Consultants.
Seemed to have very little knowledge of computers, zero interest of what specs were required, a huge amount of arrogance around doing the groundwork required, and charged the company a lot of money to tell us to buy a popular off-the-shelf product at a pretty uncompetitive price. Definitely IT consultants.
We have exactly 1 (o-n-e, one) piece of in-house software.
Take a wild guess if they tested it on the new hardware.
Deadset no way they should’ve been paid.
Essentially charged 5 figures for about 2 hours’ work, and I’m fairly sure they got a commission on each of the ~50 devices we bought too.
And the higher tiers of management are on a cost-cutting bent…
Put as much RAM into it as you can (it’s a simple DIY job).
Rip out the old optical HDD, and put in a solid-state HDD (again a simple DIY job, once you’ve cloned the original HDD).
My 6-year old Macbook Pro was running like a bag of ■■■■ with the latest OS. Finally it dropped it guts when the dedicated GPU died (apparently a common issue for 2012 models). Ended up doing the following:
upped RAM from 2 x 2GB to 2 x 4GB (DIY, cost about $160)
replaced 750 GB optical with 1 TB SSD (DIY, cost about $300 including the cloning cradle)
had it rejigged to boot from the integrated GPU (yes, the Macbook has two GPU’s in it for some reason… about $200 by a computer shop in Bentleigh)
It now has a slightly less hi-res screen (not a prob… don’t use it for hi-res purposes anyway) and runs like a dream. Faster (and runs significantly cooler) than when I bought it. A helluva lot cheaper than ponying-up the moolah for an equivalent new model too (~$3500).
Oh, and trust me I am no computer boffin. This was the first time I have ever gone into the guts of a computer. It really was a piece of cake. Well, the cloning part was a little fiddly, but that was because corrupted sections of the optical drive were causing the cloning software to stall. The physical removal/installation of RAM and drives was a doddle.
Quite right… like I said… no boffin here, here be no boffin…
Yes, for the above, wherever I said “optical drive” read as “old mechanical, spinning drive”
In his case maybe so (though he doesn’t need the gpu fix). In my case, I had a pantload of unfinished projects in a piece of software which Apple has now updated and (in their infinite fucker-ness) made:
a) the previous version unusable on the current os
b) it not completely backwards compatible with previous versions (importing v9 projects into v10 is a clusterfuck leading to all sorts of instability)
As such, it was easier for me keep the computer alive to complete those projects on that version of the software.
I will eventually update to a new computer and the newer software, but need to make it a clean break.
It looks real nice, always the right price, and runs on bugger all resources, but I’ve never really found it worth the hassle on a personal computer. (Had 2 or 3 installs at different points, ubuntu & mint I think)
In my experience it’s a pain to set up, then a bunch of little pains along the way. Every time you think “I can just do that with…” there’s another 3 steps. Nothing insurmountable, not even anything all that technical, just inconvenient. Again and again.
You, being a contrary bugger, will probably love it.
Deal with it professionally for a particular purpose-built PC for a particular (graphics heavy) application, and it’s beautiful. Fast, stable, nothing superfluous.
Same problem I have been encountering with my HP Laptop. After installing the printer driver when I saw that my canon printer offline windows 10 was appearing every time, I could not print anything.
This will show you what DNS servers you PC is currently using. BTW some ISPs now supply NBN routers preconfigured to get DNS automatically when establishing a connection.