The Frugal Propellerhead Family's Great 2014 Computer Upgrade

The great 2014 technology (mostly computers) upgrade is now over. WOW, it was a crazy and fast ride..... kinda like the Texas Giant roller coaster! 

Many of you will remember the late spring when I moved my desktop workstation to an Ivy Bridge "Core" system built in the ginormous Cooler Master Cosmos II case. At the time, we were a Core 2 Duo family. The workstation was a "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quad, myself and daughter on ThinkPad X301/X61 running low/ultra-low voltage C2D, wife and son on ThinkPad T61s running regular mobile C2D. 

Around that time, I came across a ThinkPad T500 locally that was too cheap to pass up (sub-$100), so it began. While these machines are "Montevina" platform running Intel's Penryn processors and thus NOT the later Westfield, "Core" processors, there's not a huge difference in routine performance. Especially when you load them with plenty of RAM and run the OS on an SSD. The whole thing really gained momentum a few weeks ago when I picked up a cheap T400 on Goodwill's auction site (yes there is such a thing). It had some issues such as a couple of broken USB ports, but at $42, I wasn't going to complain! 

For those who aren't aware, the T400 is the 14.1" version of the T500 (15.4" LCD) with universally integrated Intel graphics vs. the switchable ATI Radeon HD 3650 GPU and higher end panels that can be optioned. Around the same time, while MacBook Air shopping on Craigslist (not for myself), I spotted a T500 for $75 complete with the Advanced MiniDock. Yes, I did say $75! That's just stupid cheap! So, I picked it up last weekend on my great Metroplex swing through Arlington, Kennedale, Bedford and Dallas (more on this later). 

And of course, right in the middle of this mash-up came the X1 that replaced my X301. So, are you wondering how I can afford to do this on a teacher's salary? After all, we're talking $1000+ retail on every one of these machines with the X1 over $2000! 

Ahhh.... that's the money question if you'll pardon the pun. First of all; know your market. Secondly; know your products. And thirdly, be ever watchful and ready to strike when the opportunity arises. So, let's start at the beginning:

• I know that working computers can always be sold, it's just a matter of what it is, which governs how much it can be sold for. Pretty much any laptop running a recent OS can sell for about $100.... give or take. In this case-in-point, the T61 machines sold for between $125 and $150, which is exactly what I sold my son's machine for. While the Z61t (daughter's laptop) being older and slower, with a bad battery sold for the $100 that I asked. So, that gives me $250 to upgrade. The other half of the market is that the newer T400/500 can and do often appear for under $100 if one is patient.
• The Montevina platformed T400/500 are in a number of ways significantly faster and better machines than the T61 that they replaced, while at the same time take the same drives, batteries, A/C adapters, docks etc. However, they use a faster bus, run the next gen "Penryn" Core 2 Duo processors, and uses the DDR3 memory that I want standardize our home machines onto. This RAM come in a higher density per module and are thus cheaper to buy. Whatever the cost is for a size (1Gb, 2Gb, 4Gb) memory I can buy in DDR2 is close to the next size up in DDR3. I also know that in my 8 year old daughter and 11 year old son's computing world, the spec of these machines is more than enough for their needs. After all, we're talking YouTube and Minecraft. So, even the Intel integrated GPU version of these machines is plenty. 
• Now that I had a known target and money in hand from selling their old computers, I was ready to catch the $42 (about $70 after shipping) T400 on Goodwill and the $75 T500 on Craigslist. All-in-all, I spent less than $150 for an complete upgrade, netting me a +$100, in the exchange. Where did that $100 go? Into upgrades of course! The T500 that Josh got received an Intel 160Gb SSD over the 64Gb SSD that was in the T61. The T61 went away with a 160Gb mechanical hard drive that was originally in that machine, so the SSD is sitting in my drive box awaiting future use. The 64Gb SSD in Katie's machine went into her T400. She doesn't need a lot of storage, but I'm afraid that Minecraft and other 11 year old games will be too much for his old SSD. That 160Gb upgrade cost $55, so I'm actually still on the plus side of the ledger! Even the Advanced MiniDock that was included with the T500 came into play as we can now move his speaker plug from the unfortunate front position to the rear.

