Computer Questions Not Worth Their Own Thread II

Those links are extremely handy. Thanks!
 
On a single 1080p monitor, $400 for a video card is probably overkill. I'd rather spend $200 now, skip the few games that won't play at max settings for the next couple years, then spend another $200 for a much better card.

For CPUs, no real point in the 4790, either get the 4790K for best performance per thread, or the i5-4690 or similar to save a bunch of money.

RAM has pretty much no effect on performance. Get lots of the cheapest RAM of minimum 1600 MHz speed you can find. DDR4 takes a different chipset/CPU selection anyhow.

And those prices are insanity... Canada isn't even a particular bastion of low electronic prices, a GTX 970 runs $370 and an i7-4790K runs $330 here... I'm sure I could ship a PC to Australia for $240.
 
Thanks for the advice and links!

I'd guess there are two main reasons for the high prices - firstly, the Australian dollar has nosedived over the past months, and secondly, those prices incorporate labour costs (and the insurance that goes with getting someone else to assemble it). Though I dunno, maybe that's still quite high.
 
I had a crash while typing a reply, so I'm only retyping it briefly.

Prices - compared with AVADirect, an American custom builder of a similar sort. They charged $381 - $441 (USD) for R9 290/290X GPUs. With an exchange rate of 81 ¢ U.S. to $1 AUD, the prices you quoted seem comparable. The CPU does seem kind of high, but AVADirect starts out with a i3-4130 which isn't free, so it's hard to compare directly. Thus based on the most direct comparison, it seems in the same ballpark.

SSDs - Generally the least expensive that's brand-name for the given capacity works; it's the fact of having an SSD, and much less so the SSD's speed, that makes the real-world responsiveness difference. Current top recommendations at the lower price points include the Crucial MX-100 and M500, and the Samsung 840 EVO, although there are other good ones.

Some are indeed 50% more expensive, such as the Samsung 850 Pro, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro. And they are much faster for large file transfers, and thus do much better on benchmarks. For most users however, it's the really fast access times that all SSDs have that makes a difference. These high-end ones are good drives, and the SanDisk Extreme Pro even goes so far as to have a 10-year warranty, but most users will be hard-pressed to tell a difference. It's one of those things where if I were making lots of money, I might get one, but as it is I got an MX-100.
 
Which graphics card is better a GTX 560 Ti or a GTX 750 no-suffix? I've got both and I'm wondering whether I should change the one I've got in the computer I use more for gaming. I'm actually doing it anyway and comparing frame rates, but while I'm doing that I may as well post this . . .
 
The 560 Ti produced 25% more fps. I expected it to be faster, but I didn't realize there would be that much difference . . .
 
Guys, I'm not sure if regular expressions are the answer to this, but I might need some help with regular expressions.

Basically, I want to replace all spaces that fit a certain set of criteria with semicolons or something, in order to sanitise a data file.

The data looks like this:

47 5-9 Carats Near Gem Cubes 1 1 336.45 1,291.00 434,356.95
48 5-9 Carats Mixed Rejns 1 1 1,897.63 228.00 432,659.64
49 5-9 Carats Mixed Rejns 1 1 1,897.89 228.00 432,718.92
50 3-4 Carats White Gem Z 1 1 372.94 2,180.00 813,009.20

Now, by the human eye, I can clearly see that the data is separated by spaces, apart from "5-9 Carats Near Gem Cubes", which is a string field that contains spaces within the string. What I want to do is either replace the separating spaces with semicolons, or wrap speech marks around the string field.

The rule to me is clear: the first space is a separator, and the last 5 spaces are separators, but all the spaces in between are part of the string. So how do I only select the 6 separator spaces using a regular expression? Or do I need to do it in a different way? Should I just make a python script that does it instead?
 
Assuming they're all in that format, you can do it in two steps:

regex to match all the spaces occurring both before and after a digit: (?<=\d) (?=\d)
regex to match all the spaces occurring after something other than a digit and before a digit: (?<=\D) (?=\d)

If you want to do quotes around the string rather than delimiters just shuffle the second regex around.

Semicolon delimiters is kind of non-standard, pipes are the standard when the data contains commas.
 
Amazeballs! 90% is in that format but that general template worked fine and was easily tweakable for the remaining 10%. Thanks!
 
Regular expressions are awesome, and very often very useful... but it's helpful to get a sense of when it's better to use a regular expression vs. a script/program.

