Goodbye Edythe-II

The inevitable has happened. Edythe-II decided to give up the ghost about a fortnight ago, and I was stuck in a strange position of not having a portable machine to get [some] things done.

I was, by no means, completely machine-less, since there's always Elysie-II to fall back on. But it is different---Elysie-II was built to be a gaming machine, and as a result, had much of the set up favouring that of playing games than actual working. Explained simply, it meant that the set up was more amenable to having wonderful visuals and large-ish text over the tiny text that I would use for ``work''-related manipulations.

The failure of Edythe-II came very suddenly. The night before, I suspended her and went to sleep, and by the next morning, it was no longer possible to wake her up. I tried various combinations of power/power button manipulations, but none of them were working. In the end, I had to go back to technical support because it is fast becoming apparent that there was a hardware issue that I had no chance of resolving on my own.

Later tests confirmed that it was a motherboard issue, and the price in replacing it was high enough that it didn't make any sense for me to do so when I can triple the amount and get a brand-new replacement with three more years of warranty (Edythe-II's warranty was just expired by 2 months, which led to the really crazy high price for the replacement).

So, what is Edythe-III?

She's a Fujitsu S937, Intel Core i7-7500U, 8GiB RAM (8GiB soldered, going to get a 16GiB RAM stick to max it up to 24GiB) with Intel HD Graphics 620. Her form factor is almost identical as that of Edythe-II, but with ``worse'' display (instead of 2560×1440, we're looking at 1920×1080), and ``better'' storage (Crucial 525GB SSD as primary storage as opposed to the original 1TB HDD---it was an upgrade that I decided to get because I realise that many things that I was doing had a lot of disk I/O, and so having an SSD is likely to improve the performance). Writing and compiling are the primary tasks that I do on the Edythes, so an SSD would make everything run much better. The original HDD is not tossed into the bin---it is going to live its life in the modular bay HDD kit to act as secondary storage for when I intend to sit down somewhere and stay plugged in (i.e. less need for the modular bay battery).

Thus, after three years of glorious Unifont use for the console, I'm back to using the Proggy series or even the Tom Thumb-esque font. I haven't actually managed to successfully convert that into a form that Windows can use, so I'm likely to be using Proggy (8×8) or some 5×7 font instead.

My biggest pet peeve is that I am literally stuck with Windows 10 with no reprieve. I did my best to reduce the amount of suck it could generate, but I have no idea just how much of it I managed to avoid through careful reading and adjusting of the underlying configuration settings. Classic Shell is a definite must, but even then it seems to act a little buggy with regard to the start menu.

Only time will tell.

And that's all I have to write about for now. It's really says something when the only times I have a ``proper'' blog entry is when something bad happens.