Here’s hoping that everyone had a Merry Christmas (or whichever holiday you celebrate!) and wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023!
Since my last post back in mid-October, I had my thoughts on what my next upgrade(s) would be – and I changed my mind. The DL360G Gen8 is, frankly, too noisy. It is great for testing things out, but with hybrid work it is a distraction at best and maddenly irritation at worst. Thus, buying the UniFi Aggregation Switch would serve no purpose – for now.
The other driving factor is that my “work” laptop, an old Lenovo Y50-70, started getting far too flaky. I think that there may be some cold solder joints but I am not set up to fix them. And it is getting old. I first thought that all the the Ubuntu 22.10 upgrade had gone sideways. There had been a lot of upgrades from Ubuntu 16.04 and I don’t limit myself to the LTS releases. When I went to do a fresh 22.10 install and the install would fail with not being able to find the Samsung Evo 850 SSD. I put the SSD in the MiniG3 and the Evo worked fine. The Samsung SSD from the MiniG3 showed the same issues in the Y50-70. After valiant service, I decided that the Y50 had to be put out to pasture.
I decided to replace it with my IdeaPad L340 (my now-old gaming laptop) with a minimal Windows 11 install – jury’s still out on Windows 11, but it seems to be incrementally improving; maybe Windows 12 will fix it 🙂 – for some specific Windows things. Most of the time it will be booted in the Ubuntu.
Of course, that meant the L340 needed a replacement. The Black Friday/Cyber Monday week sales were on and I decided on a Lenovo Legion 5 AMD. It is running an AMD Ryzen 5 6600H, RTX3060, 16GB DDR5 dual-channel RAM and a 512GB PCIe Gen4 SSD. This is my first AMD system in, what?, 30 years. My last one was an AM386-DX40. Besides, my son had decided he wanted to build his own gaming rig using the Ryzen 5 6600 🙂 It is a nice laptop – runs quick, battery life for web browsing, YouTube is about 4-5 hours (with a 80% “full” using Lenovo’s battery conservation).
What’s next? Not sure yet. I’m still waiting for ArmA 4…