But what about this? OK, I'll admit it. It was a "one-off", one of those ridiculous deals that sometimes still happen on eBay. I got it at $305, so about $330 after the rather high shipping, but still a very low price. I'm selling my X301, complete with it's 160Gb Intel SSD, and 8Gb of RAM for $300 while including my spare no longer needed batteries. If I wasn't selling to my friend who's been lusting after it for a long time, I'd price the machine (downgraded to 4Gb of RAM and 128Gb SSD) for about $375-400 which is completely doable. I'm doing this because, he and I have been friends for a LONG time. And, it's where my personal ThinkPads go to live out their retirement (T23, T42p, X41, X300 and now X301). 

Before I close out of this long post, I'll go back and explain what I was doing last Saturday.... instead of writing blog posts. Besides the T500, I also went out to pick up a iPad Mini 2 (aka Mini Retina) for my wife to go into her fleet. Yes, for those who are counting, that's 6 iPads that we own and 7 that are used on a regular basis including the iPad 2 that her school provides! I promise, I'm going to write a post just on our little brood of these things soon! Oh, I also stopped by and visited with one of my favorite YouTube video makers who goes by iBookGuy. It was a great visit and will make its way into a future post as well. In any case; now you know how the great upgrade of 2014 came about to be and how it was done, at a pretty low cost.

 

 

The State of Solid State

The Fall (as in season), of 2011 will be recorded as the fall of the hard disk drive (otherwise known as HDD) in the annals of computing history. "Neck-deep" flooding in the Bang Pa-In, Thailand brought the vast majority of world production to a screeching halt and doubled the price of drives within a space of days. Why do you care?

From 1956, when IBM (yes, that IBM), introduced them as the secondary (there was a time when Floppy was king) point of storage for computers, these things have become increasingly dominant in the industry as our society has become increasingly digitized. In that day and age, virtually all computers were mainframes and most off-line mass storage as done on tape. Remember those old movies showing the "computer room" with banks of cabinets and big reels of tape spinning?

At MIT where a lot of this type of technology was developed, virtually no one was even allowed into these rooms. If you wanted to run a program, you had to hand it over to one of the "priest" (swear to Jobs, that's what they called them) and those guys would run the "stack" and you'd get a green-sheeted print-out. My first job in college was at Texas A&M in the Teague building doing card punch for a professor and running the resulting program! I guess I was an Aggie Priest! Anyway, as things progress from the 70's into the 80's, computers got the big "packs", removable hard drives in a cake carrier size..... just like the picture above. We had a "mini-computer" at my first job after college which used these things.

At that job, I generally worked on an IBM PC AT. It was a 286 and had the then crazy expensive and extravagantly sized 60Mb hard drive in it! My boss at that cotton company was a little technology crazy and spent a lot of money on such things, so we had the AT, an XT, AND a Compaq Portable. You remember, the clone with a folding keyboard when closed up looked remarkably like a Singer sewing machine ready for travel!

So, is this post about old storage mediums? No: as close as that is to my heart (I know, it's a weird unexplainable thing), that isn't the case. I've recently gotten to the point where my little computer side-business is even starting to go in this direction. The last three machines I sold were equipped with SSDs instead of traditional hard drives. When Joe-blow on the street is opting for it instead of the older, more capacious, and cheaper mechanical drives, then it's time must have arrived.

 

What brought this on all of a sudden? Well....yesterday, I took my last system with a mechanical boot drive "off-line". Our home server built in this Silverstone PS07 case, with the Asus E350-M1pro (AMD APU 350 Brazos chip), had a 500Gb Seagate Momentus XT in it. Yes, I know; it's a "hybrid" drive, but the NAND part of it was just a big cache and didn't really function as an actual SSD. It's being replaced by a 160Gb, Intel 320. It got me to thinking.

