ASUS ZenScreen MB16AC 15.6-Inch Full HD IPS Monitor is available on Amazon, B&H, and Newegg. This is not a paid promotion. This monitor was purchased bought online and used regularly for 6 weeks prior to publishing this article. When I took on a new job earlier this year, I knew full well that…
Working in hotels with your laptop can be a pain, sometimes literally. I mean really working, and producing content. Here's just some of the issues commonly noticed when traveling for work like I do: no secondary display, man do I miss having one way-too-high desktop to type comfortably on…
The Problem I recently had to turn in an old laptop that I sometimes used with my bootable 2.5" Samsung 850 EVO 2TB SSD. Uh oh, now I have a few weeks to wait for a new system, meanwhile, how do I get stuff done? Sure I had my superfast SuperServer Workstation that I sometimes use this SSD in,…
If you have a Dell Precision laptop with up to a 1TB Toshiba M.2 NVMe SSD inside, congratulations, you have quite a nice workstation! This "corporate" laptop is blessed with a 4K display, and that envy-inducing thin bezel. A close cousin of the popular and highly rated Dell XPS 15 that a…
My brother is an architect. Having the GPU grunt on his laptop has been an issue for years, usually at a great impact to battery life and budget. When his laptop needed service a few years back, I restored his latest daily laptop backup to a VM, and offered him temporary remote access to his…
Last year, I was pondering new ways to remotely surf the web securely, privately, from my home's IP address, even when far away from my home. The concern wasn't so much about my internet provider, Cox Communications, from knowing what I'm doing. It was more about securing in-the-clear…
What if you'd like to connect your Windows 8.1 laptop to four routers, each at factory defaults, doing the initial configuration, one router at a time. But each router is also a DHCP server, feeding your laptop with a 192.168.1.x address. If you put an ethernet switch or hub between your laptop and…
I have 2 Yoga 13 laptops in my extended family, one purchased in October 2012 at first release, and another in November 2012. Both have been pretty smooth sailing with Windows 8, although the orientation sensor has been oddly more problematic on one than the other, despite using the same drivers.…
My W520 laptop now has Windows 8.1 installed, which is running VMware Workstation 10 to run a VM of Windows 8.1 on an 8TB GPT C: drive, using just 8GB actual storage. Follow? Now that the RTM (Release To Manufacture) 8.1 code has been released to MSDN/TechNet quite by surprise yesterday, I've been…
Above photo courtesy of "The SSD Review" from the excellent article here. Excellent diagram below from here. When I got my ThinkPad W520 back in October 2011, I noticed that the mSATA form factor was limited to SATA2's 3Gbit/sec speeds, on that particular early mSATA implementation. The…
It's been a busy month, with a tough, manual migration from an old-school Windows 7 32 bit ThinkPad T61 laptop, to a very new touch-enabled Windows 8 64 bit Lenovo Yoga 13. Given the Yoga has no Ethernet port in its slim, essentially sealed SSD only design, backup and bare-metal restore testing…
Santa arrived a day early, with a Yoga joining our family of zillas today, ordered on Nov. 24, but arriving on Dec. 20, weeks ahead of the Jan 2013 expectations. Let's call it yZilla. It's really called a Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, which is really a convertible Ultrabook/tablet at 13.3" 1600x900 …
This shouldn't have been so difficult, but I'm afraid it was. A lot of trial and error. Cabling, BIOS settings, and drivers. But it works, and works well, if you get all the details just right. This article will help W520 owners that are blessed with a high-end graphics workstation-class laptop.…
A very pleasant retail experience with my family, back on Saturday July 7th, just weeks since the Grand Opening in Danbury, CT. In all honesty, I wasn't expecting too much, and it's an hour away from home, so I won't be going often, not until they build more locations anyway. I've seen Apple stores…
Here's a long standing thread on Lenovo's forum, with over 2,200 views and no real solutions: W520 will not wake from sleep 10-26-201108:31 AM wabisabi2004 I tinkered with this for far longer than I'd care to admit. Thinking it might be the RunCore mSATA 128GB SSD, I went back-and-forth with …
Lenovo ThinkPad USB 3.0 Dock 0A33970 is available on Amazon here. Pictured above is my temporary test rig, trying out my new video output options that go well beyond the 2 monitor-outputs at a time max on my previously used LenovoThinkPad Mini Dock Plus Series 3 433830U. You can see the Lenovo Thi…
The Lenovo ThinkPad USB 3.0 Dock 0A33970 is available on Amazon here. You may recall my saga of the major "turbo" boost I gave my stock ThinkPad W520 last October, using 2 8GB Kingston RAM kits, a 128GB RunCore mSATA SSD for my Windows 7 C: drive, and two 1TB Western Digital 1TB Scorpio …
The lovely Lenovo ThinkPad W520. All the details of what I crammed into this efficient Core i7 mini-beast. I managed to get 3 drives in, with 2.1TB of total capacity. And the 16GB of DDR3 RAM is running at full 1600 speed. The secret to all this was is the mSATA port, under the keyboard (see top r…
I'm very happy to have finally received my ThinkPad W520. Set original preload drive aside for a bit, to play with Windows 8 Developer Preview for a bit fun first, seen here: https://tinkertry.com/windows8onw520 Now back to getting this laptop ready for work. 1) Memory I needed to upgrade to 16GB, …
TinkerTry - PCs, EVs, home tech, efficiency and more, including virtualization. My opinions here, not my employer's.
Paul Braren, MCSE in 1998, VCP #2681 in 2005, vExpert 2014 to 2024, Veeam Vanguard Emeritus, 2015 to 2019.
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After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. So far, Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh looking a little better for 2024. More cores, but still just PCIe Gen4 and DDR4. Looking ahead, I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm. I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when Pat was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
Easily update VMware ESXi at TinkerTry.com/easy-update-to-latest-esxi
