Will I ever Buy a Laptop Again?

Will I ever buy a laptop again?  This is a significant question, PC's themselves are going the way of becoming locked down, indeed UEFI was the first step on that road, requiring secure keys and other literal dongles is becoming quite common for the home PC Builder; or even small assembly shops.

Laptops are an even more confused space, building your own is sadly incredibly rare, but even rarer is being able to buy a laptop and it being upgradable.

Now, I accept laptops have soldered on components, they are an all in one solution for most vendors.  So it was four years ago when I specced up and bought my current laptop I had three requirements from it:

1. Upgradable Memory

2. Upgradable Drives/Storage

3. Changeable Battery

At that time I settled on the Lenovo E480, with an 8th Generation Intel Core i5 inside.

For point 1 I was able to buy it with 4GB of RAM (a single stick of DDR4) installed, saving me over £110 on buying an upgrade to 8GB direct.  I simply received it, opened it and installed a 16GB kit (pair of 8GB sticks) for £83; so I saved and had more memory.

For point 2, I was again able to get deliver with a single 500gb mechanical hard drive, and for merely £65 I was able to get a really nice M.2 nVME SSD and install that the moment it arrived.  I am still able to replace the standard 2.5" SSD SATA drive if I want.  And I was also able to install a 1TB MicroSD card for more cold storage of large files when on the move and disconnected from my file server.

For point 3, being a Lenovo is a huge boon, there are a lot of resellers of their components and the battery is no exception, plus it's a battery just installed with a sticky pad and a single 4 pin connector, very simple to open the chassis and swap it out.  After four years mine is due a change, it has gone from around 9 hours on a full charge to only 4.

The machine is simple to work on, it's got lots of external ports, it can drive all the devices I want, the wfi, bluetooth and just quality of the Lenovo build is very nice.

So, what could possibly replace it?

I am coming up blank, I've been looking and looking, I do not want to support Apple, as much as I like the look of their hardware the total lack of any repair or upgrade paths in the M1/M2 space annoys me, their GPU is custom too, and I want to be working in open source wherever possible (read Linux).

Asus are similarly offering lots of options but so very many of them are locked down, there are RAM upgrades for some, but that's about all.  And crucially battery replacement is sketchy, it's hard to even find out what battery a unit offering has.

Very similar results in my search with Toshiba, Acer, Dell (including Alienware) and a custom builder here in the UK.

I did look briefly at modular options, such as the ones touted recently by Linus Sebastian, but getting them here in the UK is a massive pain in the rear.

So simply put will I ever buy a laptop again?  I don't know.

If I can find something meeting my three previous requirements and include adding an external GPU via USB-C to it, that maybe a selling point, but I'm really not willing to give up on the first three requirements I had.  They are the very definition of a laptop to me, you live with a locked down CPU and GPU, but at least you can expand the utility of the unit in other ways.  Except, vendors want to ship thinner, sealed, easy [for them] to support units with a limited [est 2 year] shelf life; after which you are cast to the winds.

As I understand it my Lenovo now being 4 years old, an 8th Gen Intel, makes it positively geriatric.

Want to read more about my quest for a laptop in 2018, why not read this one http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2018/12/deep-thought-about-new-laptop.html

Or even my laptop purchase from 2012, http://megalomaniacbore.blogspot.com/2012/01/custom-laptop-for-virtual-deeds.html

Sorry... What was that measure?

 I've a bit of an eye for oddities in product listings... and this one caught me...

This is for a door latching system and its the weight thng at the top, first of all they can't just say "takes between 1.2 and 1.6 kilos of force to open", instead they go with this very odd metric of 1.5 bottles of 4L water.

So... one and a half bottles of 4 litres of water....

Very distinctly not six litres of water... And the strange thing is I'm pretty sure a litre of water weighs a kilo itself, so one and a half bottles of 4 litres... That'd be 4 + 2 giving us 6 in total, six kilos, which isn't mentioned.

