Photos Latest Purchases Thread: v2.0

100 S2 Snakebite screws and driver.

 

asus gtx 660 for £32 score

 

5 DVDs for a £5

Bourne Legacy
Suckerpunch
Safehouse
Battleship
Muppet's Christmas Carol

 

Lumia 640 Dual SIM. Because i need a phone for that extra SIM card so mom can call me for free (well, 13 cents per call of any length, but that is nearly the same). And it gives me an extra year of Office 365 Personal if i did read it correctly.

 

May not look like much, but to me it's a big piece of my grand scheme for the family farm here in Ireland. I'm now the herd keeper for our deer and I'm doing my best to get things running a bit better (we're hobby farmers, constructed treatment wetlands are our bread and butter).

Delighted with it for only €400.

 

Its so shiny!

 

Loving it so far, so much better than my old phone.

 

Er... what is it?

 

Looks like a sickle mower...So you can then make silage.. fodder animals..

I'll get my coat.

 

Just for my car. Dyson V6 animal

 

It's a grass topper which I am using to mow the larger fields and accessible areas on the farm, in an attempt to keep thistles, nettles and bracken (ferns) at bay so as to increase the amount of grass growth.

For the last 26+ years that we've been here, fighting those things listed along with Gorse, has been an on-going struggle. Spraying is effective, but extremely expensive and awkward. As a child, I used to go out for weeks on end with slash hooks trying to keep it under control, as a teenager I used a strimmer with a heavy duty blade. Now, doing a single field, which would have taken me 6 hours by hand, is done in an hour

As I said, it may not mean much to others, but to me it's a big deal.

 

SM951 512gb for main rig, should slip into my ITX Impact setup very nicely, finally it has dropped to a price that I though was in my favour (£240) and just in time for Windows 10.

 

- Samsung Galaxy S6 32GB for the missus (black)
- Samsung Galaxy S6 edge 64GB for myself (emerald green)

I just can't stop touching it ... mmmm, shiny!

 

An HP Pro x2 612. No so much a purchase as an acquisition. We’ve been assigned 7 of these and 10 15” ProBooks 450 G2’s by the IT contract holder in work as new staff machines. A comical figure since we have 28 teaching staff and another 5 who work from a laptop all day, including myself, but the Departent of Education only had so much to spend on the 1200 schools and we were given 80% of the total number of old machines we had, which was 24... therefore 17.

All 17 devices are base models running our managed network standard W7 Enterprise x64. The Pro x2’s have 4GB RAM, 1.5GHz i3 CPUs, 256GB SSDs and the basic 1366x768 12.5” screen plus the usual webcams, card readers, wired LAN through the backlit power keyboard, USB3 and DisplayPort with no bells and whistles like biometric scanner, 4G modem (though the micro SIM slot is still present on the tablet element) or VPro support.

The 450 G2’s are as similar as possible in spec to the x2 612’s with 4GB of RAM, the same basic 1.5GHz i3 CPUs, 500GB mechanical hard disks, 15.6” 1366x768 display and no bells or whistles like biometric reader, WWAN modem, backlit keyboard etc.

I can take one of either and whatever I choose will be replacing my woefully plastic and cheap Dell Vostro 2520; the only thing that had going for it was an anti-glare matte screen because I really don’t like glossy screens on laptops, which both the new HP machines have! The Vostro is a slow, cheap heap of crap though, so I’ll rebuild it and throw it back into the “spare machines” pool along with the rest of them to be slowly, systematically destroyed at the hands of teachers, classroom assistants and primary school pupils. I say “spare machines” because we don’t actually have any spare machines, we’re very under equipped for a school which is growing by about 50 pupils per year and fast approaching 500 enrolled by September 2016.

I’m a little torn between taking one of the Pro x2 machines or a ProBook which I could upgrade with some drop-ins. On one hand, the Pro x2 is a nice machine straight out of the box. I can’t see myself using the tablet element much (as far as hybrid laptops/tablets go it doesn’t really hold a candle to the Surface Pro 3) but who knows, in time I might grow to like it and find uses for it around school. The backlit keyboard is a plus, as I often work in a low lit room with my laptop screen brightness turned down at night. I’ve only been using it for a day; and I am actually using this one, I hardly ever used the Vostro in the 14 months I’ve had it… but I already find myself missing the trackpoint of my own ThinkPad X230, as well as the far superior keyboard. The x2 Pro keys have terribly low travel with little tactile feeadback, which I am finding it very hard to type this on!

The caveat of this size of machine is no DVD-RW drive plus the smaller, noticeably duller screen in comparison to the ProBook. I’m used to the lack of optical drive and smaller screen with the X230 though and a smaller, more portable laptop is more suited to me, so at the moment I’m still leaning towards keeping the hybrid instead of having to install 8GB of RAM and an SSD in the ProBook to bring it up to the same standard. I have until September to decide because I won’t be issuing them to the lucky 16 staff until then anyway.

 

Just got the word, its shipping out to me now

 

Needed some new toiletries.

Also, on their way to me:
- D-Link DIR-868L dual band wifi router.
- D-Link DGS-108 8-port Gigabit router.
- 50 meters of Cat6 network cable.
- 50x RJ45 connectors
- LSA punchdown tool
- crimping plier
- Cat6 wall socket
- Microsoft Wedge keyboard

Guess who is updating his home network?

 

A Thornbridge Brewery polo shirt which I picked up after a tour of the brewery.

 

That's a good price. Mind telling where you got it from?

Edit: just seen its from OCUK.

 

Richard Adams - Shardik



Anthony Horowitz - Moriarty