So, in the previous installment in this upgrade game I was crowing about how I knew how to boot from a USB drive on the Dell XPS 12 and therefore upgrading the SSD in it was going to be a piece of cake. Well, it turned out to be a piece of the heaviest, densest, fruit cake you’ve ever seen. Dropping it onto a wood floor would have dented the floor. […]
READ MOREThere are several possible reasons for wanting to boot from a USB drive, I suppose, but mine came from this thought experiment: I’ve been diligently making regular system backups of my Dell XPS 12 for a while and today I wondered if I would be able to recover from, say, a crashed hard drive or – a much better scenario – from upgrading the hard drive to a higher capacity one. In fact, this latter scenario is the one that interests me: I’m contemplating a 480GB drive (currently the Crucial M500 is $280 from newegg.com) to replace the 240GB drive that I bought a year ago for my Dell XPS 12. […]
READ MOREI had some issues today with the Windows 8 WiFi connection on my Dell XPS 12. Short story (the long one is tedious): I was using the machine at my local Acura dealer while waiting for the service on my wife’s car to be completed. I closed the lid once I could pay and get the car, yet when I opened it again at home, all Windows 8 wanted to do was to reconnect to the Acura dealers WiFi. It wouldn’t show my home WiFi at all. Even funnier (in hindsight), running the Troubleshooter resulted in a request to activate a ‘manual’ WiFi profile for an older wireless network for somewhere else. […]
READ MOREMy new XPS 12
is a pretty nice machine. Small (0.8” × 12.5” × 8.5”) and light (3.35 lbs), despite the intricacies of the flip screen and the touch capability. The top and bottom are covered in some kind of black matt surface that’s easy to grip and doesn’t seem to mark that easily. Yet, I’d prefer having something to protect it. Unfortunately it’s not such a bestseller like, say, the 13” MacBook Air that a whole accessories industry has grown around it. […]
We’re getting close to the conference season at work: in June I’m going to both TechEd US in New Orleans and //build/ in San Francisco. Rather than cart around my very unloved Surface RT (haven’t used it in possibly two months), I’ve been dithering about buying an Intel Windows 8 machine, a touch device, say a convertible.I’ve had my eye on two possibilities, the Surface Pro and the Dell XPS 12. Since none of the touch machines available right now just aren’t powerful or expansive enough to be my main PC, I’ve been thinking of upgrading that too. […]
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