It's been a long road, from 2011 till now. It started with this little drive. It's all I could afford at the time, 64Gb Mushkin Callisto in the 1st Blackbird build. Over the course of the last 3 years, that machine has gotten 128Gb, and 256Gb SSDs; with the most recent rebuild I installed my very first SATA-III drive. A 240Gb Sandisk Extreme. That changeover didn't just change Blackbird; it's 256Gb Samsung SSD went into my wife's T500, the temporary 128Gb SSD went into the Viking HTPC replacing a 64Gb Samsung. This last weekend, I just upgraded our living room HTPC to a 128Gb SSD as well. Last month, my personal X301 got an Intel 320, 160Gb that has a TRIM function to replace the older Samsung 128Gb drive that did not. As you can see here, this isn't "1st Generation" replacement, I'm now in the 2G with bigger, faster drives displacing older, slower and smaller drives.

It's undeniable that SSDs was faster, but they were way expensive. So what happened? It wasn't quite this dramatic, but we are back to the top now. In 2011, the floods in Thailand didn't just drive up the price of hard drives, it changed the landscape of computer storage overall. In years past, the industry would have just borne the brunt of the high costs caused by the shrunken supply and then return to normal when the factories came back on line. However, in this case; there was an alternative in the budding SSD industry. Solid State Drive manufacturer's response to the "disaster" was to aggressively ramp up production while cutting prices to penetrate the market. Basically, every 9 to 12 months, the capacity of drives would double at the same price-point.

As the capacity was rising and the prices were dropping on SSDs, we can add the arrival of the "Cloud". This perfect storm (no pun intended) of technologies is spelling the end of the mechanical hard drive in it's traditional role. What has now happened is that in many cases, the SSD have taken over as boot, or only drive with commonly found capacities of 480Gb and beyond. Yes, they are still expensive compared to the spinning platters, which is why you often see the boot drive/storage drive (SSD/HDD) combination. 

Why am I writing about this now? It's that there's a "sea change" out there. You can feel it. SSDs are now the accepted norm for users who want performance. As I pointed out earlier; the last 3 laptops that I sold; one a Dell Latitude E6400, the other two ThinkPads, T61 and T500 all went out with 64Gb SSDs. What makes this remarkable is that I deal in value. My clients want something that will run well for as little as they can pay for it. However, they know the difference between a "cheap" consumer machine from Wal-Buy (my word), and something made well that should last. They also want performance if they don't have to pay too much for it. I offered all of them the machines with a regular HDD, but offered them all an alternative of a small 64Gb SSD for $50 more. After seeing a machine with an SSD run, they all chose less capacity, but better performance, despite the additional $50. These were "regular guys", not gamers, or Tech Gurus. Their use of them is from daily working computer to sit by the recliner check email/web-surfer. They just want their machines to be snappy!

Back in 2008, when the ThinkPad X300 was introduced, the thing that set it apart wasn't the thinness (the MacBook Air was slightly thinner AND beat it to market), it wasn't the uncommon at the time, Hi-Res LED lit screen. It wasn't even the still not standard, ridiculously slim 7mm optical drive that the MBA didn't have.....still doesn't. If you blow that picture up; it's item "N", the 64Gb SSD! The X300 was the lone machine on the market at that time that only came with an SSD! Now 5/6 years down the road, it's a tide that is beginning to wash away the HDD dominance. Ironically, the old hard disk drive has be relegated back to it's original role......that of secondary storage.

Buy Broken Stuff....Really!!!

If you don't already do this, your missing something. What am I talking about on this gorgeous Saturday morning (the first cool one this "fall")? It's no secret that I flip computers, so it shouldn't be a surprise that I often leverage the "scratch and dent" bin of eBay and Craigslist for items that I can pick up cheaper than "normal". There are several dynamics to this particular strategy, so lets look at them.

