UnderdogRally

I'm having trouble finding something reasonably professional that matches the mountain equipment co-op backup I've been using for a decade. Professional laptop/messenger bags just don't seem to have much space. I'm looking for suggestions, or experience if anyone uses timbuktu and/or crumplers. For non-work travel, I much prefer a hiking daypack. Well made, large, flexible pockets make a lot of difference. Good materials ensure that the empty pack is still light.

I've started capping in games with low processing needs for both power and heat control in my clevo w230ss chassis. Stability aside, I was finding things getting needlessly hot and activating the fan with a lot of programs running. That could also just be bad power management settings on my part, though. I don't bother when the laptop is plugged in for newer, resource intensive games. No point in capping at 60 when you get 62 to start with.

I like the intel 7620 card for 5ghz use at home. Fast and pretty stable. Not sure I'd call it the absolute best without more reviews on the few competing 5g/AC products. If you're using it to move around a lot and need to connect to 2.4ghz networks frequently (e.g. airports, hotels, coffee shops), then you might want to consider another option, even a usb adapter. There are plenty of reviews and discussions online on people having difficulty in that band with the 7260. Despite this, I went with the 7260 mainly because the vast majority of my use is within my home network (netgear R7000), and I was willing to stomach potentially unstable connections elsewhere.

I'm quite satisfied with my R7000. Easy to set up and manage, works great in managing a mix of N and AC connections, and the default software (firmware + genie app) is more than sufficient for me needs. I've read, but can't confirm that the Asus has better cloud features. The netgear is passable but not great in that respect. I've also read, and can confirm that the netgear has great usb3 transfer rates. I have a hard drive mounted in the usb3 slot acted as a NAS, and it's working great. My only complaint is that it's huge (coming from a dir-615). Between the device and antennae, it takes up a lot of horizontal and vertical real estate.

Have any non-mod options to working around the wifi whitelist been developed at this point? I've been upgrading devices in my home to wireless AC, and am now down to a couple of lenovo laptops (y470, y500). I would be installing a 7260 AC. The y500 is my wife's laptop, and the suggestion that I would "flash her BIOS" in a literal, non-innuendo kind of way was not well received. As a side rant, this is in addition to general maintenance on the y500 driving me nuts... from trying to get expresscache working (apparently it's been inactive for the last year) to updating broken drivers, etc. I can't believe how much time it's taking to read through and sort out all these piles of tiny, nagging issues.

I'm having similar trouble getting expresscache to work on my y500. The 16gb ssd is clearly there, space shows up as unallocated and uninitialized in disk management. eccmd -info tells me that the "HFS volume is not mounted." I've tried various suggestions from others having similar problems including: - Cleaning the SSD through an admin command prompt and diskpart - Uninstalling and reinstalling expresscache (tells me it "could not determine SSD" and to configure manually) - Configuring manually with eccmd - partition (leads to "semaphore timeout period has expired") - Initializing the SSD through disk management (leads to "semaphore timeout period has expired") Either way, expresscache can't seem to detect and/or configure the SSD. There are pages and pages of threads on lenovo forums about these problems across devices, but I haven't found a solution to the "semaphore timeout" problem other than suggestions that the ssd might be dying.