apache-labs.com

Hi All,

1. Is there any truth to the assertion that Lenovo brand is a poor choice for ANNAN and Thetis.

I have heard this statement and that Dell is a very good choice.

The reason for asking is that I am considering in getting another PC for my station.

Currently using a Lenovo SFF with Ryzen 7 2700, Win11 and Thetis idles along at <3% CPU load, I do get a very occasional audio pop which most times does not register an SEQ error. But I do see a few every now and then but on rear occasions will get a page full.

So does Dell or any particular brand stand out above the rest?

2.
I am also thinking that if I do get a second PC I might make this a dedicated ANAN PC, No internet connection and disable all possible OS processes.
If I was to do this are there any reasons not to use Win 7 or 8 and also an older Gen i-7700. I also hear that most users that tried this approach have reverted to Win 10/11.
How many of you are still using Win 7 or 8?

Cheers
Andrew

I've never heard anyone bad mouth Lenovo any worse than HP or Dell or any other major brand. IMHO, the assertion that Lenovo, or any other brand of PC, is a poor choice for anything just on the basis of its brand is a bad one. With very rare exceptions associated with bad/unreliable hardware, I don't think any one major market brand stands up the rest on a technical basis.

There's no intrinsic reason that any one PC should be better or worse on a brand by brand basis. This is particularly true if you remove any vendor-specific software such that your OS environment is box-stock, plain vanilla Windows and run the Windows recommended drivers for all hardware.

This is not to say that certain hardware is not better or worse. For instance I bought a motherboard that had both an Intel and a Killer (Qualcomm) NIC on it. The Intel NIC worked fine for our radios, the Killer NIC was terrible.

I'm a huge fan of SFF PCs. I've got an HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini with an i5 in it that I use to serve up some network monitoring app's and that thing is a beast. I would not be so quick to give up your Lenovo.

Based on the message traffic on this forum, and my own experiences, one thing that seems fairly certain is that NIC hardware, and network configuration, play the biggest role when it comes to the quality of our radio experience. This is unsurprising when the communications protocols are all based on UDP, a lossy protocol. Dropped UDP packets can be quite annoying, a run of them can ruin your whole day.

IMHO, your best move is add another NIC to your Lenovo so that you can dedicate one of the two NICs to the radio alone. This could be the motherboard NIC or the new one, whichever you find works best. Even a USB 3.0 NIC will work fine if your SFF has no slots. If for some reason you don't see great performance with a USB NIC then use it for the internet and put the radio on the motherboard NIC.

Once you have the dedicated NIC, and both that NIC and the ANAN on static IPs on a separate subnet from the rest of the house, you can strip out all unnecessary network service and protocols from that NIC as discussed in this topic: viewtopic.php?f=22&t=4127 With that done you should not have to totally neuter the rest of the PC. Most folks with reasonably powerful machines, which you have, and two NICs are easily able to multitask along with using the radio.

Thanks Scott

You are the best person here to know if there were any brand specific issues and if you say no one brand stands above the rest then looks like I might be getting another Lenovo.
Locally can pick up at auction QA Failed and repaired Lenovo PC's with warranty for less than half the RRP. Previously was the same for HP and Dell but no longer.

Regarding the second NIC, I do have 2 spare PCIe X1 slots, but I don't need to go to that extent as my audio pops are few and very far in between.
And this has been with having Thetis process priority set to Normal and without the Network Throttling Index change in the Registry.
I have now changed both of these.

Still would like to hear from Win 7 & 8 users about your Thetis experience.

Regards Andrew

Andrew,

Lenovo is the company that IBM sold their PC Division to. It is as fine a brand as Dell but I would not use an HP. I agree with Scott on most of his advice, except the part about putting another network card in your machine and running your Anan on it's own ethernet interface. It's a wonderful idea and I have done that here with super results but it gets complicated for a person without computer/network experience.

Like Scott, I am a SFF computer fan. I have several Intel NUC computers here. I actually run Windows 10 and Thetis 2.9.0.6 on an i5 NUC (NUC8i5BEH) and then use a program called Remote Desktop Connection to access the NUC/Radio via WiFi. It's not too bad to set up and it too works well.

As to Windows, I very very highly recommend not fooling with down level unsupported versions, such as Windows 7 or XP or 8 or Vista. It's like owning a horse for transportation and while oats are now cheaper than gasoline, there's no air conditioning!

73 -- Larry W8ER

Thanks Larry,
I hear what you say about not fooling around with old OS. Reason for asking was that I happen to have an old i5-4570 PC and unused Win8 Pro so I thought I might see how it behaves with Thetis. Will not be going online.

Andrew