Goose Legs

Last year I went through 3 XPS 13's. I believe one had a faulty thermal sensor (It was reporting >95C on the CPU during idle, causing the CPU fan to skyrocket during any workload). The second one had 20 dead pixels, and the final one had a bad hinge. I ended up returning the final unit, but I do recall that all the systems had noticeable coil whine, and from my preliminary research is a widespread 'problem' with the computer.

The 6121 is a pretty popular modem, you shouldn't have any issues.

As an American who has family who lives in Canada, it'll never happen. I love Canada, and I make a conscious effort to visit at least twice a year, but whenever I cross the boarder to come back home...I'm home.

$109/month for the package ($125ish after taxes) for 150mbps down, 20mbps up, and the highest tier of TV with HBO, Showtime and Cinemax for four Tivos with Comcast in Oregon. Edit: I'd be happy to trade some of my download speed for more upload speed.

So long as the cabling in the house is physically connected to the CMTS, you can buy your own modem locally, call in, and have them provision the modem. You will only run into issues if there's a problem with the cabling, such as if it was physically disconnected. (Although these days that's rare, unless the previous tenants severed the cable and a new one needs to be run).

Yes....technically you can. First off, whatever task you are trying to accomplish would need to be multi-socketed, otherwise the traffic can't be split among the connections, and it will behave similar to a single threaded application on a multi-core CPU, and only use one connection. Also, you would want your internet connections to be of the same type, speed, and have very close latencies to each other. If one connection is significantly faster or slower than the other, you will run into issues with timing, packets arriving out of order, and general stability issues with file transfers and other real-time applications.

Yes, and very. I'm running an SB6183 for the Extreme 150 package (currently the fastest in our area, but a little birdy told me that 250mbps will be deployed in the next few months over here). The biggest advantage of having a modem capable of more channels is not necessarily the maximum theoretical speed, but having the additional channels allows the network to load balance your traffic to your modem. For instance, if four or five channels are being heavily used by your neighbors, being able to go onto others will give you more consistent speeds. (This is assuming your node isn't completely over subscribed, the additional channels are available in your area, and the server on the other side is capable of maxing out your connection. And also, this is Comcast, so this is also assuming they're not going to be major A-holes and artificially throttle you). As per my internet package, I'm supposed to get 150mbps down, 20mbps up. In my area with this modem on good quality RG6 cabling, I see about 185-188mbps down sustained, and 25-26mbps up, sustained.

This.

Get a new router, there is no reason a game should wolf down 60mbps of internet bandwidth, constantly.

At least 8, 16GB if you need to transcode.

What are your target devices? If your devices support direct play, you won't have any issues but if that server needs to transcode, you might want to get a beefier CPU otherwise you'll take a big quality hit.

Kinda reminded me of this scene.

I had a pair of 27" 1080p monitors and I will echo the thoughts of people who say it's too low of a DPI. I have pretty good eyesight, and based off of my experiences, I would say 1080p is perfect if your display is 23" or less. 1440p is perfect for 27" or less, and UHD is good for anything above 30". There are exceptions you can make, but I wouldn't use a smaller resolution for a larger screen based on those findings unless you're sitting several feet away.

I had a refurbished 1TB Seagate drive that vibrated more than some adult toys. I don't think it's necessarily a sign of failure, but it sure was imbalanced. My guess, some screws on the spindle motor were torqued more than others. Personally, I didn't end up trusting that drive since some other ones I had laying around barely vibrated at all, and that specific Seagate was ridiculously noisy in any environment I tried using it in.

I see what you did there... I'm at just shy of 105GB of FLACs. So, a fair bit.