Teclast F7 Plus Review – Comparison to Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 2

I take a look at the Teclast F7 Plus which I bought on a whim to see if a cheap laptop could compete with my similarly-valued X1 Carbon Gen 2 from 2014. Turns out it could not, except in battery life (spoilers).

I actually purchased the laptop about a year ago and started making a video about it, but the farked around without working on it in the interim. Hence, we are here now.

For some reason I did a full walk-through of the Teclast’s rather robust BIOS, which you can see here:

https://youtu.be/OEDxgZwiUgg

One-Netbook’s OneGX1 Pro – Didn’t Buy it for Gaming (with Teardown)

OneGX1 Pro - YouTube Cover Image 01 - v1 - P1010254

I’ll admit I was charmed by the full-sized specs of this diminutive laptop (or netbook, as you will), and I have a thing for tiny laptops in general. So I couldn’t resist it when Banggood offered it up to me in a full-on tracking cookie assault of marketing. (That being said, I purchased it from Amazon to avoid paying duties.) It’s a solidly built little machine, and a solid performer save for one thing: It’s not what I would consider to be a gaming computer. Though it is indeed sold as one, what with it’s somewhat-included side controllers and advertising to that effect. Sure, it can play some games just fine, but without some kind of even halfway-decent (even mobile-optimized) … Continue reading

Outlook / Exchange Error: Network Problems or the Microsoft Exchange Server Computer is Down for Maintenance

ms_exchange_angry_cry

There are tons of posts about this subject, but none of them offered the very simple solution that worked for me: Make sure the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant is running on the mailbox server. We had a catastrophic crash of a VM host, on which our Exchange 2013 server was running as a guest. Everything seemed to come back up just fine, and all Outlook users were back online with Exchange, except for two. One user was running Outlook 2016 like the rest of the org, but one was running Outlook 2007 (don’t ask). They seemed to have nothing in common, but they both were throwing errors that network problems were preventing communication with the Exchange server. I did all … Continue reading

Clone a Dynamic Disk to a New SSD in Windows 10

Clonezilla Vomits Feces onto Other Tools Because that's Classy

This is partially just for my own reference, so I don’t have to go down this rabbit hole again. (But I hope it helps you, too!) The Situation I wanted to upgrade the LITE-ON 256GB SSD in my trusty ol’ Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop to a snazzy new Samsung 960 EVO 2TB drive. I have a version of Acronis that came with a Crucial (or Kingston?) SSD, which has worked great in the past. The problem? There was a system reserved partition at the very end of the disk, and Acronis therefore would not proportionally scale the OS partition to fill the disk; It would only scale that system reserved partition. In a moment of errant stupidity, I said, “Ah-hah! … Continue reading

RAID HDD TCO Calculator (Total Cost of Ownership)

HDD RAID TCO Worksheet Sample

A while back I created a HDD TCO worksheet showing the relative costs of certain drives in no real context. This spreadsheet aims to calculate the total cost of ownership for a RAID array, which is a much more involved affair. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dM2vO08gmX3VwYyJtTE5D1Gu75TTU-nUW95j1_DVx8c/ That’s a read-only version, but you can easily make your own copy to play with: If you have a Google account and are logged in, you can just hit File -> Make a Copy.. to save it to your own Google Drive. If you hate Google sniffing into your private affairs, you can hit File -> Download As and grab a copy in the format of your choice. I hope I’ve provided enough of an explanation as to … Continue reading

ZeroFiller: Nearly Fill Up a Disk with Zeroes for Snapshot Backups

ZeroFiller - Some Source Code - Screenshot

ZeroFiller (for Windows!) This might be a relatively niche utility, but I figured I’d share it because it might help someone in the same situation. File Version Description ZeroFiller-v0.8-20171023.zip v0.8a2017-10-23 The ZeroFiller executable only (requires .NET 4.5.2) ZeroFiller-src-0.8a-20171023.zip v0.8a2017-10-23 The ZeroFiller source code (requires >= Visual Studio 2017, probably) Backups I run a lot of VMs and I’m a bit obsessed with backups. I do high-level backups (meaning files, DB data, configs, etc.), as well as low-level backups of the actual VM disk images. The raw virtual disks get snapshotted on the host system, then the snapshot’s raw data is backed up using dd, gzip, and rsync. It’s not fancy, and it basically grabs the machine in a crashed state … Continue reading

Enterprise Network Switches for the Home: Ramble feat HP Procurve 5406ZL

The HP Procurve 5406ZL and…

…a whole lot of other crap, vis a vis my opinions on used enterprise-grade networking hardware for the home (or small-ish business).

I purchased an HP Procurve 5406ZL on eBay mainly because I “need” 10GbE on my home network, which is almost recursive because it’s for editing 4K video, which I need for editing this video.

The bottom line for me is that you can’t beat the feature/price ratio when it comes to equipment like this. That is, if you can afford the resultant power bill.