At it's most basic is the "bread and butter" of my little business; the refurbished Corporate laptop. I don't need to get into the benefits of them today, but here's how to squeeze a little more out of them than is already there. If I go out on eBay and just buy a ready to go E6400, I should be able to pick it up for somewhere between $175 and $200, then if I sell it for the typical $225-235, I will have cleared my standard of about $50 (give or take). However, many of these things are sold "part or repair". That means they are missing something. That could be everything "something", but most likely is that they are missing a hard drive, or maybe the A/C adapter too. Sometimes, there's as much as a $100 difference between a "ready to go" machine and one like that. Another factor is this: if I have an appropriate hard drive, in this case a 2.5" SATA HDD of between 80-160Gb/5400rpm, then I'm already ahead of the game. I emphasizes "have" because, if I have to go buy one, it ends up costing around $40 after shipping and it's just not worth it. So where do these drives come from? When I work on a computer and it's trashed, or the client needs/wants an upgrade, then I save the drive. If they want, I'll destroy it, but that's rarely the case. Also, when I get a computer for my family, I always pull the mechanical hard drive and replace it with an SSD. So, over time, I accumulate a number of good condition drives up here in my cabinet just waiting for a job. You might wonder if this is safe and/or ethical. Here's the deal; if after I've DBAN'd it, and "clean-loaded" an OS on one of these guys, the probability that someone is going to try and extract old data off of it is pretty darned slim! So, if I'm careful in buying the "new" machine and pick one of those "Parts or Repair" jobbies that still have the caddy and cover, then I'm golden! For Pete sakes though, don't buy one without the caddy/cover, or you'll end up spending upwards of $25 just ordering that little piece of metal and plastic! 

The same thing goes for the T61, T400/500 machines from Lenovo ThinkPad. These are corporate machines and when they come "off lease" or are surplus'd due to replacement, many entities require the company handling the old machines to physically destroy the drives. Anybody like banks, insurance companies and hospitals which require client record confidentiality will then put thousands of these computers into the secondary market w/o a drive! The better surplusers, will save the caddy/HDD cover, but the sloppy ones will just destroy the whole thing. This whole process will allow you to either make more money or if you are buying for yourself, save more money. I've often upgraded our own computers using this technique and end up making it a zero-sum operation.

Here's the next Frugal Propellerhead trick: buy outright broken stuff.... really! Understand before we proceed that there are risks with this. It's simply not 100% and sometimes you lose. However, knowing this, if the price is such that you are OK with the cost/benefit ratio of the equation, then there are great gains to be had. I'll start with my latest conquest. The Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD4H bought off of Craigslist for $65. I understood that it had a broken PCI-e (x8) slot, and was pretty OK with the knowledge that it was usable even without that slot. At worse I could use it in my HTPC which would never need a second graphics card. Besides, this was an ATX board with a third full-length slot (albeit a x4). However, the upside was that this is a board which is at worse, a year old, and at best 6-months or less since the Z77 platform was current right up until the release of the Z87 "Haswell" chipset. And as you guys know from an earlier post, I did a RMA (which was approved) on this guy and it's on it's way to Gigabyte. So in a week or so, I'll have a replacement in hand. 

That little episode was so successful, I've decided to do it again. This time, with a Gigabyte GV-R7750OC graphic card. I've been wanting to upgrade my vid-card for some time, not because I need more power (I don't), but because, my HD 6700, on a fairly regular basis, will behave strangely. It will give me artifacts around my mouse cursor, and if I don't reboot quickly, it'll go "black screen" and lock up the box. This is not acceptable on my main workstation on which depend pretty heavily. So, why don't I just pick up one of the many really cheap, 5000 or even 4000 series cards and replace it then? Well, for one thing; I'm kind of a stubborn cus' and don't like using "bottom-feeder" gear on my primary machine. And secondly, I will on occasion, convert a video or two, but most importantly do photo-editing on rather large DSLR generated image files. There's that, plus I want a cool running card as well. Those specialty passively cooled "mid-line" cards are really kind of hard to find and they tend to be a little pricey (at least to me) when you do find one. What to do? While researching cards for my client's gaming computer, I had zero'd in on AMD's 7xxx mid-line otherwise know as the "Southern Islands" series. In there is a low-powered model designated as the 7750. So low-powered that it doesn't need external power. Now; that's for me! However, I didn't want to pay the $90-100 for a new one. Yeah, that's right......I want nice higher end products, but don't want to pay the price. Did I say that I'm a stubborn 'cus.....hence Frugal Propellerhead? Not surprised that I bought a "parts or repair", "untested" (meaning, "we know it doesn't work, but you can hope") one off of eBay for $45, are ya? Would you be surprised to learn that Gigabyte also warranty's these guys for 3 Years like their motherboards? And that, I've got run it through their RMA process and currently waiting for approval to send it back?

