microsoft withdrew its free Windows offer in Europe for this class of system and then they quickly disappeared. However if you look for the equivalent Lenovo which includes a DVD writer as well you can still find them for £169.

DELL Latitude E3550 laptop disappointing

I've just purchased a new DELL Latitude E3550 laptop for a customer and I'm disappointed with it compared to it's predecessor the E3540. The first obvious difference on inspection was the DVD writer is missing and as there is no space for it, it is not even an option. You will require an external DVD to load programs, rip music CDs or watch DVD films. I can understand that in a cheaper consumer laptop that this is standard or even for a small business laptop or ultrabook this is a necessity but in a large-screen, business laptop costing well over £650 this is just not acceptable.

Also compared to the previous model the hard disk drive is no longer the hybrid version with and integrated small SSD cache. Performance does seem to suffer and the slight increase that the latest Intel i5-5200U 'Broadwell' processor is also not spectacular. The hard disk activity light is missing and the power button has a small stripe power mark but no light making it difficult to see if the laptop is asleep or hibernating. The 15.6" display standard resolution is OK but not great. Again evidence of cost-cutting in the design and although the overall build quality is good, the touch pad rattles. On the plus side; keyboard lighting appears to be standard.

DELL have seen to be dropping the ball recently and this laptop if evidence that all is not well in the design and product marketing departments. I have switched my recent purchases to Lenovo for both desktops and laptops and will continue to do so until DELL get their act together again.

Thank you Virgin Media

I enjoy 100Mbps super-fast cable broadband from Virgin Media! I live right on the edge of the cabled area. All the hundreds of houses further out suffer with slow ADSL (1 to 3Mbps) unreliable broadband. For just £42 per month I have great broadband with unlimited downloads, HD television and a TiVo box to record and catch-up on hundreds of channels, plus a telephone including line rental. Also brilliant customer service.

I've been a cable customer since we bought this new house and subscribed to cable from the very beginning about 15 years ago. Unfortunately it didn't get off to a great start as the house builders had installed the cable in the street incorrectly, but when that was fixed it has been full speed ahead since then including three company takeovers (Comtel -> NTL -> Virgin Media -> Liberty). Occasionally the cable does drop out typically at 10am and is restored by 4pm. I assume that they are doing maintenance. I do however have a 3 mobile broadband dongle for these times plus for when I travel.

A very satisfied Virgin Media customer.

Finally bought my first DSLR

After many years of consideration, I've finally been tempted by the low price of £279 for a Nikon D3200 DSLR with 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II telephoto zoom lens. I've owned a couple of 35mm SLRs in the past and understand the basics of photography.

My goal is to get out of the point-and-shoot rut of the last few years. I can't imagine that I will be using Manual mode initially, though I remember using a hand held light meter in the old days! Also I've got to get into the idea of variable ISO and post processing RAW images in order to get the best from the photos that I take. I must admit though the first few photos that I've taken in Auto mode and fine JPEG format have come out remarkably well.

In praise of Chromecast

We recently upgraded our main living room TV to a Sony Bravia Smart TV. The old Toshiba Regza migrated upstairs to my computer workshop and replaced a really old fish-bowl CRT television which was mainly used for me to watch football. To take better advantage of the new HD widescreen, I added a Google Chromecast stick making it effectively a Smart TV controlled from computer, tablet or phone.

What a revelation. Anything that I watched on the PC monitor can now be cast, or streamed to the wall-mounted widescreen. It integrates really well with the Google Chrome browser and is relatively inexpensive (£30) for a brilliant gadget. It also included a neat mains USB charger for those older TVs that don't have a USB socket like mine. I can now catch-up on missed programs (in HD quality) for the BBC channels and will soon be able to do the same for ITV, Channel 4, etc.

Wonderful WiFi

I've just realised the impact that WiFi has had on a normal domestic environment. Just by listing the devices that are regularly connected to it and hence my 100mbps Virgin media cable broadband connection.

• Two laptops and three desktops
• One Smart TV and one Chromecast TV
• One Nexus 7 tablet
• One HTC smartphone
• One Sonos bridge and speakers
• And for completeness, via Gigabit Ethernet, one desktop, one Home Server and one NAS box

As yet, no wireless printers, photo cameras or CCTV cameras, etc.  Still not bad for one house.

