[Nottingham] VNC box in place of port replicator

[Duncan]

On 03/03/14 09:04, Jason Irwin wrote:
> On 20/02/14 17:05, Duncan wrote:
>>> They appear to be Clevo W740SU's. Oddly enough, PC Specialist doesn't
>>> seem to ship that variant. Schenker or Novatech might.
>> Brilliant!  That is the information I was missing.
>
> A word of warning - their batteries are terrible. Depending on the
> model, you'll be lucky to get 3 hours use on the battery.
>

I went for a Dell XPS 13 developer edition in the end.

The W740SU sounded good on paper but the reviews were
quite negative on the build quality.  I would have liked
a 15.6" screen (eg. Dell XPS 15) but that added too
much to the price.  I'm spoiled these days. Having had
a work provided MacBook air for the past couple of
years there is no way I can go back to a laptop with
spinning rust or noisy fans (during normal usage).

I also upgraded my ageing desktop with an SSD and a
discrete graphics card and now it flies like shit
off a shovel.  It has gone from > 30 seconds to boot
to "the time it takes the monitor to show a picture"
(which makes accessing the bios fun) and all the
pauses caused by software vs graphics memory contention
are gone too.

I've still got the VNC project on my list but it has
been bumped down in priority since a spare keyboard
and a 5m VGA cable and multiple inputs on the monitor
solved the problem well enough for now.


Have fun,
Duncan