Scott Hanselman

Every 6 or 7 years I get a new PC. My most recent one was in 2018 and I'm happily still using it today. However, I have made a few modest and somewhat low-cost (and one high-cost) upgrades. Each of these upgrades means I'll get another 3 to 5 lovely years out of this desktop machine. I'll be using Amazon referral links below, and you are supporting my writing when you use them, thanks!

The #1 thing I'm thankful for is that the ASUS ROG Strix X299-E Gaming II ATX Gaming Motherboard (Intel X299) I purchased three years ago was such a solid choice. It has/had ample memory slots, two (the new one has 3!) m.2 hard drive slots, and it's a large size for future video cards. I'm putting upgrades into this motherboard that didn't exist when I purchased it and it's doing great. If you can, always stretch the budget for a roomy motherboard - you can save up for the upgrades over the coming years like I did.

These are the upgrades I've made over the last year.

New SSD - Low Cost and High Availability

Upgrading your hard drive is a huge benefit and relatively inexpensive upgrade. I originally had a Western Digital Black 512GB SSD using an m.2 interface. This was my first "hard drive that doesn't look like a hard drive," and I still find m.2 drives to be basically impossibly amazing.

I noticed that my Drive Health, per CrystalDiskInfo was in the low 60%s and the ATTO Benchmark was getting weak on the writes.

I upgraded to a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD m.2 NVMe for just $165. This drive is double my original's space and nearly 3-4x the perf in some places. Plus, the Samsung Drive Migration software just worked. I literally added this drive to my second m.2 slot, ran the migration, shut down, moved the drive to the first m.2 and removed the old drive, and rebooted. I didn't get a single complaint from Windows.

This is NOT a sponsored post. This product and technique just worked and I'm thrilled. You may also be able to get a similar result from Clonezilla and another drive, but I was very much impressed with Samsung and this upgrade.

Here's the before and after benchmark between the 2018 WDC m.2 SSD and the new Samsung EVO Plus SSD.

Before:

After:

Comparing this drive to my D: and E: spinning rust (regular) hard drives is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing it. This SSD is 10x faster than a regular drive.

Memory - Medium Cost and High Availability

I had 32 gigs of RAM since 2018 but randomly (I know, this is silly) while cleaning my PC noticed I had four memory slots unused. I *did* know this when I bought it but I just flaked or forgot I had the extra space.

I could have gone to Crucial.com but found the exact model of memory stick from 3 years ago and picked up another 32 gigs for $200.

While upgrading, I also noticed (with help from Twitter) that I wasn't running the XMP memory profile and running these at 3200Mhz. I was running them at 2133Mhz all this time! Doh. So a nice upgrade and one small switch in the BIOS and I've got 64 gigs PLUS I'm clocking nearly 50% faster.

This has improve performance for me when running Docker and Kubernetes locally along site, Teams, VS, VS Code, Outlook, you know the drill. I usually sit around 35-50 gigs committed when really working with everything open. The extra headroom has been great.

High Cost and Low Availability

And finally, as of the time of this writing, this is one that requires more money and more luck. I used an online bot to look for stock drops of the new NVidia 3080 video cards and got one near Christmas. I've also heard good things about the waiting list at Evga.com.

This card was $699 which was a significant outlay and I went back and forth on it before I decided to go for it. It's proven to be a great upgrade, particularly as an upgrade for video rendering for my YouTube as Adobe Premiere uses it a lot.

I really hope that this card and the more affordable 3060 are more available soon because it's a lovely upgrade.

Take a look at your desktop motherboard and consider your possible upgrades based on cost, availability, and performance and see what you could put together at a reasonable budget! Hope this helps!

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I love emulators. I love that they exist. I love that we have computers that are not only fast enough to translate and emulate instructions in real time for totally different computers that may not even exist any more but also for computers that are shipping today!

I love these C# based emulators:

• CoreBoy is a cross platform GameBoy Emulator written in C# that even does ASCII
• Emulating a PlayStation 1 (PSX) entirely with C# and .NET

Today I learned about Ryujinx, an experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C# on .NET Core. The homepage is at https://ryujinx.org/. Emulators are great for learning about how to write and factor great code. Some are certainly "big ball of mud" architecture, but RyuJinx is VERY nice.

Ryujix is particularly cleanly factored with individual projects and modules that really follow the single responsibility principal.

It's written in .NET 5 and you can just git clone it, and go into the Ryujinx folder and "dotnet run," or build from Visual Studio. There are also daily builds on their site.

Some of the impressive features - and again, this is written in C# on cross-platform open source .NET 5:

• The CPU emulator, ARMeilleure, emulates an ARMv8 CPU and currently has support for most 64-bit ARMv8 and some of the ARMv7 (and older) instructions, including partial 32-bit support. It translates the ARM code to a custom IR, performs a few optimizations, and turns that into x86 code.
• The GPU emulator emulates the Switch's Maxwell GPU using the OpenGL API (version 4.4 minimum) through a custom build of OpenTK.
• Xinput-compatible controllers are supported natively; other controllers can be supported with the help of Xinput wrappers such as x360ce.

Most emulators are created for educational and experimental purposes, so don't look to be using this for nefarious purposes. This is a fantastic codebase to explore and experiment with.

Using a computer is like riding in a Lyft. Writing an Emulator is like disassembling an internal combustion engine and putting it back together differently and it still works. It won't make you a better person but it will make you appreciate your Lyft.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My mom is very clever and thoughtful and when I was in my early teens and easily overwhelmed and generally freaking out or panicky she'd say, "feel it. Be here. What is your body telling you. Freak out fully but put a time limit on it."

