Ask HN: Any piece of hardware that was more of game changer than you expected?

When it's not making coffee, it doubles as a very therapeutic thing to clean and maintain for a couple of hours every couple of months.

I once (before children) had 3x28" 4K displays but they had to wrap pretty tight around my sitting position otherwise I had no chance of seeing what's at the far ends.

I love the laptop factor, but I need a good GPU sometimes. There are ways to plug one using USB-C, and I wanted to go for that first.

But my little bro, a gamer, told me it was a waste of money. For $29 a month, I can get a remote beast of a computer with Windows 10 on it and use it as much as I want.

At first, I wasn't convinced. Primo, I'd have to upload all of my stuff. Secondo, what about the latency ?

Well, I'm not playing multiplier online games, so it turns out the latency is imperceptible for my use cases. It's not your typical VNC setup, they optimized their client and protocol and I sometimes forget I'm not on a local machine.

Second, OVH is behind the brand, so their uplink is crazy good. Which means uploading and downloading things is very fast. Sometimes it's even better to stream movies from the shadow and watch it remotely than to use my local connection O_o

Eventually I saw the $2000 GPU I wanted to buy, and realize that it would take me more than 5 years of shadow usage to reach that price. After which my GPU would get old anyway, and I would need another one.

Bonus: it takes no space on my desk, doesn't make noise, doesn't heat, and I can use it when I travel, so I have the buffed up GPU at my disposal at my clients sites, in holidays, anywhere with decent wifi.

Because yes, the latency is good enough that I actually don't bother to plug my ethernet cable anymore: wifi works fine. Hotel wifi sucks though :)

Unlike gaming streaming services, you are not limited to a gaming provider, you can reuse your steam account or gog games. You are actually not limited to game, you have a full Windows 10 at your disposal. You can do video edition, model training or 3D rendering. Not crypto mining though, according to the terms of use. In fact, nothing that requires background tasks as the computer shuts down as soon as no human use it (I assume they make money by sharing the hardware).

But if you do want to play, it's nice. I tested Borderlands 2 with all settings cranked to the max, it works smoothly, including a with a controller plugged with BT into the laptop!

It's not without any problem, obviously:

- one or twice a day, the image will glitch, and I will lose control for a few seconds. So don't do remote surgery or bank your MMR on it.

- the linux client just doesn't work on the lastest Ubuntu. I have to reboot every time to my windows session.

- I'm in France, so YMMV, since I have no idea how good the ping to their server is from the US. Work fine from Germany.

- if you alt tab for too long the shadow client (from the laptop windows, not the shadow windows), it will consider you are not using the machine and disconnect (probably part of their business model). I lost data this way.

- the GPU you get depends of where you are. Some get a P5000 with 16GB GDDR5X, some a GTX 1080 with 8GB GDDR5X and some a RTX4000 with 8GB GDDR6

- if it gets through, it can act as a VPN. Unfortunately, the ports it uses may be blocked.

- their support is google-level terrible. If the answer is in the FAQ, you are good to go. If not, you are on your own.

And then I just put one of my monitors right in front of me and now rarely use the second one. But when I need a second monitor I'm really happy I didn't sell it.

So layout makes a really big difference.