For example, it's nearly impossible to use a regular expression to match a valid email address.

This is a regular expression for RFC822: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

The more complex RFC 5322 email standard can't be done with primitive regular expressions.

(Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/using-a-regular-expression-to-validate-an-email-address)
 
To update, my computer arrived today. Went for the i5-4690 with Gigabyte R9290 (there weren't many intermediate GPUs to choose from). Problem is, it doesn't want to send any signal to the monitor. Using a TV & digital recorder I've established that the HDMI cables I've tried both work, as does the monitor itself, but when connected to the computer with a HDMI cable, the monitor receives no signal, and when the TV is connected to the computer with a HDMI cable, it also receives no signal. Which would seem to suggest that the computer is not sending any HDMI signal. My solution tomorrow morning will be to contact the company who put the machine together and tested it for 24 hours (and installed everything) - perhaps they didn't test the HDMI connection? The monitor came with a VGA cable, whilst the computer has DVI, so maybe they tested via DVI on another monitor.
 
Does your motherboard have onboard graphics? If so:
1) Make sure that's turned off in the BIOS, if applicaple
2) Make sure you're definitely connecting the HDMI cable to the graphics card's HDMI output, and not the motherboard's HDMI output! I know this is as silly as "did you turn the plug on?" but it catches everyone out now and then...

Otherwise, test it with a VGA cable to your TV (which should have VGA input on it).
 
Many thanks! Turns out I was using the motherboard's HDMI output. :blush: Though in my defence, when I looked at the back of the tower, there only appeared to be the one HDMI output at first glance.

I should add that my only previous PC is an iMac.
 
I have a problem.

I set up ownCloud at home, and it works great. Perfectly in fact. I have a ddns, so I can access it either locally through the LAN IP, or through the ddns subdomain. The ddns definitely works: when I ping it, it pings my WAN IP just fine (i.e. the one I get when I type "what is my ip" into my search engine). My ports are forwarded on my router (and actually I've DMZ'd the server too).

Problem is, whenever I try to access the ddns subdomain from my home PC, it correctly redirects to my WAN IP, but instead of the router forwarding the http/s request to the server, the router sees that the request is coming from a local IP and instead thinks I want to access the router's web interface. It works fine if I use my phone on 4G (i.e. not on the LAN), because the router sees a foreign IP and correctly redirects the request to the server. But when I access it from a PC on the LAN, it goes to the router. This is fine for my desktop PC: I just set the server address on the desktop client to be the local IP address of the ownCloud server. However, for my phone, it's a massive ball-ache. If I'm on the wifi at home, it only works with the LAN IP. But if I'm on 4G, it only works with the ddns address.

So, how do I tell my router, with the best of intentions, that I don't want it to load the web interface if I'm accessing it via my ddns address or WAN IP? I only want the router interface to show up if I'm accessing my LAN IP, and not my WAN IP. Is there a way that it will only listen to port 80 on the LAN and not on the WAN? Is this a thing I could tell my router to do? What else can I do?????

The router is a "dlink dsl 2680". THANKS
 
So, how do I tell my router, with the best of intentions, that I don't want it to load the web interface if I'm accessing it via my ddns address or WAN IP?

Most routers have a setting for not allowing WAN access, if you don't already have it toggled. Mine is labelled "Enable Web Access from WAN?". I recommend leaving it off in general, unless you're very good about router firmware updates and strong passwords.

If you don't have the option and aren't on the 1.03 firmware, try updating.

However, I'm not certain that will fix it... easiest thing would just be to change the ports for either owncloud or the router web interface so they're not both on 80.
 
Yeah, I've disabled access from WAN, but presumably it's recognising that the request is originating from the same WAN IP that the router is on, and so treats it as a LAN request. (The problem doesn't occur if I use a proxy.)

That last line is genius, I will simply change the ports!!! Perfect, thanks.
 
Occasionally when playing Starcraft 2 my screen fills with vertical lines and makes a static noise, then my computer crashes. It's not common and hasn't happened when doing normal web stuff, Starcraft is the only game I play so I have no idea if it's specifically causing it or if it's an overload sort of thing.

Any idea on what could cause this?

So this has gradually been getting worse after completely disappearing for a few months. Now it happens when watching Netflix and sometimes even just posting on CFC. I updated my drivers but no luck...

I'm starting to think I should start looking at just getting a new computer, since this one is getting a bit old anyway...
 
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