ShowHBK

Yea, For "Work" go with a Latitude, or XPS. The Inspiron line of products are CHEEP CHEEP CHEEP COST SAVING MATERIALS CHEEP CHEEP. not All SSD "Solid State Drives" are created equal. To put things in "car" terminology. some SSD are slower then others. You might have an SSD that is the equivalent to a 4 cylinder engine. Reliable, but not very fast. In the SSD world, the 4 Cylinders would be most common SD Cards, low end Hybrid Mechanical drives, or non-NVMe SSD. But, the NVMe drives in (most) XPS systems are the LS3 V8 monsters of the disk storage world. Fast transfer speeds, punchy load times, and enough read/write options to make your head spin...WHOOOOOOO BABY!!!!!! All jokes aside. Quality "buzzwords" to look for in good Solid State Drives would be "NVMe" "M.2" or "Pro" in the name of the drive.

Dell is actually making a comeback in terms of their build quality. the XPS 13 and 15 have almost ZERO screen and keyboard flex and they really do give you a nice premium feel when you pick them up. If I had to compare it to anything, they feel "Apple" levels of quality. Also... They are cheep (relative compared to the competition). Dell just recently released their G5 and G7 systems to replace the 7000 Gaming series and the white and blue one looks AMAZING! HP has fallen behind to me and I honestly have a hard time recommending them. Their product line is confusing at best and their marketing needs help for sure. There is a possibility that I could recommend Lenovo as well. I use Lenovo systems and they are great for business use. the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is something that I have been drooling over for some time now. The laptop is mostly carbon fiber and gets a battery life of up to 6 hours (according to Lenovo). The feel of the system is very business oriented and practical with plenty of ports. Not something you can take for granted these days.

In short... no... I would not subject any human to using the Surface Pro as their full desktop via a dock without it looking like Dr. Frankenstein's Dongle Life Monster. Could you do it? 100% yes! The Sky Lake CPU and GPU would be more then enough to power two 1080p displays via the Surface Dock. I wanted to do it so bad for a long time, but Rally Pat is correct when he says the dock is glitchy and inconsistent at best. The reason I simply can't recommend the Surface for a desk PC would be that on the off chance you have a client in front of you and your dock is not powering your display it really makes you look bad. I personally have used the Surface Dock at work and I hated it's proprietary connector and I also had a problem where I overloaded the dock with iPad cables for imaging and my Surface would fail to charge. I unplugged it to go to a meeting and the battery was actually depleting all day while I thought it was charging. MASSIVE fail on my part for overloading the dock. *pukes* In the event you want to chase the Dell Idea, they have a website called the "Dell Outlet" where you can get massively discounted items directly from Dell. The reason the XPS systems are so cheep on there is because Dell deals in the business sector so much that they often have overflow, returned items, or incorrectly configured items returned. Dell has to turn then around fast so they slash the prices and you still get the warranty... all because some guy forgot to put the correct RAM in a system. The XPS 13 2-in-1 is going to $750 on there with a 256GB NVMe SSD which is a killer value for what you get. If you really want to be a baller, the $1900 version is down to $1150 on there right now at the top of your budget... But I would hold off until you know exactly what you want. No sense in rushing it. =)

This is honestly sad to me. My i3 versions have been AWESOME in the two years we have had them in the building. They stay nice and cool and students love them for Photoshop and other drawing apps. Actually, I have had more complaints this school year for our 23' iMacs because "Planned Obsolescence", am I right? wink wink... Finding the perfect middle ground is hard though. Usually finding the "no compromises" device is hard. The Surface on one hand has great build quality, but on the other is a very poor value for what you get. The Macbook Air is a much better value, but lacks future support from Apple. For business/work use, I often find that a aluminum build, NVMe SSD, and Windows 10 often yield the best results out in the field. The XPS 15/13 are near perfection, the only thing holding them down in my book is the $1800 price tag for that 4K touch display *sigh*, if only?

