Might have mentioned it before elsewhere. 

HP.. Their 'mini' series.  I got one. Was working fine.  then started rebooting out of the blue. ( not OS reboot, hard power restart )

Thought it was my UPS dying .. nope.  brought it inside to beat on..   stress test until it was nearly on fire, not a blip.  Next day 3 reboots in a row.  Then nothing for a few days..  Even tho testing was fine, tried new ram, new SSD, same random results.   So bought a 3rd party power supply. A mistake.  these **** use DRM keyed power supply so even tho they have the same plug and enough juice, if they dont 'talk nice' so they are ignored. 

Against better judgment.. got an OEM one. Ran fine for 2 days. poof.. reboot.  Sigh. into the trash heap it goes i guess. 

Oh, and you cant freaking update bios unless you install windows. wtf? Last HP i ever get. 

Not too long ago, I put a Linux partition on my work computer, because it's the lightest machine I own (my personal laptop has a big screen and lovely keyboard but it's big and heavy and has no battery) and I want to be able to boot up into a non-work environment while traveling.  They've got all sorts of snoopware on the corporate image, and anyway it's running 'doze and therefore barely usable.

Recently I decided that it's too risky, that eventually they'd scan the machine and see an unauthorized partition, and my risk tolerance has sharply declined lately, so I deleted it.

I got the recommendation for this "high speed" USB stick from pendrivelinux.com.  It uses UASP (which is SCSI-over-USB instead of the traditional USB bulk storage profile) and has a "real" SSD inside it.  I installed a full Linux image to it, with an EFI system partition and everything.  Now I can boot my work laptop into this and it works really well.  It can run the "super speed" USB at 10 Gbps so if your machine has a fast enough port it's just as fast as having the disk inside the machine.

I've tried the whole USB Boot Drive thing before, but was never satisfied with the performance.  This, on the other hand, works great.

And apparently I got it for half price because I bought it for about $40 and now it's listed for $80.

Until the security team locks down the BIOS and you cant boot anything that they wont allow :)

I think we do that where i am at. I still have that old un-managed mac, so not sure if its happened yet. But if not, its still on the planned list. Tho one side effect is that mac hardware can NOT get on the network, VPN, or directly use any of our non external-web-based services. Has to be via a shop managed VM in my case, at least for now. Soon i bet that stops working too. ( or i put osx back on, and let them control it. Which i doubt would work, since it cant be upgraded to whatever is current. its an X86..  last one  )

Sat Nov 23 2024 02:58:55 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: The Flying Penguin

Not too long ago, I put a Linux partition on my work computer, because it's the lightest machine I own (my personal laptop has a big screen and lovely keyboard but it's big and heavy and has no battery) and I want to be able to boot up into a non-work environment while traveling.  They've got all sorts of snoopware on the corporate image, and anyway it's running 'doze and therefore barely usable.

Recently I decided that it's too risky, that eventually they'd scan the machine and see an unauthorized partition, and my risk tolerance has sharply declined lately, so I deleted it.

 

From LXer's feed.  I didn't realize they were still making them...  Cool.

So intel just got rescued, in effect. 8 billion of our tax dollars because, well, money laundering..