It is just all round odd... That's all I've got for you, move along... move along I say!

From intel to AMD...

Well, that just happened... I bought a Ryzen CPU...

That may not seem a huge revelation, but let me be clear in my PC's I have always (well nearly always) had Intel CPU's.  But the current 3rd generation of Ryzen has Intel on the ropes and I have to get moving with my new PC build.

And I've gone in what may seem a strange direction.

Initially I thought about third gen Threadripper, but I really can not justify the expense, most of my work is done on servers and though I could bring it all onto my workstation for compiles (like LLVM) but really its a convenience and not worthhy of nearly £2500 (after a processor and motherboard).

So what did you do Xel?... WHAT DID YOU DO?

Well, I've gone with an AM4 socket motherboard, a very good AM4 socket motherboard, and I've gone with a 3rd Gen Ryzen Zen 2 architecture processor, but perhaps not the one you'd expect.

You may expect me to have gone with the Ryzen 9 3950X, and you'd be right sometime next year, when they're properly out and in stock and prices have homogenised some.  But today, pre-Christmas, they're like rocking horse shite and costly.

The processor I've gone with then is the Ryzen 5 3600X...

Yes, it's Zen 2, yes it's AM4... Yes it's only 6 cores and 12 threads like my current workstation machine.  But it was only £200.  It comes with the stock cooler, so I cam practice with that before delving into fitting the AIO.

I've gone with an Asus ROG top tier motherboard for this class of processor, and I plan to let it go up to the 3950X with it's 16 cores and 32 threads sometime next year.

Memory, I've gone with two sets of 2 x 16GB Corsair Dominator RGB.  For a total of 64GB of RAM, which is a massive upgrade and maxes out the motherboard.

For that's the big thing I'm giving up, if I had gone with the threadripper3, then I'd have automatically had access to double the RAM slots (8 to be precise) and 128GB of RAM is common as a maximum on the X399... But here on the X370's it's usually 64GB (though some are 128GB).

The motherboard, RAM and processor all come from Amazon, for (to me) the princely sum of £700.  So the whole new machine, with the PSU, AIO, Case and storage I already have has topped me out at £1,100.

Expect build videos and tech tinkering footage soon.

Laptop Battery Project

You know that moment when you've torn your laptop battery apart and find Li Ion cells so generic that you can only call them "orange"... yeah... I'm there....

This is like the third replacement battery I've gotten for this laptop, and I love the machine.  But with a battery life shorter than a Goldfish's memory I need to sort this out.

Time to shop, and likely get scammed, trying to find affordable replacements.

The wiring on this thing is also pretty rubbish, why the heck are there two batteries with opposing electrodes towards one another with just a piece of thin plastic card between them?... I mean, is it trying to burn my house down?

AO.COM... Yes, a review of a website for you all, this lot have a real mixed experience for you, my experience went from being quite happy with my purchase to utterly and totally dismayed by them, so much so that I ended up having to call them and threaten them with a cease and desist order.

Lets explain, Monday our tumble drier died, Tuesday the house was getting over run with washing drying, so Wednesday the wife asked me to sort a new drier... We're strapped for cash, so cheap cheap, was the order of the day, I checked Coop Electrical, and they had a drier, but you had to pay delivery and it'd take a few days, and we have the estate agent coming... yadda yadda yadda...

So I looked elsewhere, and remembered a TV advert for "AO, Lets go"... bringing their site up, same drier, same price, free next day delivery... bargain?>!?!... I ordered, and at the end of my ordering process it asked me to update whether I wanted to be contacted with offers, and I declined.

However, I had set all the contact details, the email, the mobile number to my wife...

Next thing I know she calls me, "Who are these AO that keep calling?"... Oh, I thought maybe they were trying to arrange the delivery...

No! They were telemarketing, trying to sell the wife cover for £2 a month or week or something for the drier, the drier which a) had not even arrived yet and b) she knew nothing about and c) which I had declined contact on.

