Friday, September 30, 2016

Celebrating Some Depreciated Tech

Early this year I purchased an ASUS gaming laptop for development and I love it.  16 Gigs of RAM, I popped in a mk2 SSD, and the thing smokes.  But this post isn't about that.  This post is about my stall worth HP Pavilion dv6-6c35dx laptop that served me well for about three years.


I loved this laptop.  I probably had it up and running for 14 hours a day most of the time and it didn't give me any problems.  It had some gaming capability with the built in Radeon graphics card that did fine at low and sometimes medium settings playing all but the most latest games.  After about a year I put in a Samsung 840 EVO SSD and the thing really hummed.  Zero noise and fast boot times.  The six gigs of memory was just enough so I could comfortably develop on it, running virtual machines with 4 gigs of memory out of the six allocated to a particular VM.

I know HP laptops are hit and miss.  I supported HP laptops at a huge corporate cube farm early in my career and some of the models HP put out where just horrible.  I probably wouldn't have bought this one at all but dumped a cup of coffee on my Toshiba laptop and it fried. I needed a laptop for work now and at the time I liked the specs and the price of this HP so I took a risk and that little A8 Pavilion ended up being a great work horse.

Spec wise it was nothing that great, but for what I wanted to do with it it seemed perfect.  Light to medium gaming, opened applications and booted up lighting fast due to the later added SSD, quiet, never over-heated.  I miss it.

With Windows 10 coming out and Visual Studio 2015 on the way I had been debating getting a new laptop for a long time but this Pavilion just seemed to keep handling everything I could throw at it so I held off for awhile.  One of my dogs helped me take the plunge though, as it got it's tale caught in the power cord and yanked my poor Pavilion (which I had dropped and punished numerous times before without every having any problems) onto the floor and munched the monitor or the graphics card.  That was enough to in my mind justify buying a new machine.

I always felt kind of guilt though, like I had cheated.  I could still plug in my Pavilion into my TV and use it to watch internet moves through (graphics worked ok for external monitors so it probably was the display).  But tonight I decided to gut for parts my little Pavilion so it will be no more.

Work gave me a hand me down laptop and told me to use it last year so I have been.  Compared to my Pavilion and my ASUS the thing was a dog (incidentally it is a high-end HP work station laptop).  Today I couldn't stand how slow my work laptop was running so I yanked the Samsung SSD out of my Pavilion, cloned my work hard drive to it, and popped the SSD into my work computer.  Now my work computer is tolerable.  It felt like I was ripping out the soul of my little Pavilion though.

So there it is.  I was really blessed at purchasing that laptop at the time for under 600 and having it serve me so well.  I didn't research the purchase and bought it at Best Buy, usually two ingredients for a recipe for disaster, but I lucked out. I see you can buy these for under 200 bucks now, and most coming with an SSD.  For that price this laptop is still a good value, but my ASUS with all it's great specs is more of what I need now.

So I raise a glass and toast a great piece of technology that served me well: The HP Pavilion dv6-6c35dx.  I will probably yank the memory out of it tomorrow and toss it into the garbage as it isn't cost effective to try to fix the monitor.  You will be missed.