Technology Tip Archives - Lazy Man and Money

How I Made My Computer Much Faster

May 7, 2017 by Lazy Man 1 Comment

Last week, my wife was working long hours combined with a long commute. Fortunately, there are only a handful of weeks like that a year. Unfortunately those weeks really stretch me thin with the two kids.

We had a leisurely Cinco de Mayo dinner on Friday at the local Navy base to recharge. When Saturday morning came around, everything around the house needed to be done. And we did everything. I don’t think I’ve ever rushed to be so productive.

By the evening, the productivity was contagious. My laptop had been very slow for a long time and arguably, it should be reasonably fast. It isn’t quite 2-years old. Admittedly, I cut a couple of corners for something thin-and-light and in-stock when I needed it. One of those corners was choosing a computer with 4GB of RAM. To get 8GB in the same Dell XPS form-factor, I’d have to spend at least 50% more and wait a few days longer.

That may have been a bad decision.

Problem 1: Trying To Do Too Much

I knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t enough RAM to keep open 150 browser tabs… even with my browser speed-hacking tricks.

Obviously, keeping 150 browser tabs is a huge problem. I had been using my browser tabs to hold interesting articles that I might want to write about later. That’s just living up to my Lazy Man moniker.

The result? Trying to get anything done was a bear.

I’m now working in a comfortable 20 tabs. However, there’s still a lot of fat to trim. I can probably get it down to a 4 or 5 tabs that I use most often.

That alone made a big difference. No longer was my browser eating up nearly all my computer’s memory.

Problem 2: Low Disk Space

There was another problem slowing down my computer… I didn’t have enough hard drive space. I have a 128GB SSD, which I figured was enough because I could always off-load big media files to another source. Why spend another $400 to upgrade to 256GB when I can put this awesome low-profile thumb-drive in my USB slot for only $35? It gives me the same amount of space and I don’t even notice it is there.

So how did I use up 128GB of space on my main hard drive? I didn’t know, but I knew I needed to free some space.

This guide freeing up space on HowToGeek was helpful, but the best advice was to get WinDirStat. (I’ll let you Google it and trust that Google get you to a trusted source. Sometimes, I link to a place and a year later, that website leads to a bunch malware.)

WinDirStat gives you a map of your hard drive and you visually see what’s taking up all the space. Big blocks are big files and small blocks are small files.

I found a couple of clusters of big files. Bingo!

Ironically, these big files were archived FinCon videos and another online courses designed to make me more productive. Each folder had about about 12GB of files. There were a bunch of other one-off files that were huge as well.

It was easy enough to move these files to the aforementioned thumb drive. I was no longer struggling to free up 4GB of space, but I suddenly had 32GB.

There seems to be some debate that low disk space doesn’t slow down your computer. However, when I checked out my computer’s performance in the Task Manager, the disk process was at 99%. I suspect that my computer couldn’t use the paging file very efficiently and it was just fighting back and forth. Now, with plenty of space, I see it at 0% or 1%.

The combination of the two fixes has made my computer perform as if it is brand new again. The whole thing only took a couple of hours. (It could have been less if I hadn’t wasted time on a couple of dead-ends.)

I’m one of those people who will usually pay a little more for a computer than they need to. When my computer is zippy, I can work zippy. When my computer takes 30 seconds to load a web page, I’m going to drift off and get distracted easily.

I don’t know if these tips will work for you. I kind of hope that you aren’t in a situation where they’d be useful in the first place. However, it’s definitely worth looking into.

I Bought a New Cell Phone… Guess Which One and Why

February 2, 2017 by Lazy Man 8 Comments

A few months ago, I started an article titled, “Cell Phones are Dirt Cheap!” The inspiration was ummm… a lot of dirt cheap cell phones that I happened to notice in the news.

It sat in the hopper with nearly 200 other articles I have in the works at any given time… until last night.

In series of probably my most intelligent thinking, I convinced my wife that going out for dinner would be good for the sickness I felt coming on. We picked up the kids at daycare and when out. Soon after we got to the restaurant, I realized that I wasn’t the only sick person, our youngest was sick as well. Except that, just barely 3, he can’t really tell us he’s sick. He exhibits some symptoms (red checks), but it is more his temperament that becomes obvious. Let’s just say it wasn’t a good scene. We ate as quickly as possible and in rushing out, my phone fell out of my coat pocket hitting the floor. The Nexus 5 that I’ve had for 3 years had a cracked screen. The case and screen protector that had served me well for years had finally failed.

