Since this Newsletter was delayed this meeting has already taken place.
Gareth is bringing his resurrected desktop PC with added memory and added SSD with new monitor which has transformed his old desktop.
Peter will bring his SATA 2" caddy and 125GB SSD, which he had replaced with a 500GB SSD in his Windows 10 laptop.
Peter began by describing his installation of a larger SSD into his Windows 10 Laptop. This involved him purchasing an external caddy to hold the new drive during cloning. (Penny Lane Computers £30). His original drive is 125GB M.2 and the new drive is a WD (Western Digital) Blue 3D NAND SATA SSD M.2 2280 500GB. (Cost about £80) The external caddy is a Transcend TS-CM42S/TS-CM80S. The caddy may be used with either a 2242 or a 2280 device. In my case the 2280. It consists of an Aluminium case and a base plate the SSD is mounted at an angle into the socket and then held down and retained with a single screw. The caddy is then plugged into a USB 3.1 gen 1 port ( or less). Peter used his copy of Acronis which includes a disk cloning facility to copy the file image. Copying 100GB or so only took about 10 minutes. Then he had to remove the laptop rear plate to access the drive bay. He found a useful YouTube video of someone doing this first. This involved first removing the single screw holding the DVD drive and then about thirty screws around the perimeter of the case. He noted 4 screws were longer and were fitted near to the rear hinges. Once the screws are all removed the case may be prized and snapped open using a special gadget (spudger) or a plastic bladed knife in Peter's case so as to avoid damage. The drive bay was found on the left hand side. Removing the small retaining screw the drive may be lifted at an angle and removed from its socket. The new drive may then replace it. The case can then be replaced.
This all sounds fine so we are ready to switch on the laptop again. Unfortunately I then got a blue screen informing me that something awful had happened to my disk. Obviously although I had checked the cloned disk before installation and it appeared to be identical to the original something was not right and it couldn't boot. I proceeded to reinstall my original drive once more with the original drive to get it working again.
At this point I had a look at WD's website and noted another version of the Acronis cloning software obviously for those who didn't buy Acronis. I downloaded this ready for use. I also validated my drive and registered it with WD. So then had another go at recloning but using the website copy of Acronis.
Finally reinstalled new drive and Bingo it all worked and booted up now with all the extra disk space. At least I know how to do that now! If anyone needs to borrow the caddy they are welcome to. So I now have a 125GB portable drive which could be handy.
Michael then spoke about a better interface than SATA with much faster speeds using PCIe which can use Samsung 970 EVO Polaris or EVO Plus giving speeds of 3500 MB/s Read and 3200 MB/s write . Peter's laptop hardware would not have supported this.
Michael also went through the types of new faster processors from AMD which are available developed from the Zen microarchitecture. in particular the AMD Ryzen 7 with 8 core 16 Threads. This was quite a complicated topic and I can best refer the reader to the link below.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List _of AMD_Ryzen_microprocessors
New variants are being produced every couple of months and he said that AMD were challenging Intel wit this range.
Gareth showed us his reformed desktop machine with an improved i3 processor and new larger SSD and a new 27" monitor for £200 with better than 1080p resolution and VGA and HDMI inputs. A AOC Q2778 VQE model.
A little different an evening but quite interesting. Thank you to all contributors.
We have now had a Committee meeting and the following programme has been generated, but as usual, if anyone would like to introduce a new topic instead we would be delighted to accommodate them. Please note that because Peter cannot attend the meeting in May the AGM has been moved to the June date.
| ICENI Future programme 2019/2020 | ||
| 2019 | ||
| April 17th | Mac Evening | All |
| May 15th | Windows and Ubuntu updates | All |
| June 19th | AGM - Computer Surgery | All |
| July 17th | A Retro Evening - Computing, Gaming and old Computers | All |
| August 14th | N.B. Date: Social Evening - TBA (but possibly Crown Manningtree) | All |
| September 18th | Home Automation - NEST | All |
| October 16th | Programming - XML Web Technologies and Go | All |
| November 20th | Slide and Video Evening | All |
| December 18th | Gadgets and Party Evening | All |
| 2020 | ||
| January 15th | Winter Social Evening: Suggestions welcome. | All |
| February 19th | Chrome OS and Linux Apps. | All |
| March 18th | AI - Pattern recognition etc. | All |
| April 15th | Accounting Software | All |
| May 20th | AGM - Cloud Computing | All |
The Social evenings dates and venues are just suggestions at this stage.
Our meetings are held at the Bourne Vale Social Club, Halifax Road, Ipswich IP2 8RE , for a map and other details please see the website.
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Membership fee currently £15, visitors free.
"ICENI does not have any Insurance cover for computers or other equipment so please be advised that you bring machines to the club at your own risk."
However many household insurance policies will include cover away from home often with no increase in premium. (Ed.)
Our website URL is
http://icenicomputerclub.org.uk
Email to: iceni@woolridge.org.uk
I am open to suggestions on what people would like to have included in the website. If anyone would like a copy of the CD of our old newsletters this could be arranged.