New Gen Portable "Workstation".....Workstation

I've had quite a bit of business lately. It's a weird for me since in years past, the month or two after Christmas/New Years has been relatively quiet. This year, I've had a number of my old clients as well as new clients who have contacted me to get replacement machines. Almost every single one of them, have been some sort of "desktop-replacement"/"workstation" machines. You add that to my wife's computer that I recently replaced and the selling off of her old T500, I've had the larger laptops on the mind.

As I've discussed already, her replacement was the ThinkPad T530 which is an Ivy Bridge generation "Core" machine. With ours' and because they are ours', I tend to be more patient and take more time finding that special deal. For one-offs like my wife's T530, you'll have to be VERY patient and/or lucky. I grabbed her's for around $135, and I was lucky, but also had to put up with a shiny keyboard, a cracked bezel and a bad battery on top of the lack of HDD. Today, I'm not really wanting to discuss these unicorns, but the machines that I can find at any time, any day. Yes; I'm aware that I've broached the topic in the past, but this post is about what's out there right now. Hopefully, somebody out there might even be able to use it for their own search!

What I mean by that is that at a certain price-point, a particular generation of machine is readily available. For me, the price-point is $200.... and the more below that, the better I like it. Right now, in "enterprise class" machines, $200 will buy you a nice Sandy Bridge laptop by one of the Big Boys (HP, Dell, Lenovo). Companies that sell hundreds of thousands of these machines and therefore have lots of inventory out there at the end of their three year corporate lifespan. Right now, it's the Dell E6420/6520, the HP 8460p/8560p, and the ThinkPad T420/T520 machines. These are easy to find and can range as low as $120 on up to $200+. Lower if you're OK to buy without a drive, and higher if it's fully ready to go. 

I probably don't have to tell you that Sandy Bridge generation machine have a lot of life left in them as far as being a viable working machine for an individual on a daily basis. They'll all take the easy to find and inexpensive SATA drives and DDR3 RAM. Although, I'll say that if you want to have lots of RAM, I'd buy it now while it's cheap, because in another year, it's going to be quite a bit more expensive!

 

Is there "anything to give" between them? As far as function, .....no. But other factors come into play. Some people love that their machine seemingly never changes and are OK, with the somber black and the retro buttoned down look. Kind of like the James Bond of laptops ..... and for them, there's the ThinkPad. These things are so traditional, the move to the "chiclet" style keyboard was considered revolutionary. They are kind of the black-tie tuxedo of the computing crowd. 

If you really want a Mac, but have to use a PC, the corporate level HP is for you. Even the touchpad on the 8460p is similar to it's MacBook Pro cousin. Clean lines devoid of superfluous creases and embellishment is the name of the game here. 

 

For those who don't care either way and simply want the same function at the lowest average price, the Dell E6420/E6520 is for you. They are nicely built (not as nice as either the ThinkPad or HP) and decent looking. They will do the job. Traditionally, Dell sells the most out of the big three, so they are the easiest to find and making them the cheapest as well. I've bought these guys for around $125 in nice shape. Peripherals such as docks, power adapters, and drives are cheap and easy to find. 

 

While these machines make nice daily drivers for just about anyone, they are also amazingly adaptable as well. Because they were corporate machines, the list of devices made for them are long and often useful even to us regular people. Just the batteries alone come in an variety of types (typically 5), ranging from 3 different levels of standard batteries, to modular bay battery, to "slice" battery that attaches to the bottom of the machine and functions as an adjunct to the main battery. Typically, there are 2 or more optical drives, and hard drive bay adapters to add more storage. Less normal, but never-the-less sometimes available are devices ranging from numeric keypads, and modular fan units to modular graphic card upgrades! 

And as if that wasn't enough, there always "the dock". Actually, it's not really that; there's often anywhere from 1 to 3 different docks! The simplest being a "port replicator" so that all peripherals can be attached to this thing and thus allowing the user to walk away with the computer by simply pushing a button. Then there are true docks that give the machine more capabilities than the machine by itself had, such as SCSI (back in the old days), drive bays, etc. Sometimes, manufacturers even have "advanced docking stations"..... that is a dock, but it does even more stuff! Things such as expansion slots AND drive bays. I even have an old IBM one with built in speakers. 

I have a client who's about to replace her desktop that's used for work with an HP Elitebook 8460p and since she uses multiple displays, as well as full-sized keyboard/mouse combo on a daily basis, I'm also going to add an HP Advanced Docking Station to her new rig as well. We'll be able to do all this for less than $350!   

Family Portrait 2016: Part 2, Personal Computing

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.

From The Ridiculous To The Sublime!

 

It's pretty much all over, but the "cry'in".... With the exception of "mass storage" and I do mean MASS, as in 2Tb or over.... the day of the spinning hard disk drive is over. With the price that they're at today, there's absolutely no reason to not have one in your machine. If you keep an eye out for the constant sales going one, it's not even that challenging to find a 240/256Gb SSD for under a $100! And I don't mean one of those "no-names". I'm talking Sandisk, Mushkin, Crucial, and even some Samsung. It really hit home last week when I was replacing a failed hard drive for a client. I had done some estimates for him between $200 on the low end and $375 on the high of the range from using a "small" (240Gb) SSD for the OS and programs and using first his onboard SD reader for file storage then on to the mSATA later. He decided to go this route because the 1Tb SSDs are still too expensive. While I was shopping for a good drive and SD card, I realized that I could do a 480/512Gb SSD for the combined cost of the original concept! I was able to pick up a Micron C400, 480Gb drive for just short of $140. Sure it's "last gen", but still a nice drive and a huge upgrade from his failing mechanical 500Gb Hitachi HDD. And since his ThinkPad T430 has an onboard mSATA connector, he'll be able to add one of those for more internal storage down the road.

