June (according to google), Visible, replacement laptop

Google says I was here

The Flagstaff stuff is accurate but I wasn’t anywhere near the indicated southern or northern spots.

Visible

Visible is Verizon’s in-house MVNO. They are famous for having $25/mo “unlimited”¹ if one joins a Party Pay group. These group members can be otherwise-unaffilliated and the big Reddit one has >64K members.

A possible SNAFU is a 5GB hotspot cap but I think the LTE router will not show as hotspot use. At any rate, they have a $5 first month promo and free SIM so I don’t have much to lose.

If it works I can drop my 16GB/$31 US Mobile Verizon MVNO and replace it with “unlimited”/$25 Visible. Will report back when I get the sim. Which might be a couple weeks because…

dying laptop

My ancient laptop (Dell Latitude E6420 which I bought used in Jan 2017, 90w) has been getting more and more unstable. Today I lost 45mins of work on a complex reddit comment helping a newbie.

The problem is overheating, due to the arcane “heat pipe” routing. I repasted the CPU which helped a bit but the problem persists. There is also a intermittent connection problem because sometimes just setting down a coffee cup on the table causes it to reboot. Yes, that’s as frustrating as it sounds.

I’ve had an eBay saved search for either a Latitude 7270 or 7280. They aren’t much newer but natively uses SSD (M.2 2280) and fewer issues with heat. I maxxed the old one with 16GB of RAM so I could run virtuals with wild abandon, but the new one will dual-boot Windows + Linux so virtualization is not required.

This one is 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD and runs off 60w max. $135 shipped. I’ll mount a spare miniSD in the slot if I need extra room.

The eBay seller requires shipping to billing address so it will go to El Paso where my forwarder is. I’ll bundle it with the Visible SIM and have it shipped General Delivery to the nearest post office a few miles away.

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1. ie, with deprioritization when the network is maxxed, and probably a high speed cap at some point. ↩