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It is 2016! We each have personal computers! Actually, I should say, "devices", since we all have more than one and they aren't all computers in the sense that most people understand them. There are 4 of us, and we all have at least one notebook (aka Laptop) computer, and one tablet. I'll get back to the "at least" part a little later.
In today's world, it's the notebook computer that's the typical product and it's the desktop that's a specialty item. Now that our children are at or close to teenage years, we all have uses for an actual computer. The last holdout was the daughter who started on a notebook computer playing games both online and locally loaded. But then, she went completely iPad oriented when she received her first one a couple of years ago. Last month, she announced to me that she intended on putting a "computer" on her Christmas List. I told her to take it off because, in our family, those are "regular use" items and not something special. WOW, what a different technological world a few years have made! Her reason was that she wanted to have her own Minecraft account, so didn't want to share with her brother! Anyway, that get's us to our current situation. We all have a "main" machine that we work on.
My son has gone through a series of various ThinkPads back to an IBM (!!!) ThinkPad A21p, many moons ago! Every couple of years, he's gotten an upgrade just as soon as somebody else upgraded from a machine that was too old and slow for their use. Of course, they've always been ThinkPads with the exception of my ill-fated foray into old gaming laptops first with a Clevo, that followed by an Alienware. Then, back I went, to the faithful ThinkPads, generally of 15" screen size because he mostly used them to play games on at home, till this the current school year when he started the 7th grade and needed to carry a machine back and forth. So, now he has a ThinPad X220 that's compact, thin, light and plenty powerful enough for doing PowerPoints, Google Docs and light research on the web..... oh, and the every-present "flash-games" that all middle school kids play! Minecraft has moved over to a "self-built" (me, not him) gaming box that got it's start from my brother sending an ASRock, Mini-ITX board populated with a second-gen Intel "Core" i5 processor. Eventually, it received my old third-gen i5 processor. Today, it does a nice job equipped with that, an Intel SSD, and an nVidia GTX 650 graphic card (so it can stream to nVidia Shield devices). More on that later as well. We have it hooked up to the new Sony 55" 4K TV in the game/media room.
His "personal" device, is the nVidia Shield Tablet. It has a nice 8" IPS screen, a powerful K1 Quad-Core processor and capable of streaming games from his gaming machine since that has certain level nVidia graphic card in it! He loves it when he's not "on restriction" from not keeping grades up to snuff! If you haven't read my earlier post on this thing, I'll go over the high-points quickly here. Other than the typical Android type things, and the game streaming that it can do, it also has a dedicated gaming controller as well, plus the capability to connect to an outboard monitor via HDMI and function as a "console". It's really a pretty slick concept and nVidia's execution is very nice.
On to the daughter. She, like her brother started her computing life via ThinkPads. In her case, custom (by Daddy) painted lavender, X31. That was replaced by a ThinkPad Z60t.....right around the time she got an iPad. The rest (the laptop too).... as they say; was history. That is, right up until last November, when she decided she needed her own machine so she could have her own aforementioned Minecraft account.
Then, she (I) got lucky! I had a friend who had a Sony VCPEH, a decent 15.6" screen "desktop replacement" of the "Sandy Bridge" Core generation. It was brought to me with an apparently dead screen/video sub-system to retrieve files. Indeed, the screen refused to light up regardless of what I did. However, it did output to an external monitor indicating the GPU was still good. They had already bought a new machine and didn't want the computer back after I got their files off. So it sat under my desk for several months then in a box due to our move to the new house. When I started looking into my daughter's request, it occurred to me that maybe I could just replace the panel on this Sony. This required me to take it apart so I could see the model number. When it went back together, the screen came back to life! This was followed by me digging into my parts boxes for more RAM, and a drive. So now she has an i5, with 8Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb Intel SSD. Like a certain overgrown elf, Daddy wiggled his fingers and made a computer appear.
Then there's my wife. And since I just recently wrote about her machine, I'll just quickly recap here. Several years ago, I talked her into a second-hand iPad (1st gen) because I knew of one I could get cheap. That was like 10 of these things ago! For me, they've been like the episode of the classic Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles". They just keep multiplying! There is of course, her progression through the generations of these things. That was followed by the expansion into "kid territory" when the children were both elementary school age because Mom had them using apps to suppliment their school learning. All of that was part of the greater issue; that of her starting to use them in the classroom with her students. This grew into a full-scale conversion from a set of old ThinkPads to "older" iPads, and now to iPad Minis. We're up to 5 Minis (not counting my daughters) and one iPad2. Oh, and my wife is now on a 1st gen iPad Air.
