in other old/new news...

"Grindintosecond" (Grindintosecond) 09/28/2018 at 22:05 • Filed to: computer

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I took my old 2010/11 vintage laptop and gave it some love. My lovely XPS15 (L502x) running a 2nd gen Core i7. I replaced it’s death-rattling fan for $16, and where It used to have a 640gb Toshiba, I plopped in a 250gb ssd. Now, you may say, “Why? It’s old.” But honestly it’s quite the good laptop rig. Here’s how.

A 2nd gen core i7 64bit 2720m is no slouch. 2 cores, 4 threads, so this will work very nice multitasking. 8gb ram. A nice 1080 screen, back lit keyboard in frankly a bit more comfortable dimension than laptops today, and on board JBL sound system with “sub-woofer” that was better an regular laptops but it’s really nothing to call your dad and brag about. The SSD was bought probably 2 years ago during a big newegg sale but languished ont he desk cause my desktop could never use the speed with it’s now ten year old motherboard. So, it’s got a new home now. It has a USB3 input, and blue-tooth, and a nice base to rest the wrists on. It’s a great secondary computer for use around the house. My current plans are to hook it up for Zwift bike training in the basement and some other light stuff that even now it’s probably way too much for. If anything else, I think a nephew or niece could use it. The battery pack, once i replace the dead one, is good for 6 hours at least and probably much more now with the SSD and not a mechanical drive, has a lump so it’s off the table top and can breathe well.

I just like bringing things to life, and this one was worthy. Plus, now that the SSD is in and the drivers are up to date, it loads faster than holy shit and flys loops in smoothness.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Grindintosecond 09/29/2018 at 07:54

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Hell, that’s not old at all. Even a Core2 Duo with a decent enough amount of RAM is perfectly usable as a normal-everyday-stuff type computer (browsing, Youtube, Netflix, etc), especially if you put a lighter-weight OS on it like some flavour of Linux.

My main desktop PC is a Corei7 running Win10, but my spare laptop is an AMD A6 running Linux Mint 19 and 8GB of RAM and it’s perfectly fine, even for some light gaming. My spare desktop is a Core 2 Duo with 6GB RAM and it’s fine as well for normal stuff as long as you don’t expect to game anything serious or do video editing on it.

Grindintosecond > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 09/29/2018 at 14:24

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I don’t understand this “spare desktop” concept.

Although I have a leftover box in the garage running a core 2 e 7700 chip. 2g ram i think? I dunno. Il have to turn it on someday soon and ind out just hwat I have. I’m also starting to accumulate leftover graphics cards. hd4850, 5850, 770gtx, I used to overclock it just a bit . Found a 720p flat tube monitor for a buck at a garage sale. It’s a perfect garage box for whatever i’m needing to find or stream while garaging.

LINUX and I, well, were no good together. Like that attractive stick-shift driving brunette college teachers assistant that you thought you were good with. Well, turns out miss LINUX is oil to my water. We never got along.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Grindintosecond 09/29/2018 at 14:36

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Eh, some people like Linux some don’t. If you haven’t tried it in awhile, it’s a lot more painless now. Short of setting things like printers up (some companies don’t have good Linux support at all, though HP has amazing Linux support), you can pretty much install it, go download the few programs you want (Chrome, etc) and go. I’ve never had a major problem with it that required something like a reinstall or the like since I started using a variation of it on my laptop daily back in 2012.

As for ‘spare desktop’ - I rarely use it, but it is my ‘media center’ PC hooked up to the TV for movies when friends come over and whathaveyou, and I also use it as my backup hard drive for lack of a better description as I have a sync program that I use to back things up from my main Win10 desktop and laptop to each other and the spare Linux PC.

Grindintosecond > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars 09/29/2018 at 15:27

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since were nerding out. Black friday has coming a dual m.2 motherboard w/gumsticks in it for the os and steam/files drives. plus the amd r5- 2600. What I got now was a xmas prize I won in 2009 and has been great. Just goes to show a top end rig today will last 10 years before any upgrades begin to have bandwidth problems....and even then it still runs games pretty well with graphics updates. So this guts upgrade will last another ten years at least.

it sits in a corsair super silent case (even has thin foam padding on all faces internally) on the same corsair water system it came with. quietly pondering. Windows 10 on this has been flawless for me. I don’t know what they did right this time but I guess since I’m not a tweaker or power user I’m not bringing out problems.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Grindintosecond 09/29/2018 at 16:09

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I’ve personally had no issues with Windows 10 either, even though my Win10 install has technically been around since 2008 (installed on my ‘spare desktop’ when it was my main desktop, then I used the SysPrep tool to strip it of all drivers, and install it in my new desktop....did the Win10 free update on the tail end of the free release period (gave it almost the whole year of the free release period to make sure the most number of bugs had been worked out) and have been using it ever since with almost no problems. :)