Scraptop

This thing has never been right and now it's DONE.

I have two good sized bids in progress and a third that might work, assuming people can get themselves arranged in an acceptable fashion. This Dell Precision 7730 has never been quite right, today when I plugged an external drive into a USB port it froze, and now it won’t start at all. I’ve horsed around with it enough to convince myself that it is well and truly dead. Flawless timing.

I did NOT need this with three big jobs coming at me. Taking stock of the situation what I have here is …

• four 16GB DIMMs

• 1TB Toshiba NVMe drive

• good battery, 240 watt charger

• backlit keyboard that will fit Precision 77x0

• A 1920x1080 display

The Precision 7730 has a Xeon E-2176M and an Nvidia P2400 - roughly equal to the GTX 1060 in my old desktop. The 7740 has an E-2276M and an RTX4000. The processor is only infinitesimally faster, but the video card is an enormous upgrade, similar to the RTX 4080. This 16GB GPU would cost about $1,000 for my workstation, or I can get it in the laptop I need for just $700.

The next system will come with a seller’s guarantee and I’m going to add three years of SquareTrade to it.

The bids situation is frustrating. All three of them need more on-net computing power and storage than I have now, but everybody seems to be horsing around waiting till end of the quarter or something. I know what’s going to happen - all three go at once and I get to spend 72 hours straight in a chilly data center installing new stuff while the sound of 10,000 fans makes me feel like a bug inside a Shopvac.

But I guess being busy beats the heck out of the alternative …