Hardy Custom Builders: Fill & Download for Free

It depends on how you’re using it, but it’s a high-end product, so the results are usually very good. Many builders use it on new homes in luxury communities. This custom builder has a bunch of examples of hardie board siding.

LOL sorry my gamer bro, but you answered your own question - with exactly what you don’t want to hear. The laptops Asus builds to run top-end games like the ones you mentioned, are the ROG series. The cheaper Asus laptops will 99.99% suck for gaming.Don’t expect to buy some $600 cheapie laptop with 4gb of RAM and onboard video - and then game on it. It won’t happen. Gaming isn’t cheap! Not even on a tower that you build yourself. And a good game laptop is more expensive than a tower, not less.And to run all those games “nicely”, plan on getting at least a middle range ROG. Look up the minimum requirements of the games you listed! And bear in mind the minimums are there so you know what you must have to barely play. Like, if you crank all the settings down to minimum, you can sorta get by and not suck too bad. If you want full hi-res gaming glory and lots of frags in fast FPS games, be prepared to spend more money. A lot more.Another good builder to look at is Sager Custom Laptops.Good luck and Game On!

Q: What is the weirdest thing you ever made with your own hands?An elevator.We bought a one story house in South Texas shaped a little like Idaho—with the master bedroom and bath off in the pointy bit. Housing is cheap here in Texas (most of you would weep, seriously) but that’s partly due to a mild climate, cheap immigrant labor and lax government oversight. Together, this means that even nice houses in upscale neighborhoods often have goofy problems that would never be tolerated up North (where for example, they might lead to ice damns and roof collapse.) It works out. As long as you pay attention to the flood plain, inspect the house yourself, and check for foundation cracks, you can get a good deal.Except…my wife kept smelling rot in the always too hot or too cold master bedroom. I installed a boost fan to improve circulation in that part of the house, and that helped, but the smell remained. So I started poking around the windows, and soon discovered the large master bedroom window was actually two windows placed side by side. That’s fine, window manufacturers make little field mulling strips for joining windows in this way—but my builders hadn’t used one. They’d just installed the two windows side by side and run a bead of caulk in between them—which was fine until the caulk started leaking. Over the years, water had gotten in and rotted the backside of the trim surrounding the windows.[Old windows at top. Staining from occasional leakage around poorly sealed windows. Real rot has already been removed.]So…I tore all that out and inspected the framing and all was fine, except—dang, these single pane windows are leaky, and who the hell uses single pane any more anyhow? In the damp southern climate, all the wood trim on all the windows was in need of replacement anyway, so I decided to upgrade all the windows in the master suite, and once and for all solve our air conditioning issues.But, I wasn’t about to call one of these window replacement places. No offense to anyone out there, but hacking the old window out with a Sawsall and nailing a retrofit inside the existing frame is a hack of the worst possible kind. You end up with a structural frame sitting inside a structural frame, and the results looks boxy and ugly (no offense) and isn’t inherently weather tight (and we have hurricanes .[Retrofit, showing how new window is nailed inside existing framing, using nothing but calk or foam to keep water out.]So I found a company called Milgard that for a good price will custom make top quality fiberglass windows to any size—to the milimeter. Excellent. I measured six ways to Sunday, placed my order, awaited delivery, and…Modern, energy efficient double pained, fiberglass windows are heavy!I took all the old windows out myself with no problem. I upgraded the water tight seals, no problem. I secured all the Hardie Plank and stainless steel nails to do the finishing, no problem. But the new windows—even the smallest—I couldn’t pick up to install them.So I built an elevator.I already had hooks in the eaves for hanging lights. I added more of these (two over each window) and built a little carriage using 2x4s, angle iron, pulleys, and cord.[The “elevator”—windows are sandwiched between top and bottom rails, the window’s weather edge pinned between wood and angle iron so it can’t slip.][The “elevator”—(vertical board taking the place of a window for display) made of scrap wood and hardware store implements, including hooks made for a swing set.]The result was, I could move a new window into position beneath the wall opening on a creeper, then lever it onto my little elevator, then pull both cords and easily lift even the largest windows using the tremendous mechanical advantage. Once the window was high enough, I stepped on the cords to hold the window at the right height as I nailed the top in place and lowered the “elevator” out of the way. Easy peasy.At the end of the project, I just removed the hooks and back filled with wood putty.Worked like a charm. Hell, it would have worked like a charm on a two story house. I still have it out in the garage in case I decide to replace any more windows some day.