Enjoying Far Cry 4

My son, Nicholas gave me the Far Cry 4 game for Christmas and I'm enjoying it immensely. As with the other Far Cry games, you wander about a huge area performing quests and discovering people, treasure and culture.

It is a wonderfully graphic game with plenty of attention to the details. The wildlife is amazing and frequently dangerous. The quests can mostly be done stealth-fully or aggressively. You can explore and conquer areas at will. The fast travel system and buzzers cut down on the boring bits, yet enemies trying to retake already captured outposts keeping you on your toes.

For example, I just managed to capture the very hard Varshakot fortress by first sniping the enemy snipers on top of the walls. Then finding a secret passage that takes you into the fortress and a quiet spot to hide up until the uproar dies down. Secondly, blowing the main gates with explosive and calling your support troops to help. This draws the enemy including the heavy infantry to move to the area under attack and then mortar it killing them all. This just leaves an enemy helicopter to deal with using an RPG and a lone soldier to dispatch quickly. Job done and fortress secured. A great game!

nVidia GT730 revisited

Following my recent post extolling the virtues of the nVidia GT730 graphics card as my new entry-level choice, I wanted to try the card with GDDR5 memory and a 128-bit memory bus. The 1Gb DDR3 version with 64-bit memory bandwidth cost at the time £34, but this has since risen to well over £40 and even £50 in some cases. The GT740 model with GDDR5 and the 128-bit memory bandwidth are £80 or so which is dangerously close to the GT750 with Maxwell architecture offering much better performance. So, when I saw a Gigabyte GT730 with 2Gb of GDDR5 memory albeit with a 64-bit bus for just over £50 it seemed worthwhile to test and see if the extra capacity and faster memory makes much difference.

The benchmarks show at least 36% improvement which for an extra £10 seems worthwhile. The Gigabyte model also comes with a relatively large (10cm) cooling fan which should aid any over-clocking that you might want to apply to gain even greater performance improvement. Also with 2Gb texture memory modern games will run better. So, my entry-level choice has moved slightly to the nVidia GT730 with 2Gb GDDR5.

Testing Windows 10

I'm testing Microsoft's latest Windows 10 version and getting really good impressions from it. It appears to be combining some of the best features of the highly successful Windows 7 version together with the total disaster of Windows 8 in a consistent and modern approach. Gone is the weird Start menu, (unless you want it) and the Charms side menu. It is much easier to find apps and files now.

I'm running Windows 10 Technical Preview via the Insider program on an old DELL Optiplex GX520 with Intel Pentium D dual core at 3GHz and just 2Gb of DDR2 memory. Even on this low-end specification it runs reasonably responsive. I've yet to try any really demanding applications or games.

There are many new features though Cortana the speaking personal assistant is not available in the UK yet. Quite a number of the new apps are just place-holders requiring further development but even these add an integrated vision of what is to come. It appears that Microsoft has learnt its lesson from Windows 8 and the really good news is that it will be free to upgrade to Windows 10 for a year when it is released later this year. With this generous offer in place and from what I have seen so far, I'm a firm supporter of Windows 10.

Fixing my addiction

My New Year's resolution is to stop playing the Forge of Empires game. This free-to-play online game is taking up too much of my spare time and is becoming a real 'click fest' addiction. I've been playing it for over 15 months now and have five cities of which three are nearing completion. I love the building and quest elements of this game but the 4 and 8 hour production cycles that I have to adhere to, combined with the fear of being plundered is a real bind. And really at the higher levels it just takes too long to achieve any progress.

So, I'm quitting and replacing my time with the three games that I have as Christmas presents; Far Cry 4 the latest edition of my favourite 'first person shooter', Simcity the city builder and management game that I have played since its original version, and Hearthstone the free-to-play card collectors game. These should keep me occupied.

I'll be popping back to Forge of Empires to show my two year old granddaughter the little people walking along the abandoned streets and trying to guess which abandoned building they are going into. She loves that!

Graphics gone

My graphics card gave up the ghost! The XFX Radeon HD6870 decided that it didn't want to display any high resolution images any more and it was only three years old.


I tried analogue and digital outputs but it wouldn't go past the boot-up splash screen in any system that I installed it.

