How to spend the bonus on a new life?

For the successful execution of a serious order, the director-master generously endowed the department with bonuses — the delights of working in a system integrator. Since there was no vacation in the fall, I decided to use money for an important task — to update my home computer hardware. It's time to eliminate weaknesses in the IT economy and please the second-grader son. The award was not a pity, but I approached the choice of each device with passion and meticulousness of a technician — I read reviews and reviews. An innate desire to share knowledge made me write this blitz review on purchases. I hope some of my impressions will be useful to you.

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To please the beloved heir

Small (sorry, my son — I hope my wife doesn't read this text) almost never used a computer. I was sitting with my iPad, playing with toys, watching YouTube, and by the age of eight I started asking for a computer to play. On my offer to give him my laptop, he slyly squinted and five minutes later showed me a picture of a MacBook. I had to moderate the ardor of the heir.

I decided to improve his computer literacy with the help of an inexpensive Krez Cloudbook N1401 on a quad-core Atom. A kind of simple, but cute machine with a modest 32 GB drive (the laptop, however, comes with another 100 gigs card in the cloud, but I'll take it for myself — I need it more). And so — a good typewriter or surfilka for the Internet. I didn't want to buy a powerful laptop for a child, at least because he didn't pump hundreds of gigs of cartoons on it (and he already knows how to use torrents, a cunning bug) and games with an 18+ rating.

Add the speed of the OS that has become heavier over time

By the summer, I realized that it was time to retire the old 120 GB SSD for free. No matter how much you clean the WinSxS folder from traces of updates, the Windows folder grows, the place ends. Yes, so in the end it ended that updates could no longer roll in.

I had to order a new drive — Kingston UV400 for 240 GB. With the help of Acronis True Image, I moved the system to a new disk, and at the same time ran the test in CrystalDiskMark. The old SSD showed 330 MB/s for reading and 120 MB/s for writing. The result of the UV400 was pleasantly surprised: 541 MB/s for reading and 496 MB/s for writing. This is pure delight, a system with a bunch of programs in startup loads much faster.

Pamper your inner director

In the summer, I pretty much updated the basis of the computer — the processor, the mother, the video card and, accordingly, the memory. The transition to Intel Skylake forced me to say goodbye to four DDR3 bars in favor of DDR4, but after buying the ASUS Z170I Pro Gaming mom, I had to save on RAM in favor of a video card. As a result, two of the cheapest 4 GB slats were spinning on the computer and with a frequency of 2133 — not memory, but sclerosis, given that I like to edit videos in Adobe Premiere at my leisure.

If there is a problem, there is a solution. I bought a Kingston HyperX Predator 16 GB whale. I removed the old memory so as not to slow down the new one, because Predator seems to support frequencies up to 3333 MHz. The mother on the Z170 chipset allowed to choose a profile just at 3333 MHz. The result is a bit predictable — rendering in Adobe After Effects has moved much faster.

And don't forget about the inner music lover

Headphones were the next to be distributed. For a good two years, I connected an iPhone headset to the computer — because of the short cable, it was impossible to recline in the chair, I had to sit in the pose of an office plankton. I've been sitting like this for two years, and now I've been generous with normal headphones with a microphone. According to reviews, HyperX Cloud was praised, I took the simplest version of the Drone, without multi-channel sound and other nishtyaks.

Very cool, I must say, the sound was found in HyperX Cloud Drone! In the movies, headphones perfectly "bang" (in the opening scene of "Saving Private Ryan"), Pink Floyd play soulfully, Through the Fire and Flames from DragonForce tears the brain. In games, I felt a deeper and more spectacular sound, more details — the headset copes with the simultaneous reproduction of many different effects, which were simply lost in phone "plugs".

I didn't really have time to use the microphone, so I just turned it up — in this position it turns off.

To put all important archives in order

Five years ago, I had an experience with NAS network storage, and it was an EPIC FAIL. A hard drive connected to a local network was transferring files not just slowly, but VERY SLOWLY. Having made three internal hard drives in the computer with my video content, my wife's TV series and an educational movie for my son, I thought again about the NAS — at least to watch a movie from it, and not connect a USB stick to the TV.

Prices for good NAS, of course, be healthy, but such a thing will last a decade without the need for replacement. After smoking reviews for a long time, I decided on Synology DiskStation DS216play — a box for two HDDs with cool network capabilities. The thing drives data over a wired network at speeds of more than 100 MB/s, which more than suits me. But the most interesting thing happens if you knock on DS216play from the outside — the NAS is registered in the DynDNS service, respectively, you can access files on the disk from any computer or tablet/smartphone. Or even watch kinzo in streaming mode — in principle, DS216play is able to squeeze 4K video in 1080p on the fly, but for me this is not very relevant yet. In addition, I have configured DS216play as a backup storage — now there is plenty of space.

Discover Gutenberg in yourself

Even though we live in the world of digital technologies, there are still plenty of places where people are asked to print out an electronic ticket in advance. Taking this opportunity, I send greetings to Russian Railways! I'm already silent about the fact that my son will definitely need something printing at school, and soon enough. So I had to look for something practical. Agree, now only laser monochrome devices fall into this category, preferably with a scanner. As a result, I settled on the budget multifunctional Ricoh SP 150SUw.

A new model, very compact, 22 pages per minute, scanning resolution up to 1200 dpi — what more could you want? I couldn't find something comparable in terms of capabilities for this money. And this beast also conquered with very intuitive controls, understandable even to a child, and the ability to easily connect via Wi-Fi. My wife is typing recipes with all her might from her smartphone, even though I told her that it is somehow not fashionable to store them in "paper" form.

The prize is over, but a new life has begun. After all, a person needs to please himself from time to time somehow more or less in a big way - it helps to continue to fight the imperfection of our world. Especially if you manage to please others besides yourself.