Smallest I've gone is mini-tower, and I have to keep sides off and my hdd outside the case to cope with overheating.

Are you in an equatorial country?

It gets pretty hot here, believe it or not.

How small is a small form factor? We have some teeny little boxes in work but I think they are mostly used to access servers over a remote desktop connection.

Can you just stick the SSD in there dangling around? Don't think I ever fixed mine in properly, it's just sitting bottom of the case.

Depends on the age and manufacturer.

The Ultra SFFs have no expansion and are the type of things you can VESA mount. I've got one at work (HP Elite Desk 800 G2 Mini) and it's a nice little unit, Core i7 6700, 8GB, 240GB SSD.

Normal SFFs usually have a couple of half height PCI/PCI-E slots. Maybe space for another drive in there. But not much room for expansion. Ideal for an office environment.

Are gaming enthusiasts a problem where you work?

Just stupid bloated spreadsheets that still sit "Calculating" for far too long even with that spec.

 8-O

Been there, done that. I only have a Core i5 laptop for work, but quickly found 4GB of RAM insufficient and needed the 8GB. Sometimes when you're manipulating spreadsheets with several hundred thousand rows, and some complex calculations and a pivot or two, Excel can really grind and chew up plenty of memory. Especially if you have several different sheets open at once...

I know spreadsheets are essential for many business functions, in fact these days there are plenty of tools (the software sort as well as the staff variety) that won't work without them, but back when I was in a humble team of DBAs, we often wondered whether spreadsheets weren't being stretched beyond their useful capabilities. To be fair, this was mainly just after we'd been emailed an epistle by some "scrum-master" who had managed to embed powerpoint presentations into every cell.

IT managers love Excel because it makes them feel as though they are "proper" IT people.

I'm a super awesome developer who has been dealing with databases for two decades, but I still use spreadsheets because for a lot of things they're a fuck-ton easier to deal with.

There's plenty of tasks which they don't do well (including anything with multiple users), and a whole bunch of cases where they are frustratingly restrictive, but they're still a great option.

I'd also offer the argument that they are not so much stretched beyond their useful capabilities, but rather Excel/etc are produced by people that lack the vision and understanding of what could be done.

definitely.
 
also true.
 
probably true as well, but I was talking principally about Excel. I've seen plenty of production systems based on DB2 or Oracle (and in one case CA-IDMS) which would have been far better implemented with spreadsheets.

 

I'm sure you'll all be thrilled find out that the SSD arrived today.

After a fuck up on my part by installing Win10 in Legacy Mode, rather than UEFI mode, and having to do it all again (including creating the USB installation media again (I'd wiped it to use it for ubuntu installation))))) I now have a dual booting system and no trashed bootloaders.

It boots quick, very quick.

I must commend Win10 on predicting my 3 screen layout correctly, apart from not knowing which I'd want as my primary (the middle one).

Nvidia settings in ubuntu now recognises that the GFX card is in fact in a x4 slot, but I guess the card is fine with that considering I can see things.

To power the SSD and HDD I had to go...
 

Male SATA power -> Female SATA power -> Male Molex -> 2x Male Sata Power.

I'm going to order a SATA power splitter because it's a bit too cosy, and I can just see a rogue cable jamming a fan and causing the CPU or GPU to fry.

Now to copy whatever I need to copy off the HDD and set that up for storage.

Just like the good old days reinstalling OSes!

I was going to ask about the UEFI dual-boot thing. Does the MB have one of those secure boot thingies you've got to disable for dual boot?

Yeah, to dual boot Windows 10 and something else Secure Boot needs to be off. UEFI can probably be on or off, but I think it's easier to have it on.

I ended up reading various guides which talked about having to copy boot sectors and all sorts, but thankfully I didn't need to do any of that. It was actually fairly trivial once I thought about it properly.

• Have only the empty SSD plugged in so the OS setups can't see any other OSes and get confused
• Disable Legacy Boot in BIOS (or definitely don't pick it)
• Run Win10 setup from USB media - making sure to pick UEFI boot option
• Partition drive in Win10 setup - I split it in half, let Win10 install on the first partition - it split that into boot and reserved bits itself as usual.
• Install Win10 - check it works
• Run Ubuntu (or whatever) setup from USB - UEFI boot
• Hopefully that sees you have a Windows installation and uses the extra unused unformatted partition
• Install 2nd OS
• Ubuntu 17.10 will sort the dual boot bootloader for you
• Reboot and pick Ubuntu or Windows Bootloader from the Grub screen

It currently has a 10s wait on boot, might reduce it since 10s feels like an age!

OK, good to know... 18.04 LTS is going to be released in a few weeks (I've come to prefer the LTS versions because lazy). I installed a daily server build to an old work pc couple of weeks ago, bunged xfce and vnc on it, and it was one of the slicker Linux installs I've run in quite a while. Hit a couple of minor issues since, which may (probably) were unrelated to pre-release build. Got one (setting MySQL root login) fixed, and hoping the other, which is real legacy stuff (netatalk) will automagically sort itself out one day RSN. 

I usually do as well but I've found a few things I've wanted to use that weren't available or supported on 16.04. I've also had the issue of using a none LTS build and forgetting the lifespan is now very short.

My server is still running 14.04 LTS. I'll probably consider upgrading that to 18.04 after the first point update.

 

Yeah, I'd find 10s a bit long. I currently dual-boot Windows 7 and Windows 10 on my PC (Win7 being the default). I have it set to 3s, which I find to be a nice trade-off between giving me sufficient time to switch OS on those very rare occasions I boot into Windows 10, and not slowing down the boot process too much.

Would be good if computers had physical boot configuration switches, so you could just flick it to setting A or B when turning on, and remove the need to have any startup delay.

Whatever you set the delay to it will invariably be either far too long, or 1 second too short. Sometimes even at the same time.