Z3R0 CHANC3

Personally, I think the warranty is fine, and I'm sure if something happened that was borderline-if I asked them nicely I know they'd take care of it, as long as I haven't been intentionally misusing it. Say, loading it with 200lbs (91kg if you care) of bricks and complaining because a sharp brick corner cut into the fabric-that's just unreasonable. My only issue with the warranty, and it doesn't matter in the slightest other than the way it's worded, "Damage caused by rips, cuts, or tears;". Rips, cuts, and tears aren't CAUSING damage, they ARE damage. And frankly, the preceding sentence should cover that, or be reworded to say "damage caused by misuse, abuse, or by accident or negligence, including rips, cuts, or tears". And US English anyway, wouldn't say "damages", just "damage", for what it's worth. I missed the drama, and when I found out about the T-shirt I actually thought it was self deprecating. Whatever, it's not a big deal to me, but people taking things personally or feeling that a personal concern is being laughed at does require some thoughtfulness with a response.

Well after some time has passed, I can say that I'm very happy with this machine. Somehow dbrand doesn't have "enough demand" to make skins for this one. I ordered one from the early 2020 version right after buying the laptop, as I understand the chassis is identical. Not sure why it took them a week to respond to my compatibility question.

Makes sense. I wanted the Xe graphics and there's not a lot to choose from. Plus I get a nice discount from Dell, which makes it cheaper.

Well that's some good news, then. I don't pay a lot of attention to Apple. The last Macbook I really liked was the 17" Macbook Pro (although the ones I used had thermal issues). Yeah the Apple storage/memory premium is garbage, but hey, if you want to play with Mac you gotta pay the Apple tax. hahaha I just got the new XPS 13 today, seems pretty nice and perhaps an alternative to what you're looking at, but not great if you are considering doing dev for Apple software/apps. It was $100 to double the memory from 8 to 16, still pricey, especially compared to an 8GB desktop stick.

So far it's good news. The BIOS update apparently addressed the power/cooling plans and I've been running it about and hour and a half comfortably.

Buying a $500 PC is going to really give you a marginal upgrade. HOWEVER, since that's the course it looks like you're stuck on.... Make sure a machine with 8GB of RAM is in single channel, so you can upgrade to 16GB dual channel when you save up money for that. Try to find one with an NVME drive, so you can use a cheaper SATA drive for mass storage and keep the NVME drive for your boot drive. Or even if it has a SATA SSD, there should be more SATA ports to add a bigger drive regardless. And make sure it's a standard ATX case, so you have a standard PSU that can be swapped out, etc. It would be MUCH better to have a marginal upgrade now with room to upgrade components later than to have something that's all proprietary.

I think the new Air is pretty compelling. Not my first choice in OS but I'm perfectly able to use it. I just hate the file structure, having to use finder to find just about anything efficiently, no right click (yes I know ctrl-click), and closing programs. The only problem I see is the performance claim looks to be highly misleading. I'm not sure if it was GN or LMG that talked about it very recently.

Well I pulled the trigger and ordered a new XPS 13. I went with the Core i7-1165G7, 16GB ram, 512GB SSD, FHD touch screen. It's a beautiful machine and has a really solid feel. The keyboard is actually larger than my last laptop (Lenovo Yoga Pro 900) while the actual size of the machine is considerably smaller. So as I was sitting here setting it up, installing updates, uninstalling crap I didn't need, etc. and this thing got TOASTY. The bottom got so hot I couldn't even hold my hand against it for more than a few seconds. It was sitting on the arm of my couch so airflow wasn't the best, but all of the ventilation is on the back edge and I certainly wasn't blocking all of it. Even resting one corner of it on my leg was painfully hot, and I finally just sat it on a flat surface and kept it there, visiting it occasionally to do the next update. I also update the bios during this time. The keyboard feels great, not much travel but the effort of key presses is dialed in pretty well and is consistent across the keys. The touchpad feels great and is very responsive. 16:10 display is sexy, and it's nice to have Windows Hello. I'll use it more over the next few days and see what I think. I am concerned about usability with as much heat as it generates. It's only a 4 core CPU, after all. Do you think this is normal? I may have to actually return it if this heat is a persistent issue with normal use.

It is IEEE 1394a but I can't find anything that says whether it carries a video signal or just data on this mobo. The main feature advertised for that board was NVIDIA SLI, which leads me to believe that was their only video focus.

Appreciated. Though I don't already HAVE a server, I do need one (ok I'll be honest, WANT one). It may make more sense to run a VM on a server and kill two birds with one stone. That may turn out to be the genius suggestion that I hadn't really even considered.

Then OP should return it immediately.

I'm really not asking for alternatives to the build I want to do, but thank you. I do appreciate the feedback.

Totally fine. And they can't enforce a warranty void sticker anyway.

My Linksys router (WRT3200) has a an ARM processor, dual core at 1.8Ghz. And it falls on it's face with VPN enabled. I'm not married to pfsense but nobody online is talking about this stuff, it seems. Nothing current, anyway.