Since my main Desktop is acting weird and I don’t want to dump money into it on guessing what is wrong I decided to just use my Dell Latitude e6420 as my main system. I was surfing around eBay and saw Docking Stations for the Laptop at a dirt cheap price. However they didn’t come with the Power Adapter. I managed to find one with a power adapter for 35 bucks so I ordered it.
I went with the Docking Station because it will be easy to grab the system for when I am on the go and also has the ability to have dual video via Display Port of DVI. I have a few Display Port to HDMI adapters so that will be neat.
The Laptop has been upgraded a bit since I bought it a couple of years ago. I removed the Optical drive and put in another SSD with a caddie to replace the Optical drive. Also for giggles I tossed in a second WiFi Mini PCI-e card. The first upgrade I did was max out the RAM to 16GB. Dell claims it can only use up to 8GB but a lot of people on the Dell Community Forums confirmed Corsair CMSX8GX3M1A1600C10 16GB will work.
I am debating to swap out the CPU from an i5 to a i7 2760QM that is Quad Core at 3.3GHz. I was also looking into the GPU since there was a Nvidia NVS 4200M but it’s integrated and would require a whole different motherboard so I am holding off on that one.
I might also get a USB 3.0 Express card. If the system had more room for the PCI-e slots I would see about using a Mini PCI-e to M.2 adapter.
I need to reinstall Linux on the Laptop. When I was using it for work I was dual booting Windows 10 and Debian with it. So now I don’t need Windows 10 on it and I can go back fully Linux. When I was attempting to use Windows 10 I tried using WLS2 with Debian and I didn’t like it. Felt too much like CYGWIN that never worked right.
The IT Garage 