What's the first thing you do when you get a new laptop or system?
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Nuke / Pave to remove vendor crap & update drivers / bios
For separate accounts it's good practice to use a daily user account with a different admin account (no one ever does this outside of a business that I've ever heard of, but $0.02 to consider)
Do the unboxing!
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Yeah, separate accounts work really nicely. Fast user switching comes in handy.
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My first thing is usually feeling tremendously disappointed about it. Happening right now w/ the MSI Stealth Pro.
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You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
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@creayt said:
My first thing is usually feeling tremendously disappointed about it. Happening right now w/ the MSI Stealth Pro.
It seems to happen with most expensive laptops. They just aren't worth it.better to keep desktops for performance and laptops for mobility.
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@thecreativeone91 said:
It seems to happen with most expensive laptops. They just aren't worth it.better to keep desktops for performance and laptops for mobility.
I did just play a Dota 2 match at 1440p w/ the highest possible settings and was able to multitask across 2 other 27" monitors during respawn lulls without the system slowing down. Though the fans are a'blarin. Not too shabby. Especially since it's over 2 mini display port cables, apparently my monitors support daisy chaining.
The biggest real dealbreaker so far is the keyboard. They completely removed the left Windows key, which is so, so vital for productivity. The keyboard also kind of sucks for typing quickly in general. Overall performance is great though, and I'm sure would be much better once I got a Samsung SSD or 3 into it, if I kept it.
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@creayt said:
Has anyone ever tried a workflow where you use separate Windows user accounts on the same machine for separate purposes?
I use one for administration and one for normal use. So always two.
Separate for work and play can work, but I think would generally be annoying.
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@MattSpeller said:
Nuke / Pave to remove vendor crap & update drivers / bios
Definitely, first thing is always a fresh install before even looking at the system.
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@creayt said:
You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
One of the advantages to enterprise engineering.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
One of the advantages to enterprise engineering.
Although it does have a cool feature ( which may be available in enterprise too ) where it uses the wifi and lan simultaneously and does QoS to put the more important apps onto the lan. I had to enable it ( was after that post ).
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
One of the advantages to enterprise engineering.
Although it does have a cool feature ( which may be available in enterprise too ) where it uses the wifi and lan simultaneously and does QoS to put the more important apps onto the lan. I had to enable it ( was after that post ).
I'm pretty sure the Intel Pro Drivers support this kind of stuff, though rarely would it be useful.
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@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
One of the advantages to enterprise engineering.
Although it does have a cool feature ( which may be available in enterprise too ) where it uses the wifi and lan simultaneously and does QoS to put the more important apps onto the lan. I had to enable it ( was after that post ).
That's confusing terminology. When is a WiFi not a LAN?
That's sort of a cool feature, but when do you have your Ethernet saturated to a point where it would be beneficial?
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Testing probably should be done in a VM to protect your machine in general, but two accounts, admin and standard for sure.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
You know when a $600 Dell gets better wifi performance than a $1700 gaming laptop that something's wrong
One of the advantages to enterprise engineering.
Although it does have a cool feature ( which may be available in enterprise too ) where it uses the wifi and lan simultaneously and does QoS to put the more important apps onto the lan. I had to enable it ( was after that post ).
That's confusing terminology. When is a WiFi not a LAN?
That's sort of a cool feature, but when do you have your Ethernet saturated to a point where it would be beneficial?
Yeah, LAN is what their interface calls it, I should've corrected it lol. Guessing "gamers" ( I'm not one so I can't speak to it ) call it the LAN because of "LAN parties" where everyone would wire up a long time ago. IDK.
I don't know about saturated, but I've noticed that when I'm downloading a file and do a speedtest.net test, my numbers are very tangibly degraded. So even if that's not supposed to happen, it's an observable phenomenon and makes me wonder if adding in a second connector simultaenously wouldn't protect against that somewhat. When I was putting this laptop through it's paces I was playing a 1440p game of Dota 2 on its highest settings and multi-tasking across 2 other monitors downloading apps, installing software, and doing general web browsing, I don't know how much of an advantage their was to using both wifi and lan, but it all felt surprisingly instant.
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@creayt said:
I don't know about saturated, but I've noticed that when I'm downloading a file and do a speedtest.net test, my numbers are very tangibly degraded. So even if that's not supposed to happen, it's an observable phenomenon and makes me wonder if adding in a second connector simultaenously wouldn't protect against that somewhat.
No, actually it would make it worse by adding unnecessary latency and a separation / recombination process onto the network. Minor, but definitely no way to improve but there is opportunity to degrade. The speed you are talking about with Speedtest.net is WAN speed, having lots of separate paths on the LAN won't affect that.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@creayt said:
I don't know about saturated, but I've noticed that when I'm downloading a file and do a speedtest.net test, my numbers are very tangibly degraded. So even if that's not supposed to happen, it's an observable phenomenon and makes me wonder if adding in a second connector simultaenously wouldn't protect against that somewhat.
No, actually it would make it worse by adding unnecessary latency and a separation / recombination process onto the network. Minor, but definitely no way to improve but there is opportunity to degrade. The speed you are talking about with Speedtest.net is WAN speed, having lots of separate paths on the LAN won't affect that.
Just to be clear, it doesn't route the same traffic over both adapters, it divides the full workload by application / purpose and routes things discerningly.
http://www.killernetworking.com/technology/killer-double-shot-pro
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Understood, it is a lot like NIC Teaming. Still requires an extra layer of overhead that, unless you are getting some benefit, is a negative. Since the WiFi connection will have extra latency of its own and more signal problems (if it doesn't you have other isues) and since you presumably are not saturating the main connection, it seems to be two negatives without a positive. The positive is only a theoretical one in a case where you are surpassing 1GigE of traffic. If you are actually doing that much, you need to upgrade your networking and this is, at best, a really poor bandaid.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Understood, it is a lot like NIC Teaming. Still requires an extra layer of overhead that, unless you are getting some benefit, is a negative. Since the WiFi connection will have extra latency of its own and more signal problems (if it doesn't you have other isues) and since you presumably are not saturating the main connection, it seems to be two negatives without a positive. The positive is only a theoretical one in a case where you are surpassing 1GigE of traffic. If you are actually doing that much, you need to upgrade your networking and this is, at best, a really poor bandaid.
Wouldn't it theoretically at a minimum reduce contention for latency on the adapter that it dedicates important traffic to? Which I think for gaming is the point. So if my Dota 2 match is the only thing running over the ethernet for example, it'll never have to execute the evaluation of whether to commandeer the adapter for each new packet from something else it might be doing, like downloading a file or serving a web page? In other words if the important stuff is in its own lane, wouldn't that exempt it from any kind of work to prioritize or rearrange traffic like it'd hit if it were sharing a connection?
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@creayt said:
Wouldn't it theoretically at a minimum reduce contention for latency on the adapter that it dedicates important traffic to?
How would it do that? The data is coming off of the same switch on the other end. Ethernet has not had contention since the introduction of switches.
Wifi, on the other hand, always has contention. So contention is what you are introducing where none existed.
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@creayt said:
In other words if the important stuff is in its own lane, wouldn't that exempt it from any kind of work to prioritize or rearrange traffic like it'd hit if it were sharing a connection?
Nope, doesn't change anything. The computer doesn't know that the traffic is prioritized. Basically you are attempting to do QoS without really doing it. The NIC is going to treat the traffic with the same overhead whether DOTA is the only thing talking on that channel or if other things are. The NIC is able to handle wire speed without additional latency, lowering the work it does does not free things up for other traffic realistically, but it does make everything else slower by sending it on the Wifi.
