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Discussion on: How many computers do you use?

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Ben Sinclair

Three-ish.

My main workhorse is a 7-year old i3 Vaio running Arch. I've upgraded it with an SSD and 6GB RAM and it's more than enough for anything I need as a developer. Vim, Docker and Chrome are pretty much the only things running on it and despite the anecdotes of a million voices on the Internet, I never run shy of resources. It's the only machine I use for personal work. If it catastrophically fails I could replace it for under £200 and carry on where I left off. If the SSD dies or it gets stolen (yeah, right!) I have everything I need backed up and encrypted off-site.

I have a gaming desktop I made from an old i3 HP which I also upgraded with 8GB RAM, an SSD and a 980GTX card so I can play games (Fortnite > 60FPS, PUBG < 15FPS, which tells you more about how those games are optimised than how inferior my equipment is...) It has a nice 24" IPS monitor I could use with the laptop when I'm working but I can never be bothered. It's running Windows 10, which I haven't used in anger (all I do is play games on it) but it's not crashed in the last year so that's nice.

I have a micro-tower i3 Dell which I did the same old upgrades to as the others and plugged into my TV, ostensibly as a MAME machine, but I rarely use it.

At work I have a 2015 Macbook Pro. It's quite good, I suppose, but it's crashy and unreliable (exactly like my previous three Macs) and has the immense drawback of living in Apple's terrible GUI-centric world. It's quite good, but I hate it and it's gradually making me an angrier, grumpier person. What I do like about my work setup is that I have a 22" and a 27" monitor connected so I can use three screens. MacOS is still incapable of handling workspaces on multiple monitors without making me want to kick puppies so I get round it by having more physical screens, and that's the most inches I can fit on my desk without encroaching on my neighbour's personal space. I use a proper mouse with it, with a wire and separate buttons and stuff, mostly so the little light on the mouse can tell me when the computer's on because otherwise it's hard to tell if it's asleep or crashed. I keep the little handbag of dongles you need to connect to anything in my desk drawer.

I have a VPS I'm permanently logged into to use as an IRC bouncer, web playground and general remote shell.

I used to repair laptops for a living so I have a load of frankenstein machines lying around I don't use that I could probably get going if I could be bothered.

I don't really use the tablets that I have. If I want to read something on the go I'll use my phone in a pinch, but I'm more likely to send it to my Kindle because the reading experience is so much better.

I really only use my phone for entertainment or a quick test of something when I'm at work - I use the VPN on it to poke at some of our websites from different countries (for instance the project I just finished had to geolocate the user by IP address so it knew whether a particular video stream was available). That's the exception. My phone's not a work thing and I don't have my work email notifications on it.