Category: Hardware

Heather Joslyn summarizes an interview:

Chances are, if you’ve lived through a few innovation cycles, you’ve got too many old computers — and their cables — cluttering your house. Do you think that if you had the right to repair your devices, to swap out obsolete components for more performant ones, you wouldn’t keep piling up castoff electronics?

So does Matt Hartley, guest on this On the Road episode of The New Stack Makers, recorded at Open Source Summit North America in April.

This is a bit out of left field for Curated SQL content, but to be fair, when has that ever stopped me? I’ve owned two Framework laptops (one of which is my daily driver and the other I gave away when it stopped being my daily driver) and really like the company because of its repair-friendly ethos, making parts and schematics available—as was the norm for companies until recently. Part of owning a thing is having the ability to maintain and repair it.

Laurent Giret shares the good news;

Starting today, Microsoft is now offering replacement components for Surface devices in its Microsoft Store. This should be great news for consumers with Surface devices that are out of warranty, and Microsoft is also offering free repair guides for its various Surface devices.

“While we have always offered world-class warranty and repair services via Microsoft support, we have been working to increase repair options by designing products that are easier to repair and by expanding our network of Authorized Service Providers. As part of this larger initiative, we are excited to offer replacement components to technically inclined consumers for out-of-warranty, self repair,” announced Tim McGuiggan, VP Devices Services & Product Engineering at Microsoft.

I’m big enough on right-to-repair that I’ll even mention it here. That said, the prices are, uh, a bit high. Compare to Framework’s prices for their parts and I guess the best advice is still, “don’t break your stuff.” But I’m happy to see Microsoft make these parts available and put out the guides. For decades, there was a norm that you released the tech specs and made repair parts available, and any step we see toward moving back to that norm is something I’m happy with.

Glenn Berry has some thoughts on AMD’s EPYC line of processors:

Over the years, I have written many articles about the fine art of processor selection for SQL Server. This is an important topic, because it has a direct relationship to your SQL Server license costs. It also affects your performance and scalability. As new processor families are introduced, I do the required analytical work and update my recommendations. In this post, I will list my recommended AMD Processors for SQL Server.

I’m just happy that the answer isn’t a null set anymore.