When I brag about my computers it’s usually a time of stress in my life where I’m trying to exert control through externialities. I say this because I don’t want my readers to think that I’m some kind of ‘mine is bigger’ asshole while instead I am a mendicant who measures each sou against a mouthful of bread.
Yet I try to keep my tools as sharp as my wit.
My base laptop (which I’ve been using as my primary computer for a couple of years now) is an HP 6475b running Windows 7 x64. You can buy it used/refurbished on ebay for $95, it cost me $600 new. It has a 15″ (rated, actually 14″ diagonal 1366 x 768) screen I hardly ever use, keyboard and touchpad likewise. It came with 1 or 2 Gb Ram which is plenty for most applications.
But not for me.
Among the “must haves” were a PCIE Slot (good for two extra USB 3.0 ports if nothing else), an SN-208db DVD Burner (may be capable of dual layer, I’ve never checked, DL media is expensive and nothing compared to 25 Gb Blu-Ray), 2 built in USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports, an HP Display Port (really much better than the VGA) and the usual LAN and Headphone jacks. The processor is a 2.5 Ghz AMD A4-4300 APU with Radeon Graphics. I have 2 x 2.7 Ghz replacements (like $15 a pop) that I haven’t bothered with since mucking about the guts of a laptop is a pain in the ass.
Of course the first thing I did was rip out the Ram and max it at 16 Gb which had the counter intuitive effect of making my machine slower (bigger swap file). Small price to pay.
The next thing I did was buy myself some USB 3.0 Hubs (upwards of $20) which run 300 Mb transfers all day long to 256 Gb Flash Drives (though for a finite number of writes, but there are a lot of them, and at a mere 190 Mbs), so I have a base storage capacity of slightly over a Terabyte in addition to being able to use my phone and its 32 Gb SD Card (80 Mb) and my Camera and its 5 32 Gb SD cards (80 Mb) and my floating collection of 64 and 16 Gb sticks (190 Mb) I use to share stuff.
At this point I don’t even care though the people I give them to get all paranoid about returning.
Anyway, Daisy Chained, I have about 17 of those on my desk and I could go to… 128? 256? A lot. 300 Mb on the other hand is not that fast at all.
It’s fast enough for some things. I own a tool (actually several) that allows you to hook up “normal” drives through a USB 3.0 port (300 Mb) which is fast enough for me to blast Blu-Ray (Quad Density, 100+ Gb) media using the part I bought for my desktop or all my 2 Tb drives.
Seriously, I have like 6 of them suitable for NSA level data mining except they’re filled with junk.
Yeah, Utah has nothing on me, even in Road Warrior mode. I am constrained by the fact touch pads, laptop keyboards and displays are a joke. I never travel without my cables that allow me to hook up random HDMI and DVI devices and I carry one (which is not random) with me along with a full size keyboard and a real mouse.
My most recent change, that you’ve had to suffer through without notice because that is my way, is my upgrade from an HTS725050A7E630 (a 500 Gb 7200 RPM drive) to a ST 1000LM 014-1EJ164 (a 1 Tb 7200 RPM SSHD drive). That cost $81+ and doubled my core storage as well as making my experience smoother.
Sorry for the inconvenience.