Saturday, September 1, 2018

Pardon the Dust

Tragedy struck this past Monday. After returning home I discovered that my faithful PC gave up the ghost. The PSU had been giving me some problems (not powering on unless you flip the switch on the PSU itself) and now it seems that the hard drive has followed it into digital heaven. Tracking down the problem is difficult and might be futile. Living in the middle of nowhere means that I couldn't just pop into the  shop for various parts which left me without a computer for most of the week. I guess a 6 year lifespan has been a pretty good run.

The good news is that I've squirreled away funds for just such an occurrence and in sheer panic and desperation I ordered a gaming laptop to replace the recently departed desktop PC. I managed to pick up a Lenovo Legion Y520 at a pretty decent price (I think. The price jumped by R4000 after I ordered) and converting to a laptop should hopefully help with the frequent power outages we have here. (The power goes off and on rather frequently, which most likely hastened the HDD's demise.)

So behold my new wondrous piece of technology!



For those interested these are the specs:
Lenovo Legion Y520 15IKM Model 80YY
15.6" FHD IPS Screen
Intel Core i7-7700HQ, 2.8GHz CPU
NVIDIA Geforce GTX1060 6GB GPU
16GB RAM
1TB 5400rpm HDD
1 x USB 2.0 port (on left hand side. Somehow they neglect to tell you this)
2 x USB 3.0 ports (on right hand side)
1 x USB C port

I've been out of the PC market for so long that I haven't followed all the latest hardware developments so I'm not sure what constitutes good specs these days, but these seem decent. I might upgrade to an SSD later when my wallet has recovered somewhat.

Now the long process of getting everything up and running and back to my liking begins. Coming from Windows 7 it's quite a learning curve to get used to Windows 10 now. So, this long ramble is just to say that the blog might be quieter than usual for the next couple of weeks while I try to recover things.

One thing I've come to realise is that our digital lives lie scattered in breadcrumbs of forgotten passwords. I've had to do so many password resets...

Onward to more technologically advanced things! Normal programming should resume soon.