I am not sure what parallel universe you are living in... but the Surface has a screen 2736x1824 at 267 PPI and the almighty iPad Pro has a 2732 x 2048 with 264 PPI. The Surface Pro 4's screen is drop dead gorgeous with near perfect color accuracy and plenty of color depth. OP said he would want to use the tablet for showing houses and the Surface Pro would be amazing indoors with the Surface Pen (which is included in the box... looking at you Apple :eyes: ). The only benefit of the iPad pro would be it's higher refresh rate then the Surface Pro, but I would argue that the apps would not be as good as their "Desktop" counterparts. My point is, The Surface has an AMAZING screen and the detachable Keyboard makes life easy when you want to show a client multiple tabs in Chrome or Edge (Yes, Edge is not as shit as you think). The benefits of the detachable keyboard for OP would be that when talking to clients you have a device in your hand that is roughly the size of an 8.5/11 piece of paper that is a FULL, no compromises device. I highly encourage OP to at least look into a surface because you mentioned that you need office. The versions of Office for the iPad are mostly gimped versions of their Windows counterparts. I would honestly be interested to know more about the issues you are experiencing. I have 8 deployed in my building and I personally own one and have never had any issues. the i3 models have been rock solid for our art department and my i5/8GB version has always been reliable. 1803 actually made my i5 version wake much faster and I notice overall performance improvements. -------------------------------------------------------------------- My recommendation based off what you will be doing are the following: Surface Pro 4 - Amazing portability. Great screen. Poor Value. Touch Cover not included. Surface Laptop - Great build quality. Same great screen as the Surface Pro. Touch Input. Needs the (free) update to Windows 10 Pro out of the box. Microsoft installs a Gimped version that NEEDS a free update to unlock x86 apps. Macbook Air - Battery that last longer then a Honda Civic. Priced for budgets in mind. Rock solid Software reliability. One of the worst screens out there by today's standards. Limited support down the road. iPad Pro 10.5' - Great screen. Portability. Hugh Apple App store. Unable to run full desktop apps. Content consumption device, NOT a serious work device no mater how you look at it. Dell XPS 13 Touch - 2-in-1 are not all that bad. Great build quality. Fast NVMe SSD for quick boot times. No pen included in the box. meh battery life. Happy hunting man. I HIGHLY encourage you to take a trip to Microcenter or the Microsoft Store at Easton and play with the devices before you buy them. Just well the sales guys to bugger off at Microcenter and you will be free to look in your own peace and quiet. A little unknown secret at the Microsoft store is that you are allowed to pick up, unplug, and hold the floor models. They don't have alarms on them and the employees encourage it.

Please let us know the results of this when you run it. Did you run any updates on the Kiosk? If so, something might have changed in an update. Make sure to ALWAYS disable windows updates when using a Windows system as a Kiosk.

Happy you figured this out... To explain what happened, the black screen actually means that the script worked perfectly. You logged in... but nothing else loaded! haha

How handy are you with windows boot scripts? If you create a boot script on login and add "taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe" then the explorer will never load and in turn the start bar will be 100% gone. After that, tell the script to load whatever program you want the kiosk to run and that will be the ONLY thing running. Once you want to shut it down or do any work, just hit Windows Button + R and run the explorer to get it back. That should do what you are asking. The limitation you are working with here is that the start bar is part of "explorer.exe" and can't be run without it. I had a piece of software a while ago called "Display Fusion" that allowed me to mess with the task bar. It's worth looking into for sure. I know Display Fusion has some stuff you can do where you can lock the damn thing or have it hidden on a secondary virtual desktop. for example, you could run your Kiosk on Desktop #2 and have the start bar ONLY show on Virtual desktop #1.

I think this is a poor way of looking at the situation... It's about the journey, not the destination... right? This is opinionated, but a cruise to me involves seeing some great sights and driving great roads. The east side of Hoover into New Albany has some AMAZING back roads full of long sections and twisting roads. 71 and 670 have some great sections that are not traveled at night. I would recommend a route that goes up 71 during sunset to REALLY see downtown Columbus against the skyline. Some sections off 315 are good for some driving as well. Nothing substitutes the fun of driving on track, but I believe that Columbus has a LOT to give automotive enthusiasts in terms of roads to drive on. You just have to look hard enough and I guarantee we could plan a cruise to end all cruises.

I have a "Loop" that would be fun... Start At Iron Pony next to 161 Hook up with 161 and take it to 270 South Pass Easton and pick up 670 Take it all the way to 71 North Take that all the way up to 270 East Get off at 161 East Get off at Sunbury Drive up to Central College Rd. Take the back roads for a while and loop around back to Sunbury. Take Big Walnut up north, hooking up with N State Street. Take that to Polaris and end the loop at Quaker Steak for some beer. This would be a total of ~43 miles and cover Highway driving, Street Driving, and Back roads for some added fun. Just an idea, What do you guys think?