I got home and started to research replacement phones. The most important thing to me was that the phone support wireless Qi charging, because I had them all over the house (there was a deal). If you don’t have wireless charging on your phones, you are truly missing out.

In an effort to save a billionth of an millimeter, most recent phones don’t have Qi charging. I suppose the theory is that you can quick-charge your phone in 30 minutes with a cord, so people just do that. Also, I’m sure that many people don’t have 4 Qi chargers around their house.

I fired up my draft on cheap phones and this article on Qi-enabled phones in 2017. While the later looks like a lot of choices, many don’t have Qi integrated and many of them are years old. Some of them only work on Verizon (not a carrier I have). Some of them like the Samsung’s are fairly expensive and don’t have the pure Android experience that I’m used to.

The Search Through Cheap Cellphones

I went back and forth from my cheap cellphones to the Qi phone list. My brain was essentially mush from the sickness and the despair of losing my beloved cellphone (a little over-dramatic on purpose). For now, let’s look at the cheap cellphones out there.

First on my list were the Amazon Prime Exclusive phones. These phones are typically around 25% off the regular price in exchange for viewing some ads. For example, this 4th Generation Moto G 16 GB for $150 is very good bargain and perfect for most people. For me the 16GB was a little small. I didn’t realize there was a 32GB version for $180, but if I had, I might have ended up with that phone.

Give the spec sheet a look which has these other Amazon Prime Exclusive Phones. I had almost thought about picking up a Blu RD 1 to have around as a spare for $59. Hindsight is 20/20.

I also had noted that LeEco Pro3 sometimes has flash sales for $299. While that might not sound cheap, it is almost a flagship-level phone with lots of premium features. Sometimes those phones go for $600 or more. Unfortunately, I’ve read some bad reviews with the software and the regular $399 price was out of what I wanted to spend.

Next up is the Huawei Honor 6X which checks in at $249. The Guardian’s review says that it’s “a lot of phone for the money.” I probably should have given it more consideration, but the software is a little old and unlike my Nexus 5, I can’t be sure I can upgrade it. The processor isn’t one of the Qualcomm Snapdragon ones that I know. The screen’s DPI (dots per inch) is a little less than my Nexus. Typically, that’s not a big deal, but it might come into play with new VR apps that I want to explore. (Unfortunately the Google Pixel which is ideal for this is way out of the range of what I want to pay for a phone.)

I gave strong consideration to the BLU LIFE ONE X2 which comes in at $199 (32GB version). I know I’ve said that lots of phones were finalists, but this was really the one I was going to pull the trigger on… until I read this review about a mediocre camera. That’s really the only “knock” I can give it and the $199 price is even below what I expected to pay.

And Then There Were Two

The final two phones that I remember (if my brain was mush before imagine it now) were “The Perfect Phone” and “The Phone I Bought.”

The “Perfect Phone” was the LG G4. It had everything I wanted. Even Qi charging through a special case. It had extras like a removable battery. (It’s great to give a device a new battery life as it goes down over time.) Did I mention the Qi charging? The screen has 538 DPI (which is elite territory). The cameras are great. It has a speedy Qualcomm SnapDragon 800 series processor. It even has Qi charging.

Here LG, please take my money!

Wait, you are telling me there’s a special offer on your home page here! So you are going to through in a fancy case and a micro-SD card? Okay, but I’m already giving you my money, so the jokes on you LG.

Add to Cart (*Click*)

LG’s response: “We’re sorry but LG G4™ Unlocked in Genuine Leather Black is currently out of stock and cannot be added to your cart. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

Turns out that the LG G4 has a boot loader hardware issue that they acknowledge is a hardware defect. I read a story that they’d fix it, but you’d have find a place to get one (it’s hard to find it for sale anywhere) and then probably send it back into them. That’s simply not a workable solution for my primary phone.

Finally… the Phone I Bought

I ended up buying a Moto X Pure Edition (64GB) for $300. (Actually $307 for next day shipping so I didn’t have to wait the weekend.) It has no Qi charging and I’m sad.

