PaintChips

Personally I switch between upgrading from a desktop to notebook so the processor gap doesn't become too big. In my student to early working years I did travel quite a bit so my desktop requirements resulted in keeping a DDR2 desktop for 8yrs--longest I ever kept a working desktop (every 4yrs was the average in my family) For a desktop I went from an Athlon 64(2004-2008) then a Core 2 Quad Q6600 built in early 2008 until May of 2016, that system went through four GPU upgrades, new fans and new HDDs. Only reason I built a Sky Lake machine was due to Win7 support, my C2Q was still running Vista/Win8.1 and wasting my spare Win7 license on old hardware would be stupid. For the most part I can deal with dual-booting if Win10 stupidity strikes. On the notebook side I used a 12" PowerBook G4 system until moving to a MacBook Pro in 2010, when my student era Thinkpad T61 abruptly suffered the famous Quadro 140M failure(GeForce 8-series family flaw) I had to settle with a Thinkpad T430 which I really didn't like but I needed a "work specific" system to keep using OneNote(this was before OneNote for OS X happened). I bought a Chromebook to fill in the gap of a long battery yet compact system--if I carry a Chomebook+MacBook Pro I could squeeze two days of mobility between charges which is perfect for long travels. (sadly since Lenovo ditched some of the impressive extra battery options post T/W_30 era, it leaves too much of a gap in my needs--carrying extra batteries or solar panel+battery pack would be too much weight or worry about lithium ion battery restrictions when flying) For "work" I finally retired a pair of 2010 Westmere era Xeon servers with modern Xeons, they were decommissioned a month ago but haven't been pulled off the rack yet--planning to turn the CPUs into keychains. Why were the servers a big deal for me? When I was an undergrad I co-founded a startup which was bought out, since I had a working community media site it created a loophole in my non-compete contract so I kept my servers running with the intent of upgrading/replacing them as necessary--was amazed I never had a crippling failure in the entire usage life.

Besides rendering, plenty of us enjoy looking forward to Intel finally having a reason to compete in the workstation & server market. Back in the Core 2 Duo vs Core 2 Quad, many people would bash the Quad owners for settling for less speed in exchange for extra cores but as soon as Windows 7 launched you saw multi-core performance increase--Win8 & now Win10 you've seen more developers put extra effort into optimized core usage due to Broadwell-E marketshare. For mainstream users a common hell is most creative software(Pro Tools, Ableton, etc) only scale up to 6-8 cores--it took nearly forever for Avid to optimize for dual-Xeons--in some studio environments you have an Adobe vs Apple situations, for example FCX has some slight benefits on the encoding optimization side but Adobe leverages render servers which is great for small to large-sized businesses vs independent filmmakers. Work wise I'm looking forward to see how the Core i9 vs Xeon E5 market handles this kind of curve ball, I use servers so this kind of shake up will influence any pending equipment purchases.

I'd say it depends upon many factors, if there is tons of physical work(loading multiple servers into a rack), adjusting a workspace with re-done networking and then getting stuck in a horrible humid subway tunnel I'll either find myself napping all the way home or crash onto the sofa Normal work day I'll sleep at 10am and wake up at 3pm. I used to be the early bird but public transit delays like subway or light rail having breakdowns between 6am to 9am made life extremely stressful. Upside to my work life I can enjoy Coast To Coast AM again

Going by Google photos of various builds of others you could try something like cutting a thin rubber gasket type material and use it on the mounting points which contact with metal. Vibration wise once you go above two platters there is always risk of increased case noise. Silent PC Review has been a useful resource in my builds, sometimes you can "force" a metal case to be silent but other times going back to the drawing board is a painful/costly step.