One more example. In case you forgot: a little more than a year ago, I bought an "as is" ThinkPad Tablet (original Android version) for a very good price. The same day that I received it, I shipped it to Lenovo as a warranty repair since (of course) it was still within a year of purchase. They didn't have the parts to fix it within the specified time-frame for a "corporate" item, so it was arranged that they would drop-ship a NEW one directly to my house. Yup, that's how it's done! 

Any failures? Yup; I bought a couple of refurbished Dell Stream 7 tablets from Newegg. Unfortunately, the power connector broke on my son's pretty quickly and within what Newegg had assured me to be Dell's warranty period. That turned out not to be the case and after several unproductive discussions with their consumer support facility in India, it went nowhere. Newegg however, was gratious enough to do a partial refund and we moved on from that episode. What's the lesson? I could very well turn the name of this whole blog into: DON'T BUY CONSUMER!!!

The ThinkPad T61 Pickup Truck

So, the $90 T61 came on Thursday. My original thought while I waited for it to come in was to fix it up a little and sell it. Then I thought about it some more and realized that there's so little money tied up into this, I could make it into a do everything random machine. Kind of like a pickup truck of laptops. Among the things that this machine could do was to set up to test out uploading video directly to an internet service. 

Let me explain myself.... in a former life, I was a coach. I know, weird huh? Chinese guy, born in Hong Kong, coaching football, basketball and track (hurdles)! Toward the end of my football coaching career, I was able to work a trade that allowed me to "film" (actually video, but coaches still call it film) the game instead of going out to scout upcoming opponents. That was an easy decision. Go every week with the Varsity team and be with players that I've coached, vs. driving all over "hither-and-yon" to random places like the "Tomato Bowl" (don't ask) in Jacksonville, Texas and spend 3 hours diagramming plays..... this is known in the trade as "scouting". Don't get me wrong, there were benefits! I know where every Dairy Queen is in most towns in North Texas, and I was able to hook my sister-in-law up with my scouting partner and they have now been happily married for 8 years!

In that time (about 7 years), I've become somewhat of an expert on the electronics end of "filming". Asian man, electronics and cameras; natural fit! Anyway, we got new equipment this year, so I got involved in the process of working with the new gear. In the hi tech world of 21st Century football coaching here in Texas (it's a religion here), we upload our videos right to a "cloud" service where it's viewed and shared with whoever needs it. What we decided to do was to start working with these capabilities to upload directly from the digital video cameras through a laptop directly to the service, thus saving the coaches the time to do it later after we get home from the game.

And this is where the T61 came in. I needed a machine that could experiment with to do these uploads. I didn't want to play around with my X301 and risk messing it up. The T61 was perfect..... well, actually my son's T61 was perfect, with it's descrete nVidia GPU and high resolution screen (1680 x 1050). So he got the $90 machine with the Intel X3100 integrated graphics and I got his machine. I doubt that a 10 year old who mostly uses his computer to play games and watch Pokemon' videos will notice the difference!. Sure, the machine got a little upgrade: 4Gb of RAM, 80Gb Intel SSD, DVD+RW burner, but it was all stuff that I had anyway so it didn't cost anything. I just had to find a way to get it off of the Advanced Mini-Dock that it was locked to and missing the keys! That, of course was accomplished through a YouTube video and now I have my pickup truck.