So I sent them a nice e-mail asking them to stop... because by then the office was closed, but they kept on calling, 16 calls later and the guy was pestering my wife, she said he was pleasent enough, but when she said "I am sorry, I do not do anything with the bank, I can not set up, and do not want to set up any payments for protection" the guy said... "Go find a bank statement, the husband won't want to miss this offer, get the bank statement and read me the numbers, I'll set it all up my end"!!!

THE FUCKING CHEEK OF THAT!

I'm pretty sure that's illegal, and the pressure it was putting on my wife, you must understand she suffers anxiety, social anxiety, that I've even got her to answer the phone is a big thing, but to have this arsehole calling and hassling her was totally unacceptable.

So, come Thursday lunch the calls not abating I asked the wife to read me the number and I called them, and I got this gal, now she was not the one calling, and I said it's not her fault personnally, but it is the fault of the company, she took my info and appologised.

Meanwhile the drier was delivered and my wife asked the driver about the calls, "Oh christ" he says "the number of complaints they have".

Pressure sales, pushing and pestering, pissed me off... And it seems they're more than aware of it, bunch of wankers.

I'll never be buying from them again, and I'm pretty sure if you read this you should take my sage advice and avoid them too.  Coop Electrical, just as good, zero hassle, and we've had fridges and driers and washers from them before.

We will never be buying from AO again!

Also of interest, I used the wifes e-mail, yet just after browsing their site I was receiving junk mail in my inbox... "You've left something in your basket"... HOW THE HELL DID THAT SITE GET MY E-MAIL?... Clearly through accessing data on my machine, cookies most likely, but... That's against EU law, they've just passed a law saying that sites using cookies must inform you they're doing so... The AO site did no such thing, I got spammed, and when I hit unsubscribe you get someone dressed in a badger on the site giving you gip, it's all just not very funny after the pertubation of bullshit they've put us through, over buying one drier, once...

NEVER AGAIN, AVOID THEM!

Supermarket Search - Website Failz

So, I have some computer restoration and cleaning to do, this is of a set of four Atari ST's and an older Commodore 16... So I want to get some isopropyl alcohol really, but I'm skint the budget for this project is spent on the carcass Atari STe to re-case one I have which was painted green...

Anyway, a cheap alternative is to therefore look for cheap alcohol based skincare products in the beauty isle... Now I'm at work, and its lunch time, so I hit the internets and I wondered if Asda had anything suitable.... Here's the search

WHAT AN EPIC FAIL!

Yes, the search ability of this website is appalling, its not the only super market chain with this kind of problem, Sainsbury's is an online supermarket site I've used a lot and it's search is terrible...

Supermarkets, make this better, or hire me... I'll make it better.

Weekends Ending

I'm not sure whether my weekend actually deserved to contain the word "end", because I didn't stop once, between jet washing, and cooking, shopping and actually coming into the office on Saturday I don't feel rested at all...

I did get to play some Minecraft however - screen shots to follow - and I also began more looking into OpenGL, you can skip back through the blog and see I was working on texture mapping some area and viewing it a few years ago, I never really got to use that as work in the office took me in a different location.

But I'm looking at an OpenGL application to leverage Windows, Linux and MacOS... Possibly even OpenGLES, so the Pi & mobile platforms in the longer run.

I have prepared Wednesdays next post about the Virtual CPU code we're working on, so stay tunes for that...

In the news I noted this article:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-27187582  

Real Life People of Walmart

I've you're a frequent visitor to YouTube you may have noticed the Zeitgeist about "People of Walmart" a few years back... Jessica Frech in all her dressing up madness... Can be seen here.

Anyway, here in the UK Walmart is actually the brand... "ASDA", and the wife and I have just been to Asda... Oh holy Christ... We saw everything...

When I say everything, I mean everything, there was one lass with so little covering her breasts - which here huge - she could have been in Heat magazine - I mean real topless in appropriate for the super market, and she was loving all the guys gawping too.  Her fella with her was the beefiest bloke ever, with a look of "You even look at my ladies titties and I be unscrewing your head to shit down your neck"... but it made no difference, her tits were huge and on display.

