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Sometimes, all manner of otherwise unrelated items cross each others' paths, stars align just right and fortune smiles on us mere mortals (or Frugal Propellerheads).
Some of you might remember that a few weeks ago, I posted about my "other" hobby, that of woodworking. As you might imagine, I approach all my hobbies the same way..... with a plan to upgrade over time and to be ready to use opportunities as they present themselves. A few years ago, I got to the point in my woodworking where my wife bought me a little table saw for Christmas. It was one of those $100 Christmas specials that you see stacked in the aisles of Walmarts all over the nation as we approach the holiday season. It was a little Black and Decker and over the course of the next couple of years, it did it's share of work. But as you can imagine, they aren't really a serious tool. The fence never would align correctly, and it was severely underpowered. They're really a $40 circular saw mounted upside-down on an aluminum table with a plastic base. I'm not even going to bother to depict it here. So, after a few items constructed, I was ready to graduate to a more substantial machine. Where-upon, I fell for the Ryobi BT3000 that you see above. Let's just say that it's a gadgeteer's table saw. If you want to look it up, you'll see that it can be set up to do lots of things, ranging from being a router table to having an on-board sliding miter table. My issue with it was that, I never used any of those features and it turned out to not hold settings very well!
So, here we go..... I had sold the Black and Decker for around $60, then added money earned for computer work etc. to buy the Ryobi for about $250. I did add a kit to it which cost me about $80, so I had $330 invested in it. A few weeks ago, I sold it for $300 and started looking for table saws on Craigslist.
I learned that among others brands and models, various versions of the venerable Craftsman 113.xxxx table saw could be had for anywhere from $75 to $200 depending on age, general condition and of course; seller's situation. Let me go ahead and explain my plan here. These are the next level up in table saws. The main feature that separates them from ones like mine is the cast iron top. These lend stability and tend to be very hard wearing, so they last forever. There's virtually no difference between a 60's version from an 80's version. Of course, there are other table saws out there of this style, but these are legendary.
...... then there were these. The Delta 36-725, "10" Contractor's Saw" selling at your local Lowe's for $599. I kept finding reasons to go by there and then swing by hardware and stare at it.... trying hard to dream up scenarios where I could come up with the $300 difference between what I had and what I needed to buy it. It was like something out of the movie "Christmas Story"! And just when I had resigned myself to refurbishing an old Craftsman, it came up in conversation with my buddy the science teacher, that he had one of these and it was just a magical as I had envisioned...... drat.....double drat!!! And throw in a dang-nabbit for good measure! To make it worse; various needs arose around that time and I spent about $140 of what I had for a number of unexpected eventualities (which I expected to get back). Let's all say DRAT again! Oh, it actually gets worse, so bear with me on this....!
In the meantime; I found a CL ad for a Rigid TS3650 for $325 in Dallas. A similar saw to the aforementioned Delta, but had an inferior fence, plus it was older. I managed to talk the guy down to $300, however, he had very tight time restrictions and I was going to be out of town that Saturday for an academic competition. So I arranged to get it from him between 2:30 and 3:30 that Sunday, not knowing that my son's swim meet wasn't just Saturday....... it was going to be that Sunday as well from 1:30 to 3:30. Yup.... no saw. The guy wouldn't budge on a meet time. It was just as well, since I was going to have to ask my wife for a loan from our actual bank account anyway to make up the difference.
Then, magic happened....
..... or more specifically, ThinkPad magic. After having my son's old ThinkPad X220 on Craigslist for several weeks without much interest, a buyer appeared out of nowhere and wanted to buy it rather quickly...... for the $165 asking price. Which as it turns out came to $325 total of cash in hand. But wait: there's more magic. A week or so before that, I had found one of these Delta Table saws list for $500 literally "in my backyard", or in Poetry, Texas which is a few miles up the road. Then, about the middle of the week before Thanksgiving, the guy dropped the price to the magical $325. So, I texted and found that he did indeed have that saw still and yes, he was selling at $325, AND yes he would be happy to meet me at my house with the saw since I was leaving town that day to go to Eastern Oklahoma! Oh yeah; and all this was happening while the other guy who wanted the ThinkPad was driving down from about an hour away to buy it.... Whew!