 

Don't Buy High End!!!

Some of you guys are now out there going: WHAT THE *%&* !!! First he tells us not to buy the bottom end "consumer" computers, now we aren't supposed to by the "high end"!?! 

Well....snuggle down and let me tell you a little fairy tale..... OK, no fairy tale, but in a land not so far away, laptop manufacturers started looking for increasingly higher end graphic chip solutions so that everything could look cooler and games (that which laptops were never designed to do) could be played better. Actually, it wasn't even that long ago; about 6-8 years ago, around the time of the late P4-M and early Pentium M processors. ATI was first "out the gate" with full-blown very capable graphics processors (GPUs), of that generation. Around the 2 year (remember this) mark, computers ranging from Apple iBooks to ThinkPads began succumbing to the "black-screen" syndrome. Basically failing to P.O.S.T. due to the graphic subsystem failing. Come to find out, they had developed what became known as the Ball Grid Array (BGA) cracking issue. Essentially, the problem was that over many cycles of heating and cooling the differing materials of the MB vs. the chip's differing cooling rates cause stress fractures to occur at the "ball" of solder that was the attachment point between the two. Over time, this would become severe enough to cause the two to lose communications and the result would be the infamous "black-screen". Occasionally, people would "reflow" them and through heating would create a reattachment, but in most cases, it would fail again. 

Fast forward 5-6 years and the high end of the notebook GPU market had been taken over by arch-rival nVidia. So if you were really interested in power, then you upgraded from the integrated Intel GPU to a full-blown stand-alone graphics solution. Two years and a class action lawsuit later, it was found that these high end chips had a flaw, plus also suffering from the dreaded BGA issue as well! TA-DA!!! 

Light the torches, grab the pitchforks, and let's go get those money-grubbing graphic chip manufacturers and string them up! They must be witches! We'll all run out and get some Savage S3 or better yet, Hercules graphic cards! Derp....... So what happened? The fact of the matter is: that amount of heat is not designed to be contained in a very small notebook computer case. It doesn't matter whether the manufacturer is ATI or nVidia, high end stand-alone GPU are not designed to be sufficiently cooled in notebook computers. I'll go a step further to say that it's mostly the consumers' fault!

Let me start by stating very clearly that what I relate is from my observation and experience talking to original users of failed machines. For the last couple of years, an inordinate number of folks have brought me their dead machines that have suffered similar dead GPUs. In almost every case, the user had been either a gamer (derp), or someone who routinely used the computer on carpet, a blanket, or pillow, and many case....all of the above! You know those funny looking slots on the bottom? Yeah, anything soft that can cover those up.....not good. When you combine a major heat generating chip with covered up vents, that's really not good.

Today, I was brought another machine exhibiting the same symptoms, a HP DV6000 series. That'd be the third one of that series alone in the last 6 months. So imagine what a place like Best Buy's Geek Squad looks like? Last year a co-worker brought me her son's machine that was exhibiting the same issues. I even managed to reflow that Dell XPS M1530 so that it worked for several months.

Now, all isn't lost. If you have a machine that's been office used (eg. on an actual desk) and not abused, then chances are good that it'll run for several years. Actually my wife has been very happily using one of these "defective" T61s for close to a year now. It was used corporately for about 3 years before that. It's fast, does everything anyone who's not a gamer would want and it cost me $65 off of the local Craig's List. After bumping the RAM up to 4Gb, and installing a 240Gb SSD, it and the high res. WSXGA screen is everything that she wants: not one complaint since I put her on it last year! Now, does that mean that I'd recommend that for everyone? The answer is an unequivocal, NO! Just go back and read about the T61 I just did for a friend's wife who had an Acer with a  broken screen. I purposely sorted through literally dozens of T61s for sale on eBay to find one that had the cool running (relatively speaking) integrated Intel GPU that I picked up at an excellent $126. She won't have to worry one bit about that machine. For me; the $65 risk is worth taking given that it's my wife and if it fails, I know it's backed up (because my server automatically does this) and I can put her into another computer in the blink of an eye. 

