Windows 10: Suggestions for excellent desktop

I need to buy a late model small desktop, corporate grade preferably to replace an older one which is a SFF HP. I won’t rule out a minitower but would prefer to drop the new into the same physical space as the old, which has been very quiet and essentially flawless. Like the current the new will be setup with 2 drives, in this case SSDs, RAID 1. Windows 10 or 10 Pro

Right now I’m leaning towards another HP, this time an Elitedesk 800 G3. The processor frankly doesn’t matter much. I uses a 400 model would do fine. It looks like these sell for $300-400 from quality volume resellers on Ebay, which is how I get most every computing device, and sold quite a few also.

Nothing against Dell Optiplex which I’m very familiar with, I have just had more respect for HPs thoughtful designs since the DC series, which I still run personally around here for server and mule duty.

What say you? What other models should I check?

:)

 

Export All Administrative Events to Excel


To analyze events, from the Windows Event Viewer, there is a simple way to export all Administrative Events to Excel, with PowerShell.

Exporting all Administrative Events to Excel is a simple two Step process, as described here:

Step 1 - Create the Administrative Events View .xml file

1. Open Eventviewer (%windir%\system32\eventvwr.msc)
2. Navigate to: Event Viewer (Local) > Custom Views > Administrative Events
3. In the “Actions” pane select “Filter Current Custom View”.
4. Select the the XML tab.
5. Press Ctrl+A to select all the XML code of the Custom View.
6. Open a notepad, paste the selected code and save the file to your Desktop as AdmEvtView.xml

Step 2 - Create the csv file with the events

1. Download the ExportEvtCSV.zip file, which contains the script ExportEvtCSV.ps1 and unzip it, on your Desktop.
   It's not a fancy script, just basic PowerShell commands to create a csv file on the Desktop.
2. In Windows Search, type “ISE” (without the quotes) to open “Windows PowerShell ISE” and Run as administrator
   
3. To allow running the script, change the ExecutionPolicy, for this session. To do that, in the Console pane type:
   Code:
   
   Code:

   Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope Process -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -force

4. In the Windows PowerShell ISE, open and run the script: ExportEvtCSV.ps1
   The script will create a csv file with a name YYYYMMDD.HHMM.csv on the Desktop
5. When done, open the newly created .csv file, format the columns as needed and optionally save it as .xlsx, if you wish.

That’s it! You now have all the Administrative Events in Excel for filtering and further analysis.

Now to the more technical hard stuff... *Confused

There is a reason for running the script from within PowerShell ISE!

It would be great if everything was also working perfectly, when running the script from an elevated PowerShell too.

We can run it from an elevated PowerShell, which means that you just follow the Step 1, as above but for the Step 2 instead of the ISE you run the script from an elevated PowerShell.

The problem is that it will work only for anybody who has en-US format for the dates. Everyone else, who has another format (i.e. en-GB, fr-FR, el-GR etc.), the dates are not translated properly by Excel (although the script uses the –UseCulture switch) and remain as text in the en-US format.

I'm not sure if this a bug of the "export-csv" cmdlet, but although it runs the way it supposed to from within the ISE, from PowerShell there is a problem with the dates format.
As I haven’t found a way to overcome this obstacle, any suggestion from the PowerShell gurus of the forum (like my good friend Shawn @Brink, for instance), is welcome.

 

New System build Suggestions

just another build suggestion to consider- System Builder

 

AMD FX OC'ers Club

That's what the auto setting will do since you're over the 1333 mark it jumps to the next step which isn't listed or officially supported I assume by that ram.

At this point though I would suggest dropping the multi one step or .5 so that we can get something stable and possibly take the heat issue out of the picture for now.