Dell – Observations from Uppsala

USB-C Works, but how would you Know?

Using USB-C to charge a laptop while simultaneously providing display and other IO traffic sounds a little bit too good to be true in practice. Maybe it would work for a set of devices from a single manufacturer (like a Thunderbolt-based USB-C-attached dock from the same vendor as a laptop). However, recently I was surprised (in a good way) when it turned out that I had accidentally got myself a USB-C-based single-cable-to-the-laptop setup. USB-C promises a lot, in this case it delivers perfectly, but what bothers me is the fact that there is really no way I could have figured this out ahead of time.

Windows 10 Reboot Loop – CUDA & Alienware

Late last year I was trying to do some machine learning work on my brand new Alienware 15 R4 gaming laptop. I had bought the laptop in order to have something portable with sufficient performance to actually do convolutional neural network (CNN) training and inference “on the road”. The GTX 1060 in the laptop is just as powerful as my home desktop machine, and should run Tensorflow and Keras well. I had the setup working on the desktop already, and copied the code over to the laptop. When trying to run the code the first time, I got some rather strange errors that I finally figured out meant that I was missing the CUDA toolkit. I downloaded CUDA version 10, installed, and the machine rebooted into the Windows 10 automatic repair mode.