An Update on My 2012 Mac Air

Typically I want to get 3 years out of a laptop to amortize spending on a premium grade machine. I’m at 4 years on this one and while there is better hardware available now, so far it hasn’t been enough better to drive me to buy something new. I maxed it out when I bought it; […]

How Much Power Does Your PC Use?

I can’t say I’ve ever worried too much about how much power my PC uses. I care about battery life on a laptop and like laptops that use a lower wattage transformer because it’s smaller and lighter. Power to servers only mattered as far as “do we have it” and making sure the appropriate 110v/220V […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 6 (The End)

Let’s start with a quick review of the pieces and what I paid: Item Cost Antec P280 Case $90 (may be higher now) ASUS P8Z77-V LK Motherboard $120 Corsair 500W Power Supply $50 (400w would have been plenty) Intel I7 3770-K $320 (have seen as low at $299) Samsung 840 250G SSD $190 WD 1TB […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 5

With the motherboard and CPU installed I was ready to add the final and perhaps easiest parts to the build. I started with a DVD drive. In practice I almost never use DVD’s any more, preferring to mount ISO files as drives (which also means I can keep them all right there on the machine, […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 4

Reading about the motherboard choices took a while. Because I had already decided on a CPU, the Intel I7 I at least had an initial filter. If you’re shopping for one today you want a board that has the Z77 chipset with an LGA 1155 socket – easy to spot on the box when you’re […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 3

With a case ordered and a CPU in mind I decided to focus on the power supply next. Remember that the better cases come with fans but not with a power supply (and in general that’s good, you want to pick you own). As I did the reading I found it’s more complicated than it […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 2

Building a computer, at least in the beginning, feels like something you have to do holistically and at the same time like a chicken and the egg scenario. For example, what size power supply you buy depends on what you’re going to use for your video card. Not all video cards fit in all cases. […]

Building My Next Workstation–Part 1

It’s been four years – maybe more – since I last bought a workstation to use for development and lab work. It’s served me well since then, hasn’t changed much, but is slow by the standards of what I use today even in my laptop. When I bought the last one it was to host […]

My $200 Oops

My Nexus 7 tablet has grown on me, though I think it’s more about having a dedicated tablet than the hardware. I’ve never been a big fan of cases for devices, they seem to throw away the lightness of the form factor that we pass extra for, and without any case I can slip the […]

Trying the Nest Thermostat

I’ve had the Nest Thermostat on my wish list for a while. It has looked like an interesting bit of technology, just hard to justify the $249 price. This past week the little plastic nub that changes from AC to heat broke on my not-exactly-high-tech thermostat, so I decided to splurge and try the Nest. […]

SQLAndy

Hardware