More platters= extra vibration, often you can use rubber washers or static resistant foam to reduce potential case amplified noise but a small case is risky. (I mostly use 1TB drives in ITX builds as a single platter is dead silent) Depending upon your usage partitioning for the faster area is do-able with the WD Blue but cost to performance wise a 7200 RPM drive with a 5yr warranty is a sway factor for some buyers. If you plan to use it for actual work or require bloated games to run faster you'll have to accept the WD Black noise(louder spin up and more audible clicking). Most people only notice 7200 RPM drive noise if their case/desk doesn't dampen the vibration, my old case made a WD Black sound noiser than a Seagate Barracuda XT for some odd reason but moving to another case made the multi-drive array near silent(I have 4 drives--1 drive is for graphic design/video scratch storage duty). Personally I wouldn't touch WD Blue drives, shorter warranty is hard to justify that price difference and as with anything HDD you'll slowly wish you had a faster HDD when migrating to a larger drive down the road.

Can't say I'm surprised at the shrinkage. Back when Steve Jobs was alive they had a decent price ratio with business class PCs from Dell or Lenovo... Tim Cook more or less gutted the line up for pure profit margins while the rest of the PC market suffered from Win8 being a flop with negative to flat purchases of new systems to replace older systems. Take a look back when Apple had a base model iMac which you could upgrade the RAM or CTO a larger HDD, that model was replaced by a more expensive iMac with a MacBook Air guts with soldered RAM which forced upsells if you wanted user-upgradable RAM. Mac minis faced the same dumbing down, you could get a quad-core i7 and the new revision ditched it for dual-cores with soldered RAM. I was in the market for a new desktop Mac last year, Apple didn't refresh the Mac Pro or Mac mini so I built four Skylake PCs and transitioned part of my workflow to Linux ...Apple has been ignoring the creative market far too long, desktop OS leaning Macs aren't part of their long-term strategy and iOS is their cash cow. I think within 3yrs you'll see Apple do something much crazier than the USB-C MBP, you might see them take advantage of their PA Semi development team to build a desktop grade ARM processor for maximum liberation from Intel and total hardware+software lock-in(Sun Microsystems/Oracle style) /Only use OS X mainly for Final Cut Pro and Logic X, I just hate Adobe and Avid to the point I'd rather keep a dedicated Mac for those tasks

Windows after Vista suffers less breakage for long term usage, WinXP in my experience gets shaky if there had been many driver and software changes--my old Athlon 64 is still running the same install of WinXP since 2004, however I did make an image backup for quicker restore may it be software/hardware or HDD failure. Still have a dual-booting G3 Mac with a OS 8.6 partition which was upgraded to 9 in 2000 and then OS X(10.0 upgraded to 10.1 & later 10.3) on another partition.

6 hours, spent almost a week troubleshooting the work side of my home network(late Dec) and decided it was time to just rip everything out to replace everything with CAT6+new gear. Turns out I was right, several old CAT5e cables were crumbling and one of my switches was failing so it was worth it in the end.

In my area Best Buy never stocks GPUs higher than a GTX 1060 SuperClocked, could be the store is just inflating prices of the 1050 because they can't keep anything else in-stock or someone in the computer area wants to use sticker shock to push walk-in customers into buying a new iBuyPower or Dell XPS desktop instead. Several BBs in my area in the past would do questionable price hikes so customers would have to do in-store pickup to get the lowest price, if I recall BB tries to use management performance scheme to boost in-store pickup for low-margin items vs upsell for normal walk-in retail shoppers. OfficeMax/OfficeDepot pulled this scheme with printer deals, certain stores would reserve x-number of stock at one price so they could sell computers+printer and remaining stock were in-store pickup only. I avoid retail stores as much as possible.

I'm starting to refuse to use Microsoft software for "work" after the recent blunder with Windows 10, Microsoft managed to break the DHCP stack which lead to busted networking unless you manually admin-run Command Prompt to perform a release+renew at each boot. How could a stupid mistake like that slip through Insider Builds and their own so-called quality labs? /facepalm (Microsoft claims to have fixed the busted DHCP issue but it still re-occurs from sleep & hibernation) Adobe was the first company I refused to do business with, the hack several years ago resulted in my Adobe account+licenses to CS2, CS3 & CS4 to disappear--someone hijacked the account and Adobe has been unhelpful even though I submitted faxes of receipts. (two of my serial numbers got blacklisted as the hacker shared the account info) (for most tasks I rely upon Apple's Final Cut Pro and Corel's Paintshop Pro on Win8.1 if I need layering+CMYK support--desktop publishing I use Quark) Adobe could have kept me as a customer via Creative Cloud but their customer service is run by a bunch of clowns after that breach so they're avoided at all cost

