Dell refurbished sale - desktop, laptop, rugged laptop, etc

[papaof2]

computers.woot.com/plus/dell-desktops-laptops-and-monitors-3?ref=w_cnt_gw_dly_snb

ends midnite 30 July

I'm probably slobbering on the keyboard about the refurbished Alienware laptop ($1649.99) and the Latitude Rugged laptops ($790 to $980) and my frugal gene keeps saying "You can't type faster than the 12-year-old $40 Dell E6420 quad core laptop you're using."

Sometimes I hate that gene - but being able to say "Get double the fresh blueberries and strawberries when you buy groceries" makes up for it ;-)

[feralferret]

A quad core would be an improvement for me. My desktop computer is a dual core. The only laptop I've owned died almost 20 years ago.

[papaof2]

The Dell E6420 quad core i7 was a "naked" laptop: no hard drive, no drive carrier, no OS, no battery, no power supply; not mentioned was that the "x" key takes spells of not working and the left "mouse" button on the touch pad is "iffy" but my hands no longer work well with touch pads so I have a herd of Logitech M325 and M185 wireless mice (both optical but the M325 uses an IR LED, weighs a little more and feels better in my hand; M185 uses a red LED and works OK but doesn't have the same "feel"). The E6420 was $40 plus about $20 shipping. I had a battery, a 90 watt power supply and a bag of carriers for E6420 drives (only needed one when I ordered them, but the smallest offering was 3 so there were spares). I had ordered a 1TB WD SSD when newegg.com had them on sale so I had all the piece parts and just needed a key for Win 10 (about $15). I have maybe $150 - $160 total in the laptop. (Frugal, cheap, scrounge ;-)

The E6420 needs the 90 watt power supply because it has the add-on nVidia video card (512MB graphics ram) for enhanced graphics on the 1600x900 display. That's actually a boot rom decision as the machine runs fine on a 65 watt power supply - it just won't charge the battery faster than 3 watts with that supply. I've never used any of the graphics options except for the run-through in the nVidia quick test - but the YouTube videos look good ;-)

Several years ago I built a quad core, 3.x GHz, desktop with a 22" display just for tracking ancestry. If there is a hidden detail in an image (photo or document) I can get it up big enough to be seen ;-) I have thousands of scanned or downloaded electronic documents (census, military, etc.) and tens of thousands of pictures (digital photos and scanned paper pics). I started cataloging all those and I'm about 10,000 images into what's probably close to 100,000 images combined. My cost for building that PC was a lot less than anything equivalent being sold then or for the next couple of years and it even has two boot SSD's - one for XP and one for Win 10. There are some genealogy tools that do not work under Win 10 so I can swap drives and access all the ancient tools that do things as I want them done ;-)

I think genealogy became a life project when the first grand was born. What if there are questions about the family that no one else knows the answer to? There are now multiple electronic copies of all I've been able to put together. I doubt that I'll ever make a book of all of it but the genealogy software can handle lineage either to direct ancestors or the descendants of a specific person or for a specific number of generations up or down. There are lots of reports and charts and it can be used to write a book but I'm thinking very few would want a 10,000 page book ;-) If I had access to a laser or high end inkjet plotter, I could run off a 4 feet high by 30 feet long family tree with name, place, birth, marriage & death dates and digital copies of pictures back to some of the tintypes and daguerreotypes. I've never tried to keep track of the time I've spent tracing family trees but it's probably several thousand hours. It takes a while to put 10,000 people into one tree and 2,000 people into another tree. Some folks I thought I'd never find, such as my paternal great-great-grandfather. No one in my line had ANY information on him and his name was too common to try to trace online :-(

I'd about decided to write him off as a horse thief, murderer or in a bad marriage because at that point in time, moving 200 miles could mean you'd never see any of the people from the place you started. That's one group of family I found by a DNA search - a second cousin with my name but his line had kept up with the the old records and even had pictures. Getting that g-g-grandfather and his other descendants that line knew about filled in a lot of holes for me.

I've talked with a few older people, getting to my favorite aunt just a couple of years before her death. She had some great stories of what she and my father did when they were growing up and she still remembered street addresses from her childhood. Knowing where my mother grew up, I could see how the two could have met. Little bits that usually aren't really important in the "who married whom" part of genealogy, but they do help you know people you've never met.