This idea of "time-boxed freak outs" has always stuck with me. A few times a year I get overwhelmed. I think we all do to some extent. Often I'd try to fight it, don't cry, don't get overwhelmed.

But I remembered what my Mom said and I started being present in the freak out. I'd set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes and REALLY own it. Get upset, cry, and not feel bad about it.

I deserve the release and by time-boxing it, it allowed me to own it and accept it. I can ramp up, and then ramp down. I've found this to be far more healthy than trying to swallow feelings and hold it in. Sometimes it needs to be OK to go and cry in your car in the parking lot.

Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. I'm a random person and this is my random blog. This advice works for me and has worked for others, but know yourself and talk to a therapist if you are having uncontrollable panic attacks or feel unsafe. If this doesn't sound helpful, be present and be safe.

I tweeted about this idea and found a number of replies that also found this technique helpful. Here are some anonymized quotes:

“time boxed panic” I love it. Don’t skip the feelings. You can’t. You just defer them often to disastrous results. Sit with the discomfort a while. The way out is through.

and

Great advice. For some reason, we have been taught to suppress emotions, not to let things get to us and to not panic. And unfairly, men in particular have been encouraged not to show emotion. But it is a natural human response. Give yourself permission to feel & time box it.

and

This is a phenomenal idea. I would add, if you could add a few more minutes, take a walk away from whatever is stressing to clear your head. Sometimes being away from what is causing the stress can help as a reset.

and finally

You don't even have to cry or freak out. Just give yourself a time box to sit, stare, and clear your mind. No phones, no distractions. We have too much swirling in our heads.

Again, as with all random internet advice, you are under no obligation to do anything you don't feel is safe for you. However, some have found this helpful. I also recorded a TikTok about it that is just 1 minute long:

I hope it helps you. Be well!

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I've long run a few dozen websites in Azure and while I've long noticed people (frankly) wasting money by having one Azure App Service (a Web Site) per Azure App Service Plan (a VM) I tend to pack them tight.

A Basic 1 (B1) Azure App Service running Linux is around $13 a month but has nearly 2 gigs of RAM. Up that to about $26 a month and you've got 3.5 gigs of RAM and 2 Cores AND 10 gigs of storage. Use ALL that RAM. Max out that storage - use the resources you have paid for. If you hit up against a limit you can always add more and scale up. Run those boxes hot, you paid for them!

While my blog and podcast and main site run on Azure Premium SKUs (and are fast and it's worth it) I have a dozen little one pagers, brochureware sites, and toys like https://www.keysleft.com/ and I've managed them all in an App Service as well. But they are static sites. They are nothing sites...so why do I need an App Service? It's overkill.

Turns out Azure Static Web Apps are a lovely thing and they are FREE while in Preview. It's great for static sites, sites made with static site generators, or Jamstack sites with serverless functions behind them.

So I converted a bunch of my little sites to Azure Static Web Apps. Took maybe 90 minutes to do 8 of them as seen below.

Since the code for these sites was already in GitHub, it was very easy to move them.

For example, the code for the KeysLeft site is at https://github.com/shanselman/keysleft and Azure Static Web Apps has a GitHub Action that easily deploys it on every commit. It's butter. It's created for you but you can see the generated GitHub Action as it lives alongside your code.

The docs are clear and it works nicely with Vue, React, Angular, or just regular HTML like my son's Hamster Blog. https://www.myhamsterblog.com/

As it's in Preview now it's free, and I'm sure it'll be super cheap when it goes live. I have no idea how much it will cost but I'll worry about that later. For now it's allowed me to turn off an entire Azure App Service and replace it with Azure Static Web Apps.

They also support custom domains and they automatically make and assign you an SSL cert. My only complaint is that there's no easy support (today) for apex domains (so all mine have www. as CNAMES) but you could proxy it through a free Cloud Flare account if you really want.

Check it out, I suspect you have a site right now that's either generated or just static and this could save you some money.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I spend so much time at the command line using the Windows Terminal. Then I spend a ton of time using git at the command line. But then I ALT+TAB over to GitHub and mess around in the browser.

Why have I been sleeping on the GitHub CLI? - there's a command line interface for GitHub!

I installed with "winget install GitHub.cli" but you can get it from https://cli.github.com if you like.

Then you run gh auth login once:

gh auth login
? What account do you want to log into? GitHub.com
? What is your preferred protocol for Git operations? HTTPS
? Authenticate Git with your GitHub credentials? Yes
? How would you like to authenticate GitHub CLI? Login with a web browser

Now you've got a new command "gh" to play with!

I went over to one of my local git clones for the Hanselminutes Podcast website and I can now list the open Pull Requests from the command line!

Here's the real time saver that Dan Wahlin reminded me about: gh repo create!

> git init
Initialized empty Git repository in D:/github/ghcliblogpost/.git/
> gh repo create
? Repository name ghcliblogpost
? Repository description This is a test for my GH CLI Blog post
? Visibility Public
? This will add an "origin" git remote to your local repository. Continue? Yes
✓ Created repository shanselman/ghcliblogpost on GitHub
✓ Added remote https://github.com/shanselman/ghcliblogpost.git

Fantastic! You can even gh issue create!

gh issue create

Creating issue in shanselman/hanselminutes-core

? Title This is a test issue
? Body <Received>
? What's next? Submit
https://github.com/shanselman/hanselminutes-core/issues/219

Checking out a Pull Request is a great time saver as well. Go check out http://cli.github.com/ and see how it can help you today!

Sponsor: Protect your apps from reverse engineering and tampering with PreEmptive, the makers of Dotfuscator. Dotfuscator has been in-the-box with Microsoft Visual Studio since 2003. Visit preemptive.com/hanselminutes for a professional-grade trial.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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