I'd never over-clocked it but it always ran warm at idle and very warm after a lengthy, intense gaming session. The ATX case was well vented and cooled with additional fans front and back. It failed at idle after the the system was sleeping so I don't think heat was directly a contributing factor. Not good reliability from a rather expensive card. And it has put me off XFX cards and AMD Radeon graphics.

I've replaced it with a considerably cheaper (£82), quieter and cooler card. The MSi Twin Frozr GeForce GTX 750OC Edition which feels about the same performance level. Let's hope that this lasts a bit longer.

Affordable gaming

Over the years I've built a few affordable gaming systems for clients and it is always a useful exercise in component selection and building to a budget. It is not always getting the cheapest, fastest bits and throwing them together in trying to achieve the best 'bang for the buck'.

As I've said before balance and quality are also factors that should be taken into account. As well as functional bling with extra buttons, LEDs, fans, windows all playing their part to make the system look more expensive than it is. With this in mind, the case I chose was the Zalman Z3 plus with four fans and a fan controller included. An easy case to work with costing just £30. The PSU was a Cooler master G500 a modern, quality unit with 80 Plus Bronze certified and fully compatible with Intel Haswell processors. Nothing modular, but cable routing in this case is not a problem.

The MSi H81-P32 motherboard and Intel Pentium G3258 CPU choice has been detailed in the previous post. The memory was a Kingston HyperX 1600MHz kit. Again not the cheapest but quality and reliable. Following my passion for SSD hard disks the Crucial MX100 256Gb is my model of choice at the moment coming in at just under £75. An additional traditional hard drive can easily be added at a later date. The AMD Radeon HD7770 2GB is an average graphics card at a reasonable price. An nVidia GTX 750 Ti is a more modern alternative.

All in all, a very nice performance system that will play most games well.

Intel's performance Pentium

I managed to get hold of one of the Intel Pentium G3258 20th Anniversary processors. This was released recently as the first over-clocklable Pentium CPU in a long while. It has been mentioned a lot online and in various publications as the good start to an entry-level gaming system. At a price of just £47 it is a real bargain.

Also instead of having to purchase an expensive motherboard with exotic overclock capabilities and settings, some of the manufacturers were releasing BIOS upgrades that would offer a basic overclock function. So the one I went for was the MSi H81-P32 board for just £37. This is a really neat micro-ATX board with a USB3 internal header making it suitable for modern cases. However I see now that this motherboard has been discontinued. Pity.

I was able to upgrade the BIOS to 1.8 version by putting a spare Haswell CPU into the Socket 1150 and running MSi's Live Update program from within Windows. I then swapped the Pentium G3258 processor in and rebooted without any problems. Next, I went into the UEFI BIOS and changed the CPU ratio from 32 to 42. I then had a Pentium processor overclocked to 4.2GHz. This was using the Intel stock air cooler which I noted is copper-cored and better than the usual Pentium coolers. People have managed to overclock this chip to 4.8GHz using better air or water coolers but I considered the extra 1GHz speed without any additional costs or risks is good enough. Under load the CPU temperature was 65C which is very acceptable.

A really good start to an affordable gaming system (£47 + £37) which I will detail in my next post.

New value graphics card champion

For the last couple of years or so, I've been installing AMD Radeon HD5450 graphics cards in family desktops so that basic games such as World of Warcraft, The Sims or Flight Simulator can be played. These cards also improve video playback, have a low power rating without additional connections, are silent (without noisy, little fans), can be adjusted to low profile cases and are fairly cheap to purchase, though the average price is increasing from £20 to £30 in that time.

I've occasionally purchased and tested similar cards such as Radeon HD6450 with DDR3 and DDR5, nVidia GT610, etc. The performance increase was generally not worth the extra cost. This week I saw an nVidia GT730 with 1GB DDR3 going for just £34 so I decided to try that. It is a short, PCIe 8-lanes card with a basic dual slot width heat-sink. Testing it shows that it doubles the PCmark7 score and trebles the 3Dmark06 figure. Yes, I know these benchmarks are old but it saves me re-benchmarking old cards and systems. And the games are old too. An impressive result and I'm sure that I will be purchasing more of these little video wonders.

Also, for a bit more money at about £60 I can get an nVidia GT640 with DDR5 and 128-bit memory bandwidth, so I will probably get one of these to see if the performance improvement is worth the extra cost. It should be.