August 12, 2020 at 6:02 pm
too bad you said reasonable cost, but it makes me curious as to what the cost would be for an Azure Virtual Desktop compared to an Azure virtual system. I am under the impression that those are separate and distinct options in Azure, but now I'm curious enough to go do some research.
Thanks.
August 12, 2020 at 6:25 pm
I have an HP Z Book for work and a second 24" monitor. It's a pretty beefy laptop, i7 32GB 2 SSDs about 3 years old at this point but still gets the job done. But I still prefer a desktop. I've built my own since the 80s and I like being able to hand pick what goes into it. My home computer is a beast that I use for recording studio work with Pro Tools and also Adobe Lightroom for photography. And there's also tinkering with VMs and such. I love all the storage that I can add. Boot disk is a 512GB M.2, a 1TB SSD for storing recording sessions, 2 5TB drives for other media (I store all my CDs and hi-res audio downloads as lossless FLAC files) and VMs to play with. I guess I just like to be able to upgrade components whenever the need arises and I've never liked being locked into what a laptop came with. I also have a personal laptop that I bought used from work for the princely sum of $1. It serves for having something portable when I need it but it's not a machine that makes you happy to work on it.
Now, I'd love to play around with a MacBook Pro but I've never been able to justify paying the "Apple Tax" in order to buy a beefy one. The desktop I built for home and recording use cost me less than a 15" MacBook would have.
August 12, 2020 at 11:23 pm
After decades of building my own personal desktop machines, last year I bought my first new personal laptop. It's far more powerful than the desktop it replaced, has just as much memory, and 50% more drive space. It and my work laptop both plug into a KVM switch so they can share the dual monitors and full size keyboards. If the on board storage isn't enough for some reason, I have 10TB of mirrored NAS space on the home network. I was concerned about the inability to upgrade a laptop like I could a desktop until I took a hard look at my history. I realized that over the years I had almost never actually done any internal upgrades to my desktop other than adding memory (which can be done on a laptop too). I'd thought about upgrading graphics cards at times, but by the time I would get serious about it the technology had marched on and the motherboard graphics port was outdated. So I'd either drop the idea or end up replacing the motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, and hard drives (since it was probably time for an OS upgrade anyway). I wasn't doing a component upgrade, I was buying a new system to put in an old box. Nothing about having a desktop I miss there.
Also last year I ditched the work desktop. Got tired of trying to keep files in sync between the work desktop and laptop. Since I needed a laptop to VPN in on work from home days and to carry to meetings, there wasn't much point in a desktop there either.
August 13, 2020 at 2:03 pm
Technologies like OneDrive make it super easy to just grab whichever machine makes sense in the moment. At home I have a stable office and run from a HP Z4 Mini workstation. For the road I have a small-form-factor laptop that fits nicely on an airline tray table.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]Jonathan Gennick
http://Gennick.com
Brighten the corner, where you are[/font]
August 13, 2020 at 2:44 pm
For the road I have a small-form-factor laptop that fits nicely on an airline tray table.
Yeah, until the yahoo in the seat in front of you decides to lean back all the way! 😀
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sqlrv
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August 13, 2020 at 2:51 pm
Yeah, until the yahoo in the seat in front of you decides to lean back all the way! 😀
I know, right? I usually pay the extra out of my own pocket for added legroom, in part for that very reason. I actually like that most airlines have that option these days. Or at least, they did have, because I haven't flown since BC - Before Covid.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]Jonathan Gennick
http://Gennick.com
Brighten the corner, where you are[/font]
August 13, 2020 at 3:33 pm
For the road I have a small-form-factor laptop that fits nicely on an airline tray table.
That's what I should've done. My Asus laptop with a 17" screen weighs like 12lbs and is big.
Aus dem Paradies, das Cantor uns geschaffen, soll uns niemand vertreiben können
August 13, 2020 at 4:28 pm
Jonathan Gennick wrote:For the road I have a small-form-factor laptop that fits nicely on an airline tray table.