Speaking of....  while shopping for his drive, I came across one of these. A Crucial M500 mSATA drive of 480Gb capacity for $149. I picked it up and plan on cloning the 256Gb, Crucial M4 in my ThinkPad over to it.

In addition, I'm going to take the 600Gb, Intel 320 that was in my wife's (now retired) ThinkPad T500 and put it in the 2.5" drive bay of the X1 giving me over a Terabyte of solid state storage in a sub-1", sub-5lb Ultrabook! Sure, that drive is a SATA-II, but it's file storage, so I think it'll be "OK". I'm not even sure what to do with all that storage, but hey; it's there if I need it!

In the middle of this, my wife's new machine, a ThinkPad T530, got a 480Gb, Intel Pro 2500. Not the fastest SSD, but dead reliable. 

So, what does all this SSD shuffling tell you? Am I just nuts? Maybe, but it's really that the capacity of today's solid state drives have them in a place to replace virtually all mechanical drives not used in mass storage. Here's the telling thing: in no case, did I pay more than $150 for any of these drives! And additional benefit? They are so fast, that just the one change, allows machines that are several years old to be completely usable and even down-right fast and inexpensive! There's just NO reason to still be running a machine with a mechanical hard drive!

The Intel Gift That Keeps On Giving...... The Core/Core 2 Duo

In early 2006, Intel began shipping their new product, code named "Yonah" and "Merom". These new CPUs were designed to take back the crown and restored the luster which AMD had taken in the preceding years. This story really starts a decade before when, from the mid-90s till close to 2000, Intel had been clearly the leader in the processor industry, although AMD had given it a very decent run for their money with the K5/K6 architecture during those years. However, those chips were always seen as being the inexpensive alternative if you couldn't afford the real thing! So, in 1999/2000 Intel was the monarch of all it surveyed with the PIII "Tualatin" follow-on to the "Katmai" and then great "Coppermine" processors. 

Then this happened! Netburst...... otherwise known as P4 (or Pentium 4). It turn out to be a wrong turn in the Intel roadmap. Simple put; they fell in love with speed. I was working in the IT world at that time and remember it clear as yesterday. "Netburst" was the next big thing, it could do everything fast. It was so fast, it required a new type of RAM.... RAMBUS (RD RAM) and even a new socket...... the Socket 423. I remember having to do a budgetary tapdance just to buy system memory for those machines because it was so expensive (and my predecessor had under-spec'd the hardware when that group of machines were bought. They were Dell Optiplex GX400 and a thorn in my side for the next 3 years. The P4s got faster AND hotter, AND faster AND HOTTER. The CPU game went this way for 5 years, until the "Smithfield" Pentium D processors came out in May of 2005. In fact, they ran so hot that most major manufacturers never made P4 small form-factor machines. The Pentium D was essentially 2 of the "Prescott" cores on one die, but it was a change that would be a harbinger of really big things to come. The other shoe dropped in January of the following year when the "Presler" chip was launched. Sure it was still a P4 based Penitum D, BUT it was built on the 65nm process. AND chips were made to go into the new LGA 775 socket which would soon become the host to the really big change.

That same January, Intel slipped the "Yonah" Core Solo and Duo onto the market in notebook form only. This was followed in July with the notebook "Merom" and in August by the Desktop "Conroe" Core 2 Duo processors. These weren't just the "same old, same old": Intel had gone back to it's roots of the last PIII "Tualatin" chip that valued cool-running efficiency versus the flat-out speed of the P4 line. The new architecture put Intel back into the drivers seat where it's been ever since. Not only that, but this series of chips dating back to 2006 weren't replaced till the "Clarkdale", "Core" Series of 2010, weren't just long lived, but can still run current operating systems and quite a lot of productivity software as well. If you're someone who uses a computer to do simple tasks such as websurfing, checking email and consuming some media, the later, "Wolfdale" (desktop), or "Penryn" (notebook) work fine. Now, if you're a media creator....... then I'd say look elsewhere!

If you're wondering where I'm going with this; then here it is! We have 2, ThinkPad T500s in our house right now that are about to go to new homes. My son's old lower-spec'd machine that has integrated Intel graphics, on a 1280 x 800 screen, and my wife's nicer switchable graphics (integrated Intel GMA 4500M or ATI Radeon HD 3650) on a 1680 x 1050 screen. These machines have run very well over the last 3 years that we've had them. My son's only got replaced this fall when he needed to carry a machine to and from school daily. However, in the last couple of weeks, I've run into opportunities to sell both machines. One will go for $150 and the other for $175. Both buyers were happy to be able to get them for those prices and they'll do a good job for the new owners. 

 

Their replacements will be a T530 running 3rd generation i5 bought for $135. It'll need a HDD, but I planing on moving her 512Gb SSD over to it. I'll have to spend about $20-30 for a new palmrest but at the end of the day, this machine will have pretty much cost me $0. My son's current X220 was bought for about $80 (after shipping) from an eWaste dealer. It didn't come with a drive, but did have 4Gb of RAM. I was able to move his old 160Gb Intel SSD into it as well as add another 4Gb of RAM that I had on hand. So that exchange will have made me about $50. This whole story really isn't about the great deals I got on the new machines, but really that those old Core 2 Duo ones were such a great generation that they were still viable enough to get me enough pay for their own replacements!