What about the "Vinegar" part? The saw came looking about like this. It had gotten rained on which you can imagine wasn't great for cast iron. Plus, it was missing some bolts for the fence rails. After a trip to Ace Hardware for bolts and Google/Youtube for info, I bought some 3m Green pads and went to work on it with, first some WD40, then the vinegar. Apparently, vinegar reacts with rust and gets turned into this kind of slurry that can then be scrubbed loose and wiped away. After that an application of old fashion Johnson paste wax to combat the moist air of East Texas, and it looks pretty much like the ad picture above! Sure, it's scratched up a bit, but most importantly, it cost me the $325 that I had and that's a good thing.
Last summer (2015, not 2016), I had a job to do. My son was going into the 7th grade and needed to carry a computer with him pretty much every day. The alternatives up to that point was to check out an ancient ThinkPad X61, complete with 1Gb of RAM out from school, or carry his 6+ pound, ThinkPad T500. So it was pretty obvious that those weren't good options! As you can see, I came up with a different answer in the form of an X220. It had an i5 "Sandy Bridge" CPU, 4Gb of RAM. Pretty good for $59. I put in another stick of RAM to get it up to 8Gb and installed a 120Gb Intel SSD in it and he was set to go.
A year later..... this happened. Our school system decided that they'd issue and mandate the use of Chromebooks. BYODevice..... dead and gone. So, now a-days, I often see my son trying to play Minecraft or Terraria on the 12.1" screened X220. Even though, those games aren't particularly taxing to the integrated GPU of the Sandy Bridge i5, it was definitely not an optimal solution.
So, over the course of the last month, I've been researching gaming machines that were a few years old..... along the lines of the "Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge" era. There was of course, the quintessential gaming machines of Alienware such as the M14x and the less expensive Lenovo IdeaPad "Y" Series among the ones I looked at. I set a budget limit of $300, so that eliminated all the Razer Blade machines and most of the newer Alienwares as well. But I was still interested in those, since on occasion, an older model can be found (often needing a little work) in the high $200. However, it was the Lenovos that really interested me. While I'm very familiar with their ThinkPad line, I'm the exact opposite on their consumer machines. What I found was that they've developed a decent reputation on selling capable gaming equipment at reasonable prices. There's no multi-colored keyboards and air vents, or super-cool MacBook looking machined aluminum cases, but they did bring the goods in the hardware department.
Although I had originally started looking at the IdeaPad Y500 and Y510p (I'm an optimist), I came across a Y560p on eBay that just wasn't getting any love! It's bidding price sat at around $50 for a long time, until it finally edged over $100 at the end. I paid $102 with $12 shipping. So for less than $115, I have my son's next machine. What is it and why did I hone in on that model, other than for the price that is....
When examined; it's not particularly remarkable for a 2010 machine. It wasn't impossibly thin like the Razer, or crazy cool looking like the Alienware. It did have some chops on the hardware front though:
- Intel i7-2630QM "Sandy Bridge" CPU
- DDR3 RAM 1333 up to 8Gb
- AMD Radeon HD 6570 GPU with it's own 1Gb of memory
- 15.6" WXGA (1366 x 768) display
Those specs are decent, with the exception of the screen resolution maybe, but there's a little something that's hidden under the skin which really helps. If you look closely at the motherboard up at the top, you'll see 2 PCIe/mSATA sockets. One is not only full-sized, but capable of taking mSATA devices.....
Which means this! I like using mSATA spec'd SSD storage. It allows a machine to have the benefits of solid state storage for things like the OS while keeping a traditional mechanical hard drive in the 2.5" SATA bay for mass storage. The smaller ones like this 128Gb Micron can often be found in the range of $25-35. That'll make the machine feel snappy while not having to spend a lot of money on buying a bigger (eg. 256Gb, 512Gb) SSD.
Warts? Sure..... I don't like that there aren't USB 3.0 ports, really dislike low-res monitors in general or the shiny plastic deck. Otherwise; it's pretty OK. It's going to be my son's computer anyway, not mine!
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.
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!