However, it does have a lot of other things.

It has a Quad HD display (520 ppi vs. Nexus 5’s 441), 64GB (twice what I had on my Nexus 5), 3000 MaH battery (vs. the Nexus’ 2300 mAh), turbo-charging, a great 21MP camera (generations better than my Nexus’ 8MP one), SD expansion (not available on my Nexus), and 3GB of RAM (vs. 2GB on my Nexus).

In fairness, a lot of the above phones had more than a few of features. That’s just what $300 buys you now vs. what $399 bought me in October of 2013. It is unfair to compare technology more than 3 years apart, but it helps me feel a little better about breaking my phone.

There are a few extra that the Moto brings such as some hands-free use and gestures to activate the camera and flashlight. There’s some water repellent. The Moto X Pure Edition was $399 when it was released in September of 2015. However, that was for the 16GB version. The 64GB version would set you back $525 back then. The reviews back then said it was a great value.

A short 15 months later, it feels like more than 40% discount is also a great value.

How can you find the right Android Phone for you? I found this smartphone comparison tool to be extremely helpful

Save Nearly 50% on the Most Revolutionary Product in Years

September 15, 2016 by Lazy Man Leave a Comment

I usually try to stay away from clickbait titles. They always seem disappointing. However, I don’t know how you can be disappointed with this.

Yesterday, Amazon announced that it is releasing the 2nd Generation Echo Dot. The big news is that the price went from $90 to a penny shy of $50. And if you buy 5, you’ll get one free. (Hat tip to sister site Alexa/Echo.

That explains the 50% off part… but what about the “revolutionary” part.

Let me start by explaining what the Amazon Echo is… and then I’ll explain why the Echo Dot is better.

Amazon has a digital personal assistant like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. Amazon calls her Alexa. That’s not very unique, but digital personal assistants are arguably revolutionary. Amazon Echo is a microphone/speaker that is sitting and waiting for you to activate it by simply saying, “Alexa.” The difference is that you don’t have to find a phone, navigate an app, press a button, or anything. I can continue typing this sentence while I ask Alexa to play music Jack Johnson. It works from across the room (unless there’s a television on, or other significant outside noise).

The Echo is probably best at playing music, but it is also very good at home automation stuff. I can control my Nest thermostat upstairs while I’m downstairs, without a computer, tablet, or phone. You can order a pizza from Domino’s with it. You can have Uber send you a car. You can play Choose Your Own Adventure games. I even use Amazon Echo to teach my kids spelling and math.

The Echo is so popular that it’s become Amazon’s next billion dollar business. And as I hinted at above, I even started contact me.)

I feel that’s enough about Amazon Echo, but you want to know more you can read my original Amazon Echo review and my revisited Amazon Echo review.

Now, to tie all this together, I have to explain what an Echo Dot is and why that’s even better than an Amazon Echo. An Echo Dot is a very small Amazon Echo… about the size of a hockey puck, but thicker. It has a very small speaker that isn’t great, but it has Bluetooth and an audio out port. This makes it ideal for hooking up to a set of speakers or your stereo. This way you aren’t tied to the Echo’s speaker (though I think it’s great, some audiophiles may disagree).

Perhaps the best part is the price. An Amazon Echo will set you back $180, and it very rarely goes on sale. The Echo Dot is less than $50. So you can pair with speakers you already have. I paid the original $90 price for the Echo Dot and paired them with a deal I found on these bookshelf speakers. However, I could have paired it with my Oontz Angle Bluetooth Speaker. If you bought those two, it would be less than $80… less than half price of the regular Echo.

So why did Amazon drop the price nearly in half just five months after releasing it? My guess is that it is afraid of Google Home, which Google’s upcoming version of the Echo. Apple is rumored to be getting into the game as well. I think Amazon’s plan is to get Alexa everywhere first.

Imagine if Amazon invented $50 tablets before anyone else had released a tablet. Would people pay $400 or $500 for an Samsung Galaxy Tab or an Apple iPad? Maybe, but it might also be difficult to market it at that price.

