An Old Man's Guide To Stuff

Hopefully this remedies the problem of the laptop screen being position too low for prolonged periods. I guess I will know for sure when my shoulders don’t feel as stiff.

While my laptop did not come with any bloatware installed by the manufacturer, there was still the usual Windows 10 bloat like Skype Preview, Groove Music, etc. Therefore, the first thing I did was to load up the Powershell as administrator and used the "Get-AppxPackage -allusers | Remove-AppxPackage" command. In seconds, I had a leaner, cleaner and clutter free install of Windows. I highly suggest that you do this whenever you get your hands on a brand new laptop.

After a few tweaks to the RAM and SSD, this should be the final configuration for a while. Link to this tweet.

After using the laptop for a day, I decided on the first upgrade. More RAM! This is the link to the tweet.

I went over to the Illegear showroom today and spent some time to speak to the service technicians who put the laptops together and check out some builds in progress. After spending 40 mins there, I put down a deposit for the following configuration at RM 5,214 (i.e. USD 1,182.31): Note: The above price includes calibration of the screen and a warranty of 2 years. My laptop should be ready for pickup next week. Can’t wait!

After the disappointment from last week, I realised that I was fairly open to spend north of RM 5,000 (i.e. USD 1,133.79). So rather than go and check out the MSI GP62 7RD Leopard (which is priced at RM 5,329 and has a GTX 1050 with 2GB VRAM instead of a GTX 1050ti with 4GB VRAM), I decided to check out some laptop retailers who use parts from ODM’s like Clevo . After checking out a couple products online, I decided on the Illegear Q5 Evo which starts out at a base configuration at RM 3,999 (i.e. USD 906.82). All I needed then was to see a unit in person at their showroom before parting with my cash.

From my previous post , it is very clear the the Dell Inspiron 15 is very competitively priced. So much so that, it was almost too good to be true. Well after going to the store to check it out in person, it became apparent why. The screen is bad. Really bad, Horrendous even. Colours are horrible, the screen is dim and viewing angles are horrid! Such a waste really, it has a wonderfully sexy chassis, nice internals, excellent keyboard and a very good price! I enquired if there was an option to upgrade the screen to a better panel and was informed that there was no such option. Poo! The Lenovo Legion Y520 fared much better and by swapping out the bundled solitary 4GB Samsung DDR 4 2400 for a 8GB Kingston HyperX 2400 would push the price of the laptop to RM 5,039.40 (after rebates i.e. approximately USD 1,142.73). Everything was going oh so well until the sales representative came back and said there was an error with the inventory system and they didn’t have any units in stock. Doub...

After browsing online for a couple days, I’ve narrowed it down to the following: Time to go to the store and check them out before plonking down the cash!

As the wife requires a pc for basic productivity tasks (word processing, web surfing, emailing and managing her social media accounts), my aging i7-2600K based desktop will be moved to her studio. The full specs of this trusty desktop are as follows: Mainboard : ASUS P8Z68-V LX Total Memory : 16GB DIMM DDR3 (4 x Kingston KHX1600C9D34GX 4GB DIMM DDR3 PC3-12800U DDR3-1600) Monitor/Panel : SONY TV(1600x1200, 72.3") Video Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 (13CU 1664SP SM5.2 1.16GHz/1.5GHz, 1.8MB L2, 4GB 7GHz 256-bit, PCIe 2.00 x16) Storage: WD Black (3 x 1TB, SATA300/600, 3.5", 7200rpm) Network Adapter : Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller (Ethernet, 100Mbps) Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Personal   Instead of replacing the above with another desktop, I've decided to go the laptop route instead as my primary gaming machine for the past 2.5 years has been the PS4.With that in mind, I will be looking for a laptop with the following: 7th Generation i...