Comparatively, her notebook computer progression is rather simple. She uses, mid-sized (15") ThinkPads. I typically get her something in the "T" Series, although, she's had "A"s, as well as "Z"s. We are how literally in the middle of moving her from a T500 to a T530. I've had SSDs in her machines for some time now. The newest machine has a 480Gb, Intel 2500 with 8Gb of RAM. Otherwise, the machine is unremarkable, but completely adequate for her needs. She hates it every time I do it, but I upgrade her about every 2 to 3 years as you can probably tell by the model numbers of the latest round. She swears it's more often, because I tend to reload her OS every year in between.
As for me; I just wrote about that issue a couple of days ago, so won't repeat it here other than to say that I'm going to talk tablets soon.
No, I don't mean that weird guy in the cubicle down the corridor; I mean Giant Monster "Laptops". If you're not acquainted with names such as AVA Direct, Eurocom, Falcon Northwest, and other builders of custom "gaming" notebooks, then this will be something new for you. Remember this name: Clevo. That's it.....just Clevo. This company pretty much is the driving force behind all the various esoteric gaming laptop computer companies all these years, and even the almighty Alienware before that kill-joy Dell swooped in and bought them out.
For years, this little know Taiwanese company has been stuffing essentially desktop hardware into what could loosely be called laptop computers. I say that because the result has generally been north of 10 pounds and with the giant power bricks (literally the size and weight of a real brick), they often push the 15 pound barrier.
Some of you might remember my little ill-fated foray into the gaming computer world for my son that resulted in the selling off of the modified Clevo, and Alienware parts machines. Although I got my money back out of them, but didn't accomplish what I set out to do, and I still have a bit of a fixation on these giants. In the time from when I was dabbling with these oddities, till the present, things have gone just a wee bit crazy.
That's three hard drives depicted in the D900f in the upper picture and that's FOUR fans in the chassis of the new X7200 in the lower picture! That's one for the CPU, one for the chipset and one each for the two GPUs. It's ridiculous, but you gotta love 'em for their shear audacity!
Meanwhile, as all this was coming to pass on the "portable" gaming front, the "Big Boys" tried to take big mainstream. Dell was first "out the gate" with the Inspiron XPS M2010 ... which, with it's 20" screen was so big; it was it's own case.....complete with handle.
Of course, HP simply can't allow Dell to do much of anything that it didn't have an answer for; so behold the Hewlett/Packard HDX "Dragon"....with a deck so big they put a well for a remote in it!
Now, conceptually, the idea was for these things to be "media" PCs with every A/V bell and whistle under the sun. Never mind that nobody wanted to sit in front of a 20" LCD, vs. attaching a media PC to a really big (40" plus) monitor for their A/V enjoyment. Everybody needed to jump on the bandwagon! Here you see one of the Samsung behemouths complete with requisite attractive Korea model that probably couldn't even lift this thing! In the end, it was basically an interlude in the PC business and these things have pretty much gone away.
So; what are we here to talk about after all that "rabbit chasing"? The real "monster" of course. Luckily, not the "River Monster" variety which is my wife's current TV show obsession! No, this one is pure ThinkPad. I can't imagine Lenovo being really wild about this concept, which is why it's been killed off fairly quickly after 2 models; W700, and W701. What you see here is the W700DS, standing for dual screen, obviously (more on that later).
Here's the deal on these oddities. Five years ago, in 2008, Lenovo released the first of the "W" line, W700, and W500 to act as replacements for the "p" (workstation) versions of the "T" line. The W5xx exists to this day, is pretty normal and therefore uninteresting. Also, it's not nearly big enough to qualify for the "monster" label anyway. Conceptually, the W7xx machines were supposed to do everything that a desktop machine would do, but have an attached monitor and be closed up and moved (sort of).
One of it's more interesting ideas was to make it a photographer's mobile digital darkroom, complete with automated color calibration for the monitor and an optional built-in Wacom digitizer pad complete with an active pen tucked away in a silo in the side of the machine.
To give you an idea of how large it actually is; that's an X300 (13.3" screen) it's next to in the upper image and an X61 (12.1" screen) sitting in it's "lap" in the lower image. Inside the giant chassis are 2 hard drive bays capable of taking and configuring two hard drives into a RAID set.
It's so big, that even the "Mini-Dock" made for it is big! The CPUs in them can range from the fastest of the Core2Duo series to the Core i7 processors. The last of the models could take powerful nVidia Quattro GPUs and up to 16Gb of DDR3 RAM. The 17" screen can range from 1440 x 900 all the way up to 1920 x 1200, plus a 10.6" pullout screen of 1280 x 768 resolution. Fully equipped, it was upwards of 11 pounds and cost in excess of $5500! Surfice to say, I'd love to have one. Over the years I've tried a number of times to develop a powerful "mobile workstation", beginning with the T4x series, then Z61m, and now T6x machines. However, I've never been fully happy with the results and now that the lower end of the W700s have dropped into the sub-$500 range, they are starting to get my attention.
Maybe, like the "River Monsters" guy, I can land one for myself someday. But then again, there's the really cool Asus G73.....