I think it’s a great plan. I’m honestly considering getting the 6-pack, adding a couple more to the house, giving them as Christmas gifts, or using them as giveaways on the site. I’m tempted to go full-out Oprah: “You get an Echo Dot. You get an Echo Dot.”

What do you think? I realize that I’m more enthusiastic than most people about Amazon’s Alexa products (hence the other blog). Do “normal” people find this as amazing a deal as I do? Let me know in the comments.

The End of An Era and The Beginning of a New One

July 19, 2016 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

This Saturday we lost electricity… and along with it my old Dell Zino. I first wrote about it when I looking to do my digital media overhaul in August 2011. It’s a fun article to reflect upon. I had two $99 HP Touchpads coming to the house the next day. That’s how long the Dell Zino was with us.

The Dell Zino was an Home Theater PC (HTPC) that we used to elminate our cable box rental fees along with this SiliconDust HDHomeRun Prime and a very cheap cableCARD from your cable company.

The combination of an HTPC, Microsoft Windows Media Center, and the HDHomeRun Prime, gave us almost everything that we’d get from renting a DVR from the cable company. We didn’t get OnDemand, but we also had a full computer for running, Netflix, Hulu, a Plex Server, and the incredible PlayOn TV.

The Dell Zino was $550 and the HDHomerun Prime was a couple of hundred on top of that. It wasn’t exactly a cheap solution to avoid paying cable fees, but it felt good. Now that we are sending Zino the Wonder Television to the eternal entertainment center in the sky, I can finally calculate how much it might have saved us.

Yesterday I went to the Cox store to get a replacement box. The idea was to get a short-term solution while I wait for the successor. I could get a box for $1.99/mo. that essentially allowed me to watch TV. For $8.50, I could get a digital guide and OnDemand. For another $15 (on top of the $8.50), I could get DVR functionality. That’s $23.50/mo. for what I had with the Zino (again, minus OnDemand). That’s $282 or $1410 over the 5 years we had the Zino.

That set-up cut our DVR costs in half! If you count that the HDHomeRun Prime is still fine it wouldn’t be too much of stretch to say it saved us nearly $1000.

I’m not sure if getting 5 years out of the Zino was good or bad. I rarely have a computer last that long, so that’s good. On the other hand, it didn’t have to do too much. It usually ran one application. I would expect it to last a long time.

The Replacement May Be a Problem

I knew that the Zino was on its last legs. I had been looking for a replacement, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. Microsoft ended Windows Media Center in Windows 10. It simply isn’t available in any form. It was the only software that works well for all the premium channels. With Windows 8 you had the option to get Windows Media Center, but you had to pay extra for it.

So ideally, I’d be looking for a computer with Windows 7. That’s not easy to find as most new computers are sold with Windows 10. I noticed a deal on a rare Windows 7 computer Amazon Prime Day, but I didn’t pull the trigger. I simply didn’t want to spend another $600 that day.

What a difference a weeks makes.

It seems like my luck comes in two forms: extremely good and the bad. This is a case of extremely good luck. I happened to go on Slickdeals where I saw the deal originally. The original deal expired, but it happened to be back!

For those who aren’t tech nerds, the processor in my old Zino scored 1782 on a Passmark benchmark test. The new processor scores a little over 10,000 on the same benchmark test. Roughly, the brains are 5.5 times faster… but there are a lot of other speed enhancements as well (faster memory, faster graphics, etc.). I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 10 times faster in practice.

The price was ~$620 with taxes, so not too much more than the original Zino. It’s a bigger computer, but not too big.

Here are the full specs for technology nerds:

Intel Core i7-6700 Quad Core 3.6GHz CPU
16GB DDR3L Memory
2TB HDD
AMD Radeon R9 360 2GB GDDR5
2x USB 3.0
4x USB 2.0
1x HDMI
1x VGA
DVD-RW
802.11bgn WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0
Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit (Includes Windows 10 Pro License)

There’s room for improvement like an SSD, more USB 3.0 ports, a Blu-Ray drive, and 802.11ac wifi. I may end up putting an SSD in it, but I’ll give the traditional HDD a shot first. I had zero 3.0 ports, so having 2 is nice. I have an external portable Blu-Ray drive, so that’s not a big deal. I typically use the Ethernet connection for the media center since it needs to be near the cable connection anyway. Thus the WiFi isn’t a big deal.

