Charles Profitt: Improving My Computing Experience

This Christmas was a wonderful time for improving my computing experience. Last October I purchased a Lenovo T530 direct from Lenovo. At the time I debated adding 16 GiB of ram and an SSD drive, but could only justify getting the ram. This Christmas my family got me several items that helped improve my computing experience including an SSD drive. The laptop is equipped with an Intel® Core™ i7-3720QM CPU. Below are all of the current upgrades:

• Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB)  DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Laptop  Memory (CMSX16GX3M2A1600C10) – I am very pleased with this upgrade. I got this originally because I knew I intended to run multiple virtual machines on the laptop and did not want to have an issue with running out of memory. The only issue I was having is I/O contention.
• Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB– This SSD has improved my boot time from 30.4 seconds to 13.5 seconds. Evolution which used to take seconds now closes instantly. This has also given me an extra drive to use allowing me to take care of the I/O issues I was having when running too many virtual machines.
• Inateck 2.5 Inch USB 3.0 External Case w/ UASP SATA III support – this little case works great. I tested it with an SSD and HDD and found the speeds to be much improved over my old USB 2.0 Seagate external drive. It is amazingly simple to replace the drive; though at this price buying an additional case is so inexpensive that might make more sense. It requires only a single USB connection for power and has an on/off switch on the case itself. This case works as well as the Thermaltake BlacX Duo 5G disk dock that I own. I had one drive that performed better for writes using the Thermaltake dock, but all other drives performed the same. I used to get 30 to 40 MB/sec with the old USB 2.0 drive and now between two USB 3.0 devices I am getting 110 to 130 MB/sec. Very Nice Improvement.

• Anker® Uspeed USB 3.0 7-Port Hub + 5V 2A Charging Port– I do not enjoy having to unplug multiple USB cords when packing up my laptop so I have always used a hub. I finally got to replace my tired Linksys USB 2.0 hub with a new USB 3.0 hub from Anker. I am very pleased with the performance of this hub because I saw no performance degradation when comparing a device attached directly to the computer vs attached to the hub. I tested using the Inateck enclosure with an SSD drive.
• Safco Products 38-Inch W Radius Front Desk Top Organizer– Yes, this is not a computer component, but having your books in easy reach always makes for a better computing experience. I can now easily organize all my Python, computer security and Linux systems administration books so they are all withing easy reach. This device took just 30 minutes to assemble and is well constructed.

With all these new components I am enjoying Ubuntu more than ever.