MontyMM

Yes, I think you probably did. I just wanted to say thanks for the great work on the memory patch, and this mod also looks like another major improvment. I shall make a blood sacrifice of a troll in your honour.

To be clear, I've applied a voluntary ban, because he demanded his account be deleted, and since we do not delete user accounts, that's the best we can do. The rest of his behaviour would not warrant a ban on its own. If he would like to request his account to be unlocked, and discuss his conduct going forward, that will be fine. Thread locked for now.

Re. the last sentence, I've taken care of that for you. In addition, your comments tend to veer into denigrating other people far too often, and is not the attitude we need on this site. I notice also that you dismissed STEP on your Nexus page as 'nitpicking nerds' that never actually do anything. I don't actually mind being called a nerd, but I might suggest that someone who spends his time designing textures for a fantasy role playing game might not want to chuck the word "nerd" around as an insult...

All in all, then, I would say Mint is your best choice. It takes the high quality core of Ubuntu, and smooths some of the rough edges and weird design decicisions. The standard Ubuntu desktop system is called Unity, and it has several problems. Firstly, it sends your local search requests back to Canonical, so they can serve you with Amazon adverts in your search results. That's an epic deal breaker for me. Also, they have forked the new display server 'Wayland', and turned it into something called Mir. This is going to create inconsistency with the rest of the Linux world, which is committed to proper Wayland. Thirdly, the Unity desktop is buggy and pants, and should go away. :D

Zorin is quite nice for a beginner - it's Ubuntu, but customized to be extremely familiar for windows users. https://zorin-os.com/

uk isps only block certain dodgy sites. Lots of them detect and throttle bittorrent traffic too. A nice cheap vpn is the way forward . Ip Predator from Sweden is pretty decent to bypass all that.

I would steer well clear of that, and just use the official Tor Browser Bundle. Why trust a potentially dodgy third party? Also, remember that browsing torrent sites through Tor is fine, but Tor asks that no-one actually downloads the torrents themselves through their network - it cripples their very limited bandwidth.

Firefox for me. I like the flexibility and I respect Mozilla far more than Google.

I agree with that part. If you were to ask a Microsoft engineer responsible for providing Windows support what he thinks of amateur overclocks, you will hear much cursing. Not because they blow up their systems, but because they introduce all sorts of insidious problems that are nigh impossible to troubleshoot. Many overclockers don't know that there are several elements affected by overclocking, and that by messing around with frequencies, you can cause all manner of complications beyond CPU stability, causing problematic interactions with other system components. A favourite is disk IO, risking data corruption. Professional companies that provide overclocked systems go to great trouble to examine and address all these factors. IMO, that is the place for stress testing - in the factory, where, if it goes wrong, the parts are replaced and the losses are costed in to the pricing. I've often heard things like: "My problem can't be my over clock. I've run prime95 for 48 hours, so it's rock solid!" That person imagines that now he has passed hat test, he now has a PC that can be relied upon to operate at that clock, in general use. That is a misunderstanding. I do overclock my gaming PC, because I don't care too much if I cause instability or data loss; I'm happy to experiment, up to a point, but I'm then very conscious that said PC is now marked "experimental". I then use benchmarks to establish the stability of the OC, appropriate to that use case. But, I also accept that the overclocked PC may not be trustworthy for serious work - any data critical work or storage will be done on another machine.

Because there is a market for them. This doesn't tell us much about the risks of an individual overclock, and nothing at all about whether prolonged torture testing at maximum load is a good idea. The purpose of any stress test is to determine the point of failure, and the nature of that failure is unpredictable. Cpus have had temperature cutoffs for many years, and these are really no guarantee of safety when overclocking. We can argue about how well cpus are capable of withstanding extreme conditions, but to suggest that applying an overclock and then artificially stressing the CPU for 24 hours does not imply increased wear and risk to the hardware is, I think, obviously untrue. In addition to the CPU and the PSU, the components of the motherboard are also vulnerable to this treatment. Given that some degree of risk is implicit in doing so, the question is what value you derive from taking that risk. If all goes well, you learn that your CPU is currently stable at performing in that particular torture test condition for prolonged periods. But how valuable is that information, weighed against the wear and risk? The fact that an OC might be stable in those particular torture test conditions does not guarantee that it will be stable in all real world conditions; it is entirely possible for an OC to pass a torture test, yet still cause instability in a game or other situations. Also, the CPU might fail the torture test, yet still be stable enough in the real world use cases you actually need. I would recommend using a few run-throughs with synthetic benchmarks and something like 3d mark to determine if the CPU is stable enough for your requirements. The idea that overclocks should be tested with prolonged torture conditions is a piece of received wisdom that is worth questioning, IMO, if you do not regard your hardware as disposable.

Like Aiyen says, the problem with Prime95 is self-evident really. You are deliberately pushing the CPU to artificially high limits (using techniques that will maximize heat and power draw), and also stressing the psu itself. If you are overclocking, you do so while exceeding the specified limits of the hardware, and likely cranking up voltage further. "Torture testing" is just not an adequate name for it - "testing to destruction" might be better. If you are Intel's production line, you can afford and are happy to weed out and destroy the less than perfect specimens. NASA might take the same view of something they put into space. But for the average user, with one expensive CPU and a limited budget, this becomes less rational. Is it an effective mechanism to test for instability at most extreme conditions? You bet. Do you really want to do that? That's another question. If you are an overclocker, you accept that you take risks with your hardware, but do you really need to maximise the risk in an artificial and extreme proving process? What is the potential cost/benefit? And, why would one imagine that there is necessarily a "good" way to do so?

Be cautious of Prime95. It is not designed for modern cpus. It could risk damage in some cases

Most linux live CDs will have it - Ubuntu for sure.

It all depends on what you want. If you need the highest level of security for information, then I would only have trust in data that is locally encrypted with open source standards. Once encrypted, it then shouldn't matter where it is hosted online. However, if you make incremental changes to the encrypted file stored online, an attacker could theoretically use those differential changes to gain enough information about the encryption to make breaking it viable. This sort of security concern might seem extreme, but as a member of Liberty, and considering the treatment of journalists and their sources (see Glen Greenwald and his partner), I'm afraid it's not quite so academic anymore. In the end, though, all encryption is vulnerable to rubber hose cryptography. The advantage of Mega, I think, is that it seems unlikely to be making its money from the routine harvesting of user data. I would use for casual data sharing, just because I have a general preference for privacy, and I think that it is important for the industry to see that we're not apathetic about being exploited in that way.

Legally, nothing is certain until it's tested in a court - that's why a wise nonprofit forum might take a pragmatic view . ;)