Hardware on Roads Less Taken

New SSD for my Lenovo X220

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

After the conundrum with my Intel 320 SSD I did some googling and decided to invest a fair chunk of money in a really good SSD - the Samsung 840 Pro, 512GB . The 840 Pro seems to be the king of the hill right now and it’s only 7mm thick which is what I need for my X220 (although people have shoved 9mm drives into it with a bit of force).

Never an Intel SSD again

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

When I bought my Lenovo X220 - which I have been extremely pleased with to date - I chose an Intel 320 160Gb SSD disk with it, in retrospect a BAD MISTAKE. No idea why I didn’t find the warnings plastered all over the net at the time, and the problem was even acknowledged by Intel as early as july 2011 . The disk has been working fine since april when I got it, until the last day of 2012…

Going Lenovo...

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 01:02:06 +0000

When I started my own company about a year ago I ended up buying an ASUS G73JW gaming laptop - I took a deliberate decision to focus on raw power for decent money and totally ignoring portability. Generally it has served me well, although it does tend to make a lot of fan noise, at least under Ubuntu. It might work smoother in Windows, but I seldom boot into Windows.

Needless to say though it is a real ton of bricks (8.8 lbs = 4 kg) and including the truly fat power supply it simply weared my back down during 2011. I have been carrying this beast in a backpack every day - and my body eventually said “enough dammit!”. :)