So, what's the deal? Are those graphic companies just incompetent or are they out to try and take us all to the cleaners? I believe the answer is no on both counts. I believe that the consumer and the market has them in a "no win" situation. We demand new more powerful computers capable of doing more. And as the market shifted from desktop to laptop computing, we asked for something that laptops were never designed to do and we wanted to do it in smaller packages. Smaller means less capability to cool. However, nobody wants to say no, so the engineers do what the managers want, who have been convinced by the marketing guys that it's what the consumers are demanding. So they create designs that stand on the knife edge of functionality that can do exactly that they say it can, if conditions are just right, but only for so long. Then when the consumer pushes the envelop ever so slightly..........

 

Tale of 2 Computers: A Case Study

It was the best of times, it was the worse of times......technologically speaking of course! You guys have read my various anti-consumer computer rants for some time now, but I'm going to actually use a current project as an example of how this situation plays out in detail; otherwise, known as a "Case Study". 

In this particular case, it starts with one of my former colleagues who has gone on to teach and coach at a different school. They are about as average of an American family as you'd want to meet. Mom and dad, both college educated trying to raise two kids and live the great Best Buy......er, I mean American dream. And of course, it being the 21st Century, that dream would include a number of computing devices. I've worked on others for them (he's pretty good at coaching football linemen and teaching history, but not much of a technician), but here's the latest.

This is an Acer Aspire 6930. It's around 3 years old, making it of the late Core 2 Duo generation. This was a good vintage. This design of processors sipped power, but yet, were very powerful. They came along in the Post-SATA and DDR2 revolution, so will take drives and memory that are big and aren't ridiculously expensive. This model was one of the nicer ones for sale at the time at around $1000. It was in the high-end of the Wal-mart range and middle of the Best Buy lineup. Equipped with a good sized 16" screen (warning bell for tech folks), it was shiny, pretty and nicely spec'd. In fact there were even versions that had a second drive capability, so nothing to sneer at!

However, just when things are looking good...... My friend called to say that his wife's computer was experiencing problems with the screen. I turned out that she had a cracked LCD. I figured; no big deal. $50 and she'll be good? Remember when I said that there's a "red flag"? The 16" screen? What is typical in the screen market place: 14.1", 15.4", 17.3"? That's right, the 16" is a bit of an unusual size, which means $$$ because of the great economics Law of Supply and Demand. I promptly got on eBay and started looking....to find that the cheapest screen available was going to $150! Three times the norm! So expensive in fact that people were selling special "conversion" cables to allow computers to use a completely different type of screen! So the next course of action for me was to try and find a broken one with a good screen. I was thinking maybe $100, $125 right? First of all, there was only about 20-something for sale period, only 5 or 6 were broken, of which all but one had......you guessed it.....cracked screens! This sounds suspiciously like a design flaw on a very expensive part. And remember, this thing was about $1000 at purchase time! 

The more I looked at it, the more ridiculous the whole thing sounded to me. I knew I had bought both Dells and ThinkPads of similar generation for less than $150, so I started looking at that as an option. Actually I started looking at similar machines to her's which includes the HP Pavilion G60 and some Toshiba A505, however, they were all well above $150 in selling price, so I turned to the Dell E6500. This machine was the 15.4" version of the E6400 (14.1") which I've bought quite a few of in the last year. Unfortunately, I wasn't quite able to snag one around the $125 mark that I set as a limit. As this was going on, I began to keep an eye on the ThinkPad T61 as well. This is a machine that I'm very familiar with and indeed have my wife on one right now. Well, to make a long story, shorter, I'll cut to the chase and say that I snagged one for $126.20, with all drives, A/C adapter and just needed to have the OS loaded. No Sweat, for that kind of money! Oh yeah! it's also the Intel graphics version that's NOT susceptible to the great nVidia GPU debacle of that generation.