Next, there was a lass, now we only followed her up one isle, but even the wife said to me, "What she's wearing is indecent"... it literally was not even a pair of pants starting below her crotch, you could see her entire anatomy through the sheen fabric, and then just bare legs immediately... Now I'm no prude, and in a porn film this would have been fine, but this girl... was 14 tops... it was indecent, and embarrassing... her mother was wearing much the same, but her short shorts were topped with a muffin roll of middle age fat, which offset the camel toe show, but even so.

And then finally, there's a guy walking along with his lass, she must have been two decades younger, I assumed he was father to her being daughter... that was until he said she could buy a bottle of liquor for the evening and she flung her arms around him and gave him a big tonsil tickle of a kiss... It was like... OH MY GOD.

In appropriate dress, in appropriate age and in appropriate activity all in the space of one store within ten minutes.

Chairs, Cars and my Annoyances

Today's a bit of a birc-a-brac post for the world at large, firstly I'm sick of the high street media were going on about this just this morning, about how internet shopping is killing shops and shopping in person.  Well, let me tell you, it's not only the internet its stupid annoying shop staff.

Let me run you through this properly, I need a new chair for my office, as a programmer I spend a lot of time in my chair, but with lots of expenses over Christmas I had a set budget to adhere to for a new chair, we're talking less then £100.  So, with such a budget I wanted to avoid getting a £39.99 plastic armed monster and have it fall to bits within a year, I actually wanted pretty much the same chair I had from 2002 til 2008, a leather short backed operators chair.

I have a similar chair at work, but its price is prohibitive, however, it looked like a certain store had the answer, a chair very much what I wanted, for £73.  So I set off to try it out last night.

I got there, and I tried it out, but was confused to see the price was £110.  Beyond the budget, and not as stated on their website, so I asked for a price check... I was made to feel like an utter and total leper.  We're not talking about a performance car show room, where if you ask the price you're instantly known to not be able to afford the vehicle, we're talking about a poxy chair in an office furniture shop.  I'm stood there waiting to speak to this chap, we'll call him 'chap #1', I'm stood there and behind him are 'chap #2' and 'chap #3', they ignore me.

I speak to 'chap #1' ask for a price check, he comes with me looks at the item, walks back to his post and says to the second guy "Can you price check that chair".  Now, this is where I got angry, the other guy walks the same path up the store to the same chair and walks back and then gets out his phone, he doesn't say "wait a moment please" or acknowledge me in anyway, he just says to 'chap #1' "back to your post".  This guy is ignoring me, his name tag denotes him as the "Store Manager"... He's ignored me and making me feel awkward, as rather than being able to engage with him I'm just stood there, staring and fiddling with his phone... he is going to use the company website to check the price... he can't seem to make any managerial decision himself.

This manager fiddles and piddles about and finally says... "Price is right" and goes to walk off.  Literally, he just turns his eyes.... "Price is right" and turns back to his minion in the form of Chap #3 to carry on chatting with him... Customer service on par with making me feel like a pile of shit.

So I interject, "but the price is £73".

"Ah no" chap #2 says with smug satisfaction "that's the price if you buy two, see" and he shows me the phone, which says "From £73.33", they're not from that price at all folks, they're from £110. This miss-leading advertising annoyed me, being left just stood there annoyed me, so folks stay out of Staples at Lady Bay Retail Park in Nottingham, they're not much cop.

And now my other piece of bric-a-brac (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-20944339) this poor woman, I know now that her insurers will either not pay out for her, and even if they do they're going to say she claimed, loosing her no-claims, she'd be all right if she just rolled the car forward and touched bumpers with the vehicle the neck patients were in, then she could claim off their insurance, but as it stands I think this poor woman is going to get utterly screwed over.  And this just emphasises why I hate Insurance companies.