What an odd, ill-informed comment!

Metronet doesn't exist any more, it was bought out by PlusNet some years ago.

Entanet is a "white-label" wholesale ISP, you can only get its services via a reseller. It's perfectly fine and, like all the others I've used, on my exchange it uses BT wholesale for its backhaul.

Merula is my current ISP and has been absolutely fine - I get something like 72Mbps no matter whether it's day or night, not least because I'm not contending with many other users at the exchange. It also makes "elevated best efforts" available, which increases your traffic priority on BT's network.

I'll be moving to a fibre-on-demand connection with Cerberus soon - they also use BT's backhaul and, unlike larger ISPs, also give access to the whole of the Web. Yes, including the bits that BT retail (as opposed to wholesale), Sky, TalkTalk and the rest block.

The site itself is IP blocked in UK

No it's not. A few ISPs have blocked it, but none of the ones I've used in recent years (Metronet, Entanet, Merula) have blocked it.

"The floppy driver Win10 removes is the standard AT floppy controller one;"

While it's true that some beta builds of Windows 10 removed the standard floppy driver (flpydisk.sys - which is all of 26K in size), it was restored in time for the final release. It's still in the latest builds of Windows 10, too.

I would imagine though that it's gone in Windows 10 Lean.

...and that explains why "a cup of char" is a way of referencing a cup of tea. I always thought it was odd slang, now I know it's actually distorted Chinese.

http://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/... has more (Royal Museums Greenwich).

Clevo for me.

They're cheap, they're (very) powerful and they're not in the slightest bit flashy.

My current one has a desktop i7-6700K, 17" 4K IPS screen and a GeForce 1080 in it, along with an NVMe M2 SSD. It also cost a fraction of the price of an Alienware or similar laptop!

I got my hopes up on reading this - had MS cracked the lightweight, high-performance bracket by shoving desktop components in a slimline laptop?

Nope. It's the same old crummy performance-of-a-cucumber U processor, albeit with a semi-decent GPU.

For now, the limited number of genuinely "desktop" laptops remains as it is. I'm wriitng this on one (with a desktop i7-6700K processor and a "desktop equivalent" GeForce 1080 - and of course this laptop is nowhere near as thin and light as the Surface. I'd rather have the power on tap, though, even if it is a bit of a pain lugging it around airports and such!

...as that was designed from the ground up as a mobile OS (in its former EPOC guise). By contrast, Android and iOS were both *nix systems crammed into a stripped-down mobile form.

The trouble with Symbian was that Nokia took control. They really didn't care about its roots and instead just shoved a whole lot of unoptimised garbage on top of what was once a lithe, sleek OS - designed, no less, to run on machines with 4MB RAM and 18Mhz or thereabouts processors. Oh, that also ran from 2 AA batteries that lasted tens of hours. There was enough power to handle touch input and full-window dragging, something which in 1997 was still a relative novelty.

Another ground-up mobile OS, not based on a desktop/server OS, would be nice to see IMO. Sadly as the costs of that are massive compared to just shoehorning Linux into a system I doubt it'll ever happen.

MS certainly does care about compatibility, it's why the x86 version of Windows is still produced. (You can still run 36-year-old programs just by double-clicking them on 32-bit Windows - and, of course, it still runs legacy 16-bit Windows programs too).

Your mistake was doing an in-place upgrade to Windows 10. You should have done a fresh install, then reinstalled your 31 mission critical programs thereafter.

(Disclaimer: I work in a school and have had to get all sorts of legacy stuff working under Windows 10. The only thing that wouldn't work whatsoever was an old ID badge printer which used an obscure way of interacting with its Windows 2000-era driver. The rest of the stuff, including such delights as old laser cutters connected by serial ports, works just fine. Yes, you may have to fiddle with settings and even the registry in some cases, but the vast majority of stuff out there can be made to work with little or no effort.)

Well, my mum died at 48 and my dad died at 67, so it's all anecdotal. As my grandfathers both died at 62 I reckon I'll be doing well if I manage to last until 70!

Just in case I do, though, I'm making sure I have adequate pension provision, both by paying in at work and by using a SIPP, which is a scheme whereby the Government tops up your contributions by 25%. Anything that's left in the SIPP when you die is free of inheritance tax.

Mine was a (second-hand) Commodore Plus/4 in 1988, for my 9th birthday. It conked out two days later and it took a while to get it fixed.

It was a good little system: 64K RAM, 128-colour graphics, tape drive, disk drive and a printer, plus a programming manual and a shedload of games. The major downside was that nobody else had one and it was pretty hard to find software; bargain bins in small computer shops and boot fairs (not sure what they're called in the US!) were the places to look. My friends all had other computers: a mix of BBC micros (for the posh kids), ZX Spectrums and C64s (for everyone else) and even the odd Amiga.

I owe a lot to that Plus/4 - it had a primitive word processor, database and spreadsheet in ROM, so introduced me to office software. It of course had BASIC and I was able to dabble with code, although it was more of the "guess the number and win points" type of game rather than anything sophisticated.

That system lasted me for 3 years, by which time my dad rescued an old IBM XT from his work (they'd chucked it into a skip). That gave me an interest in PCs and I've never looked back!

Early in 1994 (when I was 14) I thought of a masterplan at school. We'd had some brand new 486SX/25 machines delivered and I knew they'd be able to play Doom, the game everyone wanted. We also had a 10Base2 network installed and I'd found they'd forgotten to disable booting from a floppy. Handily, they had DOS IPX packet drivers on the C drive of each machine.

As luck would have it, the head of IT was due to visit a conference in London one afternoon, meaning the IT rooms would be unguarded. I arranged with some friends to "bunk off" of Games, a subject I hated... I was (and still am) rubbish at football, hockey etc. We snuck into the main IT room, left the lights off and got to work. 10 minutes later there was a roaring (albeit mute) game of deathmatch Doom in full swing... we were having a great time of it!

Just as I was introducing my chainsaw to my best friend's face, the door burst open, the lights went on.... and the head of IT walked in, a look of absolute amazement on his face as his gaze moved across the screens. It turns out the conference in London had been cancelled at the last minute.

Expecting the rollocking of a lifetime, all that happened was that he said "Boys, you shouldn't be in here!"
We turned off the PCs and left for the library, in disbelief at what had just happened.

Years later, I suspect that the head of IT was singularly impressed at what we'd got the school PCs to do, but of course he couldn't condone it. I don't know about him, but I ended up logging hundreds of hours at home over the coming years playing co-op and deathmatch Doom (and Doom 2) with friends, family and eventually complete strangers over the Internet.

Happy times.

The Redstone builds of Windows 10 (14295 onwards) have added ANSI emulation too - only 30-odd years after DOS brought us ansi.sys.

This is even more daft when you consider that it's only the big ISPs that block those sites anyway. Smaller ISPs, even though they go via BT's network, still allow access to them all.

Heck, back when Wikipedia was blocked a few years ago (due to a contentious album cover) I could still access it via my ISP at the time, Entanet... which meant they weren't even implementing the super-secret block list as operated by the Internet Watch Foundation.

It's an Atom, just one that's been rebaged to a Celeron. The performance is absolutely terrible and even a cheap i3 would beat it hands-down! It's a shame Intel have diluted their product range like this as it leads to confusion (as you've demonstrated).

Dual-core Pentiums and Celerons (in the vein of those since the Wolfdale days) are still made, of course, and these days are merely cut-down i3s. The Atom-based Pentium and Celerons are a relatively new invention and the easy way to spot them is to see whether they're advertised as quad-core or not; quad-core Pentiums and Celerons are just beefier Atoms.