So, what does this all mean? First of all; although, the cracked screen is an accident that couldn't be anticipated and probably not the fault of the computer, I will say that if it's not one thing, it'll be another. At least in the case of consumer PCs, I find that your unlikely to hit year 3 without having to do something to repair or upgrade it. So let's look at this case study: $1000 into 3 years comes to $333 per year. I'll admit that I got a great deal on the T61 so I'll inflate that number a little bit to $225 which is what "ready-to-go" laptops commonly costs. This comes out to be $75 per year. If you aren't some sort of "expert" and need special brand-new leading-edge technology, most people are perfectly fine with a 3-year-old off-lease corporate laptop. So do you really just want to throw that other $150 per year away?

Crossing the Technological Rubicon

It's not often that we get to do something momentus in terms of technology, especially for someone like me who tends to buy after things hit the "sweet spot". In the last post, I talked about upgrading my X300 and having an extra drive as a result. In the post before that, I discussed the demise of the Mushkin Chronos SSD, which is in the process of being RMA'd. Well, I did it again! While in the process of looking at MacBook Pros, then trying to find a Dell E6400 for a friend the other day; I came across a Craigs List ad for an SSD.......new Samsung 256Gb for $100.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking; I was thinking the same thing. SCAM, not really "new", really a refurb, another one of those "penny auction", "I just sold it, but I can tell you where to get one just like it" things. Turns out, it wasn't any of those things. it was being sold be the same guy who was selling the Dell Latitude E6400 that I was buying for my friend. Apparently, he works for/or with Dell and has access to lots of their "sell-off" type stuff. He picked up a bunch of them to use and sell when Dell decided to move on to the new faster SATA-3 standard. I don't know what he paid for them (it must have been great), but I don't really care since $100 for a new 256Gb SSD is a great price in an of itself. Especially because it's a Samsung which is generally considered to be right up there with Intel on reliability. Given that my machine is older and wouldn't see the benefits of SATA-3 anyway, this is pretty awesome. In fact, it turns out that this particular drive is the sell-to-OEM repackaged Samsung 470 that I used in the Viking mini-HTPC build last month. 

So, along with this situation and the RMA'd Chronos returns, I'll have 3 spare SSDs. This puts me in the unique position of being able to move all of my front-line computers to either a single SSD or an SSD boot drive/mechanical storage drive combo with the exception of the file server. That's 5 laptops: 240Gb Sandisk in my wife's T61, 128Gb Samsung in both my X300 and Z61m mobile workstation, 50Gb in my son's Z60t, and 64Gb in the daughter's X61. That's along with a 256Gb + 1Tb in my desktop workstation, 64Gb + 500Gb in the living room HTPC, and 64Gb + 500Gb in the bedroom HTPC. The amazing this is that it wasn't intentional or extravagant, just an almost imperceptible shift in storage medium that's completely changed everything.
 

Amazon's Daily Deals

Even Frugal Propellerheads that keep an eye on everything need a little luck every now and then! A few nights ago, my wife reminded me that I needed to order some 3.5mm headphone splitters for her classroom before I went to bed. So I rolled over, and got on the laptop to order this thing. Weeeeell....in the midst of this, I noticed that Amazon was running a "deal of the day" as the Sandisk Extreme 240Gb for $154.99! I nearly fell out of bed! I had been charged with getting another laptop ready for my wife, by her highness, and as luck would have it, I had lucked into a nicely spec'd T61 for $80 on Craig's List a month or so ago. All I had been waiting for was to find a good deal on a bigger SSD. I'd say that 240Gb qualifies as a "bigger" SSD since I run 128Gb ones on my machines!

So anyway, from just dumb luck, I'll have her in a pretty quick upgrade from the Z61m that she's been working on. It needed a rebuild anyway, so it'll get that, and go to her new school with her.