RIP, very sad to hear. :-(

What did I just read? Mill-bro... plexx... plexx... not sure if troll or not?

With your CR icon, I can't tell if that's a sarcastic reply or a serious one.

Gratz Doc!!!

**NO SPOILERS FOLKS** I thought the movie was awesome. It takes things and cranks them up to 11 and never seems to let off the gas. Honestly, I felt the hype was real/worth it because the movie did everything I wanted it to do and then some. Bringing your daughter should not be a huge problem IMO, because the family sitting next to us had two kids younger then 7 or 8, but it will all depend on your tolerance. There is a LOT of fighting and explosions, but no gore or anything like that. one scene *no spoilers* where a person is thrown into a spinning blade of death and they explode with a little blue blood everywhere. Keep in mind, this is a Disney product, so they do expect kids to go see the movie so they can sell more merchandise. 10/10 Movie though, worth the see

Your happiness has to come from within my dude. True inner peace is when your mind, body, and actions are all in perfect harmony. You are NOT crazy and I can prove it... Three years ago I was working my first job out of college working in a corporate building for McGraw Hill and GOD was I miserable. People would give you fake smiles and go about their daily business, fucking you over at every chance they got. Bosses would treat you like you were expendable and not worth anything. All that, combine with the consistent unrealistic expectation of "get it done, or i'll hire someone else who can do it" were really weighting thin on me. I wanted to quit for so long, but I did not know where to go internally. My anger grew more and more each day dealing with people who could care less about me and I was dreading going to work each day. I finally had enough and knew I wanted to quit my job. I gave my two weeks notice and my dipshit boss demanded that I leave the building that same day and never come back. The day I walked out of that corporate shit-hole was like a 1,000,000 pound weight was lifted off my shoulders. I decided to dig into the I.T. field and within a week I was working at a High School in their Tech department. My B.A. is in Art Education, so working with kids was part of my background. I love education and technology and the day I did both for a living felt like the first day of a great professional career for me. I currently love my job and there is not a day that goes by that I regret quitting the corporate world. I love what I do and I am actually excited each day to go into work. I have no boss to hassle me, no micro management, and I can do things however the hell I want and not a single person gives a damn so long as the work gets done. My point is... Do something you love for a living, and you will never work a day in your life. Do I make $100K? Fuck no! But I could not be any happier each day doing what I do. Unless money matters to you, there is no point in being miserable each day. Wake up each day excited to go to work, so get out there and find something that makes you smile each day

The rules never said that you had to have ALL of the criteria... It was assumed that you only had to meet one. I'm also not 100% sure why "I" have to be the one to own the car... If photography happens in a public place the the image falls under the rights of "fair use". Also, Not all the images loaded for me and when I counted we we're at 8 images loaded so that's not my fault that folks can't link images correctly. w/e... i'll post a new images next month

My photo was not counted? WTH!!!

:p:p:p http://www.quickmeme.com/img/dd/dde01a7a92aa19b4972b4fb097b332686e4ba1f0771b47994b0f28c71f175383.jpg

I have the full resolution version of this image, But google Photos linking is stupid... http://www.columbusracing.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=923&pictureid=9076

Sale no longer pending... Both buyers have respectfully declined. She is still up for sale.

Sale Pending

Do you care about taking amazing photos? if yes, The answer is: The Pixel Do you care about stock android? if yes, The answer is: The Pixel Do you like almost being forced into an Apple-like eco system of products? if yes, The answer is: The Note 8 Do you like Samsung? if yes, The answer is: The Note 8 Honestly... I love my note 8. I have a Gear Watch and IconX headphones from Samsung and everything works perfectly. I am not a huge fan of the Samsung Android interface, but an Android Launcher takes care of that in two seconds. My Note 8 lasts all day and has some great features. I also enjoy the stylus which is exclusive to the Note, but be warned... the Galaxy S 8+ is basically a Note 8 without the stylus... and it's cheaper then the Note 8, so keep that in mind if you care about price.

In the "price per performance" department I'm not sure it is a good value. I also just saw a video online of the wing on the back... it's a wing on top of a wing... because we hear you liked wings dawg!

How poor is poor? Are we talking scrap yard finds poor? or, I'm an investor who was making $300k a year and now that I switched jobs so I only make $250k a year which I believe is poor mans money? Lets have a frame of reference, good sir *tips hat in your direction*