Progress Updates (again)

[Justin]

I'll look into the hanging bug before too long but I have an idea what is causing it (internal stuff) and the next version would kinda address that automatically with some of the other changes that are being made.

I know I haven't posted in a few days - lots going on outside of VDJ (life gets in the way sometimes). Today I decided to take a day off and go with my dad to check out yard sales. Not too many more nice days like this around here this year.

First one we stopped at -- JACKPOT!!!

I picked up a Dell Optiplex 3010 small-form-factor PC with Intel i5 Quad-Core 3.2 GHz CPU, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and two 22" LG monitors, for $200.

I got home, then realized I didn't have a keyboard where I'm staying at the moment (since I've been using all laptops). On a whim we stopped at a resale shop and viola - nice HP keyboard for $1.50 completed the package (I dreaded the idea of digging through my storage unit for a keyboard)

The Dell also has an add-on ATI graphics card, and with a BIOS update I was able to use both the on-board Intel video *and* the separate graphics card.

So now my 19" 1440x900 display is the "little" screen   The 22" both run at 1920x1080. Most workspace I think I've had on a single desktop and believe me, it is VERY useful when working on software, graphics, videos, etc. I still have the ability to connect a fourth monitor, may be useful when I move to a new place soon...

Best part is, unlike the last time I moved a drive from one machine to another, this time it just worked (the drive bay in the mini-tower actually has a slot for a 2.5" laptop drive) *and* it upgraded me to Windows 10 Pro using the license key that came on the machine.

Even the driver updates (motherboard, audio, CPU) just fell into place with no user-interaction required. Seems Windows really is getting their stuff together...

Total investment: $201.50 and a couple hours of time. Now what to do with the extra laptop. Dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows 10 sounds like a grand idea (that laptop's license is still valid since I re-activated this install with the new machine's license, and the drive that came with it is just gonna get wiped for storage).

I kinda feel like I'm going to wake up any minute now and this was all a dream...

For fun, some pics. The last one (assuming the forum lets me upload it) is gigantic as it is a screenshot of the entire desktop with a bunch of stuff loaded.

BTW, having a 1920 wide display is great, I'm making more use out of Windows' "side-by-side" feature now. Having a total desktop of 5280 is just insane...

[Justin]

Almost forgot the backside of this mess...

[Fabio]

That is a great deal...and you just moved a hard disk from one PC to another and it just worked?  Wow...I haven't done that yet, but it's good to know it will work!

-Fabio

[Justin]

Well it worked *in this case*... last time, just a couple months ago, I tried the same thing from my HP laptop that died, to the Acer laptop I recently acquired. Not so good news and I ended up doing a full reinstall on what is now the drive in this machine.

Last time I made two mistakes:

- Forgot to set a "restore point" -- in fact I had never set one, so there was no "last known good" configuration (Windows *used* to do that automatically I thought).

- I failed to do a *complete* shutdown first. Shutting down Windows puts it in an almost hibernate-like state for faster bootup. To do a full real shut down you have to open a command prompt as Admin and type "shutdown /s /t 0" (unless there's an easier way, but this works for me).

So after attempting to install some drivers on the new laptop it was left in an unbootable state with no way to "go back". Days of reinstalling all of my development tools and all that, now I set a restore point every time I make any major change like installing development software or updating to any non-OEM drivers... and of course this time I didn't need the restore point.

Better to have and not need, and all that...

Now I'm off to put Windows 7 on the laptop, mostly to have a "virgin" test machine running the lowest OS I plan to support (technical Vista introduced the new multi-media system but Vista has so many problems itself I'd rather just go 7+ as being "officially supported").

One thing I like about the onboard audio (and I've seen some laptops that do this): the "Speakers" jack and the front-panel "headphones" jack show up as separate audio devices in Windows. So Preview can be accomplished using only the on-board Intel audio   Also if I hook a television (instead of a digital DVI monitor) to the HDMI output, there's yet another audio output device, and yet another AMD HDMI on the add-on graphics card... but I'm using the DVI out on all three monitors so only Video is supported there.

[Fabio]

good to know about the full shut down!  I'm gonna have to try that...I have an old dual core laptop (Dell) that I'm giving my to my niece who's about to start high school. It was my former giging laptop.   I will have to do some playing around with the OS...