Yeah, until the yahoo in the seat in front of you decides to lean back all the way! 😀
Heh... I'm that "yahoo". I like to relax when flying. The last thing in the world I want to do when flying is work on a laptop. If someone else wants to, they should plan on such a thing happening and have a laptop sized to do so. 😀
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.
August 13, 2020 at 5:19 pm
Heh... I'm that "yahoo". I like to relax when flying. The last thing in the world I want to do when flying is work on a laptop. If someone else wants to, they should plan on such a thing happening and have a laptop sized to do so. 😀
It's fair enough to lean back. The seats are designed to work that way. That's my view on the issue, even when it's inconvenient to me to hold it. My solution as I mentioned has been to just pay for the extra-legroom seats.
Sometimes I also just relax. Depends on my energy level and my mood. Sometimes I can crank out an amazing amount of work, and other times I will pop in the earbuds and queue up an Audible book and just close my eyes and drift off.
[font="Comic Sans MS"]Jonathan Gennick
http://Gennick.com
Brighten the corner, where you are[/font]
August 13, 2020 at 5:44 pm
Our company used to supply desktop machines but three years ago they switched over to supplying laptops instead. Easier to ship across the country I guess. Currently using a Dell Latitude E5470. It wasn't bad when I first got it but now its a piece of garbage. Came with a HDD instead of an SDD so its really slow on boot up. Pretty sluggish will all the security and VPN software required by corporate IT. Will be getting a replacement soon with SSD. Can't wait for that to arrive.
Also have a personal laptop hooked up to a big screen TV for entertainment purposes. Better fit that a desktop machine, takes up less space in the entertainment center. Wireless keyboard / touchpad makes it easy to use from the couch. However for gaming purposes its a desktop machine all the way.
August 17, 2020 at 1:21 pm
I have a wireless video adapter I use as well to get movies to the living room TV now that we've removed satellite service from it, and the Wii is too old to handle modern netflix/AMZN.
August 18, 2020 at 11:49 pm
I have previously worked from Home for over 4 years before Covid19. I was given a laptop, 2 screens and a docking station. In my previous job, I had the same setup with a desktop. I haven't kept up with the desktop performance, but I imagine that you can get a better performing PC for cheaper than the comparative price of equivalent laptop. That being said, my current home laptop is a dell, purchased for home use. At the time of purchase, the same Laptop on the Business side, was about $500.00 more. The first thing I noticed is that I had bought a 1 TB drive. What I got was a 100 GB Solid State C Drive, and a 1 TB D Drive. Having never been concerned about my PC architecture, I had to get creative. Over the last several months I have installed a full developer version of MSSql. I also uninstalled all the junk thay comes with a home version of Dell. I installed a light version of Visual Studio with SQL tools and Some other programs. I have the MS server set to run SSIS, SSRS and SSAS. I also took a course on Coursera. I have installed a PostGRE server, MySQL and I have Oracle running in a container. I also have some other containers with SQL loaded on both windows and Linux. I installed Pentaho and MicroStrategy Desktop and several other programs. I had to change some settings, so that I can turn services on and off as I need them, but I find that the laptop is a great development tool. You can create a partition, download a sample of data and create your workflows and designs. If you have VMware or Docker Pro, you can seamlessly move your work to a production server or the cloud without any adjustments. Also, your laptop is portable and you can take notes in meetings, or record meeting conversations. Now that solid state drive prices are lower, I was thinking of buying an external drive and creating full oracle installs with docker. My next adventure will probably involve Tableau. The only drawback to the laptop that I find, is the limit on RAM and number of processor cores. To go big on a laptop can be quite expensive, but as I was saying, this is my Home PC. In my last job, I sent specs to IT purchasing. and we met in the middle after a discussion with several IT Managers. Another thing about those meetings, was I was able to convince them to up the overall specs on development PC's
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