I’m excited to have a processor that fast with that much memory. I have been using laptops that are designed with chips to save power for years. Even the Zino used chips designed for a laptop. I imagine it will be quite an increase in performance to go back to the power of a full desktop.

I’m hopeful that it will be relatively easy to get Windows Media Center set back up. I’ll let you now how it goes.

Remix Mini: The Best Cheap/Value Desktop Computer?

December 3, 2015 by Lazy Man 2 Comments

It’s been a few years since I’ve done a technology makeover in the Lazy Man household. My 3 year old is starting to use computers at day care and my 2 year old is never far behind him. My wife and I have laptops. I have a spare $100 laptop if something should go wrong.

Recently I’ve missed not having a real desktop. I wonder if I’d be more productive if I had a big monitor and a real keyboard and mouse. At the same time, I’ve realized that it often easier to do some tasks on my Android phone than my Windows machine. The dedicated apps that I have seem to be more efficient in some ways. For example, I can reply back to a DogVacay notification almost instantly, much faster than signing into the website and navigating to the message center.

… or maybe I just saw a cool product and I am trying to justify the purchase. I’m not sure.

A group of ex-Google employees have hacked Android into a desktop operating system. Their company, Jide, is very new and the operating system, Remix OS, is rough around the edges, but the reviews on the first version of the OS were very positive. When I saw that they were launching a $40 computer on Kickstarter, I jumped in.

That computer was the Remix Mini and I’ve been using it on and off for a couple of weeks now.

Remix Mini - Cheap Desktop Computer — My computer set-up… the cheapest desktop computer?

As you can see, my photography skills are terrible. The Remix Mini computer is sitting on the monitor base behind my speaker. It is about the size of an elongated hockey puck… small enough to hide just about anywhere.

The Remix Mini is essentially the guts of a smartphone without the screen. It has built in Wi-Fi (alas only 802.11n) and Bluetooth. It has HDMI out (essentially for hooking up to many monitors and televisions), audio out, an Ethernet jack (not sure why as many laptops don’t have them), two USB ports (alas 2.0), and a microSD slot.

I paired it with the 24″ LG 1080P monitor you see in the picture. I didn’t have strong feelings about the monitor other than it was IPS technology (good!), 24 inches, from a brand I trust (LG), and around $100. I saw a lot of Black Friday deals online that were as good or better for the money. If my timing had been different, I would have been tempted to pair it with a 30″-ish television that were everywhere on Black Friday.

You’ll see that I also use a corded mouse that I had lying around. I’m hoping that Santa brings me this bluetooth optical cordless mouse for Christmas. The Bluetooth keyboard is from my old HP Touchpad… it works well with Android. Behind the monitor I have some cheap speakers that I picked up at some yard sale. In front on the monitor I have an OontZ Angle Bluetooth Portable Speaker. I don’t need two speaker systems, but I’m waiting for Santa to bring me a power strip so that I can plug the speakers in the back in. In the meantime, the Oontz works well. Plus it’s kind of fun to see how many wireless Bluetooth gadgets I can hook the Remix Mini up to.

Overall this desktop computer cost me $155. That’s $100 for the monitor and $55 for the Remix Mini. (It was $40 in the Kickstarter campaign and shipping was a disproportionate $15).

The monitor serves a dual purpose. I asked Santa for an HDMI switch which would allow me to hook up my laptop to the monitor without switching cords in back. So even aside from the Remix Mini set-up, I have an area where I can use my Windows machine with a nice big monitor with multiple windows.

Finally, you may notice that I round out my desktop with a LED Desk Lamp similar to the one I mentioned in my 2015 Holiday Gift Guide. (My current version is discontinued.)

While on the topic of mobile desktops, I’m almost tempted to pick up this Kangaroo Mobile Desktop which for $99 appears to be a Windows 10 version of Remix Mini.

Final Thoughts

I’ve done a lot of rambling here and I’ve probably gone off course a bit. The point of this article was to show that for a very small investment, you can have a very capable computer. It can do email, Netflix, Excel spreadsheets, YouTube, web browsing, Amazon Instant Video, and run over a million Android apps.

To get all this value in such a small investment is nothing short of amazing. I want to encourage people to take advantage of it.