Not a fan of Maruchan cups as their veggies never re-hydrate properly so you're chewing on a half-eatable veggie or chunk of mystery filler. Cup is just meh as some kinds are just gross or others are more salty. There are plenty of *real* great stuff out there if you're looking for a good filling & tasty cup/bowl of soup but the cost will be closer to $1-1.50. I'll have to lean towards @Slick review on dorm stuff that Nongshim is really the best tasting instant noodle and they also sell cup & bowl versions of most flavours. When it comes to instant noodle/soups I'd only recommend Indomie & Nongshim.

Depending upon your needs you could use a cheap Intel Celeron or Pentium J-series embedded ITX solution if you want 2-4 SATA ports for a multi-bay NAS.

It depends upon your goal or expectation of making money online, people who purely aim at cold hard cash will suffer burn out vs enjoyment from it. Microsoft Rewards(formerly known as Bing Rewards), you get paid to search with Bing with Edge & your mobile device. There is also points to earn if you buy anything from Microsoft's Store which is useful at times. (buying a Raspberry Pi 3 is slightly cheaper if bought during a free case promo) Surveys, Amazon mturk, etc are time consuming but the payout can be worthwhile. Sites which give 5-12% cash back in the form of points from using their affiliate link while shopping is another option, I've done this for all my shopping and it pays off----for the most part I don't always find Amazon being cheaper unless I need an item shipped faster. (on average Amazon's Prime Shipping has been late by an extra day or two and at that point I can't justify buying everything from them, if you want my business you'll need to earn it) Crypto-coin is a mixed bag for mining as the exchange rates are hard to predict unless you monitor the trend long enough to know when to sell or exchange to said currency. Some of the alt-coins aren't worth mining unless you have hardware optimized for that kind of mining and difficulty keeps rising so you're still reinvesting money into hardware to get the same mining results in some cases. Try working on community projects with a donation option, you'd be amazed small "improvements/mods" to games, opensource and whatnot can be worth your time. Write How-To guides as a blog then also sell them as a Kindle eBook on Amazon so people who loved the blog edition can support your work. Write reviews of products, on Amazon you can earn a Vine account which allows you to get stuff for free to review and keep... typically I sell some of the stuff I no longer need which helps pay the bills. DIY projects which you sell the item you've been working on, in the past I did this via Twitch on a separate account and it was amazing "DIY" streams are popular. Twitch streaming can be profitable if you're willing to have viewer interaction. Post videos onto YouTube, just like Twitch it can be profitable if your channel becomes popular--my friend shares a YT because a single person channel is hard to please a wider audience and the variety of projects/topics has helped grow the subscriber base. I've made money and got a lifetime unlimited licensing of a program that I used for work, the developer loved my templates so much they became "bundled" with the stock program and some of the newer templates were rolled into major upgrades. The program wasn't well known back in the mid-2000s, I liked their desktop publishing product so much that I gave away templates and the developer was impressed by community support.

I originally found out about Linus via Linus Cat Tips, my cat purrfectly uses the toilet like a human

Back in early 2013 I wasn't really shopping for a new notebook but I stumbled upon a B-stock(outer shipping box damaged) 15" MacBook Pro for $1508 and it was still factory sealed so I'm thinking a worker knocked it off a pallet so Amazon wrote it off as damaged stock. It was the only time I made an Apple impulse purchase when my existing Mac wasn't due for replacement. (the 15" MBP became my work notebook for tax reasons so my then Thinkpad T420 was retired) Same time as the MBP purchase I bought 16GB(2 x 8GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SODIMM for $58 before memory prices doubled. Still using it as my mobile workstation even though the GeForce 650M is showing its age. (hardware wise I'll be stuck moving to a Dell Precision notebook)