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Showing posts from November, 2016

Dell Inspiron 11 3162 Review

I bought this little 11" laptop off Dell's site after poking around and thinking it would be nice to have a little laptop again. I really missed my MacBook Air after I sold it - silly move that - so I thought why not consider this one? It's specs are underwhelming: Celeron N3050 processor 4GB of RAM 32GB eMMC HDD Bluetooth version 4 WiFi - 802.11ac+ For what it is, it performs quite well. It's crippled though. In fact - so crippled I couldn't get the thing to start a week ago. It would try to boot into Windows 10 and just hang and hang and hang - you get the drift. I let the power completely drain then tried again. Repair windows install was the next question.... grr. After completing this it booted. That's the only problem I've had with it. I have had the chance to use it for a couple of presentations. The built in HDMI interface is amazingly handy and the Dell drivers work well for the system, allowing for quick and painless swaps between th

Dell T110 Server - older tech still doing the yards

The last time I was out in Coober Pedy, I saw a lot of Toyotas running around. Landcruisers mostly - a great vehicle and out in the Red Centre with some pretty harsh conditions, they were the vehicle of choice. Solid, reliable, amazingly well built. It's a bit like the older Dell servers still kicking around. To my case in point - the Dell T110 Server. These servers, brand new, with a Xeon Processor, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD were around $1400. We got several cheap, added RAM, disk and an OS and sold them to customers. The basic spec was pretty sound: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3430 @ 2.40GHz  4GB of RAM (maximum 16) Dell PERC S100 onboard RAID (fake RAID but still OK) space for 4 disks tower configuration  About 18 months ago I was given one of these servers by a grateful client after a particularly painful weekend migrating one server to another. After thinking about it for a bit, and knowing the S100 RAID card is Windows only (Linux won't see the arrays, jus