Hardware

If you’re plagued by RSI symptoms, it’s high time you evaluate alternatives to traditional keyboards and mice. For me, moving the mouse to my left hand nearly twenty years ago (even though I’m not left-handed) seemed to do the trick. Ultimately, though, it proved not to be enough. Much later I switched to a lightweight gaming mouse to reduce the weight I’d have to lug around. That helped, but only for a time. I also experimented with various types of split keyboards. But that’s a topic for another post.

Vendors in the gaming space often make wonderful keyboards, but their software is not always up to par. Take the Razer Huntsman Elite: its software is a whopping 422 MB download that installs eight (!) background processes that consume valuable system resources all the time. Luckily, there is an alternative.

I am a mechanical keyboard aficionado. I guess this started in the late ’90s when I typed on a Cherry G80-3000-LSMDE for the first time. The low force required to press a key combined with the tiny click when a keystroke registered created a typing experience that was both easy and precise. I have not owned many keyboards that managed to recreate this typing experience (actually none). Here is a little account of my decade-long journey across keyboard land.

This article describes how to build a fast workstation PC that is almost completely silent (actually the fastest possible in terms of single-thread performance). It is based on a PC build published by German c’t magazine.

When it comes to selecting a general-purpose workstation I tend to be looking for the impossible: high performance, superb reliability, quiet operation, moderate price. Amazingly, there exists at least one device with all those qualities: the Fujitsu Celsius J550.

The Lenovo Yoga 900 packs some amazing hardware in an ultraportable 1.29 kg 13" chassis: high-resolution 3200x1800 screen, Intel Core i7-6500U CPU, 16 GB RAM. The only downsides I found so far: glossy display, maximum SSD size is 512 GB, OS is Windows Home, not Pro. There is not much we can do about the former, but we can change latter two pretty easily. This article explains how to upgrade the SSD and install a clean Windows 10 Pro without any Lenovo bloatware.

Having made the switch from my trusty Lenovo T520 to the W540 here is my account of what works well and what does not. If you wonder what made me choose the W540: read this.

My current laptop is nearly three years old. That is a pretty long time, and I have contemplated getting a new machine more than once in the last years. I even went so far as to buy a more fancy replacement, but that attempt failed miserably. After using the new device for only a few days I realized that I had taken my Lenovo T520’s qualities for granted too much. I had thought a sleeker, more modern notebook would have all its qualities, too, albeit in a more appealing hull. Boy, was I wrong. As I wrote after trying to work on a Sony:

When you move users from a physical PC to a VDI environment you may find that they are not too happy with their new machine’s performance - it happened to me. To quantify things I took a series of measurements comparing the old PCs we migrated away from with both VDI machines and the new PCs available to some.

When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad - at least for CPU performance in a VDI environment.

Sony Vaio laptops are rumored to suffer from two defects: the preloaded OS image being full of crapware, and being extremely difficult to clean install. The former is true for nearly every laptop vendor. I do not care about it because I reinstall anyway - I know from first-hand experience how much can go wrong building an OS image. The latter is bad since it obviously jeopardizes my remedy for defect #1.

Contrary to what Lenovo wants to make you believe, the T520 laptop is not limited to 8 GB of RAM. I own this reliable workhorse and made the mistake of buying another laptop because I wanted something more elegant, but mainly because I need more than 8 GB of RAM. As it turned out, the other machine was not as business-proof as I thought.

I have been using Lenovo laptops for more than seven years. They never failed me - not a single hardware fault or software instability in all those years. OK, not everything was great - I distinctly remember the R60 which had an atrociously bad screen - but apart from a few glitches here and there IBM come Lenovo delivered great quality again and again. And yet here I am ordering my first laptop from an entirely different manufacturer. How come?

FantecA drive enclosure for 4 SATA drives, connected to the host via USB 3.0 and presented as JOBDs is a great and inexpensive method of adding a lot of hard drive capacity to your computer, e.g. for backup purposes. The enclosure model I have bought is the Fantec QB-35US3. It is compact, the fan not too loud and vibrations from the four drives are kept amazingly low. It can be connected via USB 3.0 and eSATA, but USB is simpler because eSATA requires a port with a multiplier-capable chipset, which is rare. At a retail price of around € 150 the Fantec is relatively inexpensive.

I have wanted an energy-efficient multi-terabyte home file server for a long time, but until recently such a system was too expensive for my taste, in terms of both energy consumption and purchase price. But now with affordable 3 TB drives and low power Sandy Bridge CPUs the time has come to build the system I have yearned for so long.

Disassembling the Lenovo Thinkpad T520 is easy, which makes upgrading the device a simple procedure. As described in my previous article I bought a T520 with only 2 GB RAM in order to replace the shipped memory with two 4 GB modules from Kingston. I also bought Intel’s mSATA SSD 310. This is a short description of the upgrade and installation procedure.

For a geek, one of the most fun things is choosing a new toy. I experienced this once again when I needed to buy a new laptop computer. The selection process was a lengthy one, during which I looked at and considered practically every model on the market. The benefits of that are twofold: I get a new device, whose strengths I appreciate and whose weaknesses I accept because I know there is no other model better suited for my needs on the market. You get this: a very personal laptop computer buyer’s guide.