Advice on a laptop
- Thread starter Goober
- Start date
Goob, you can try designing your own like we did. CyberPower from back east built our deisgn for us. We have dual i7quadcores on an Asus Sabertooth motherboard, vid card is a GeForce GTX 680 with 3GB+ of memory, 12 GB of RAM is built by Corsair, 2 harddrives also made by Corsair, one is an 80GB for the operating system and the other is a 1TB for holding data and crap, soundcard is a Creative Soundblaster XFi Titanium Fatal1tyin an Azza box (which has a total of 6 slots for hard drives), a Steelseries Merc Stealth keyboard, with a Logitech trackball mouse. It cost about $2200 - 2300 but you can get a pretty powerful pc for what you want to spend.
I like designing my own and just replacing parts as they die.
I like designing my own and just replacing parts as they die.
Yes, it is. The tower is about 2' x 8" x 2.5'. A bit too hefty to be a laptop. lol
Forgot to mention the monitor is a LG W2442 19" 1920x1080.
Forgot the header. You're looking for a laptop. Can't offer any advice there. I can say that you're pretty much stuck with proprietary units, though, as laptops are limited for space and what you can put into them. I'd suggest researching reviews on them.
CNET is a favorite place to visit when I research stuff: Laptops & notebooks: Laptop computers, notebook computers - CNET Reviews
CNET is a favorite place to visit when I research stuff: Laptops & notebooks: Laptop computers, notebook computers - CNET Reviews
Don't think you need an i7 processor, they're stupid expensive and not really much more capable than an i5, certainly not enough to justify the price in my opinion. You're not going to get much choice in components, but for the kind of money you're willing to spend you can get a pretty high end system, just be sure to get as big a disk as you can, at least 500 Gb, and as much RAM as you can, nothing less than 4 Gb. Buying a new laptop also means you're almost certain to get Windows 8 with it, which is quite a change from anything you're accustomed to, and if the laptop screen is not touch-enabled you'll probably find the new interface to be a bit of a nuisance. It's designed for touch screens and is not very friendly to a mouse. I've had Win8 on an older laptop that originally came with Vista on it for about a month now, and it's a big improvement over that, not nearly the hog Vista is, but I got so frustrated with the quirks of the new tile interface and the lack of a Start button I finally installed something called Classic Shell (http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/) to get back to a desktop that made sense to me.
I confess a bias against touch screens. On a smart phone or a tablet they're great, but for a home PC, especially if you've got a good sized monitor that sits relatively far away from you, they're too hard to reach to be useful. And they get smeared up with fingerprints quickly, which I really dislike. Also, certain apps that come with Win8, notably the email, messaging, contact management, and calendar apps, will not work unless you give Microsoft your email address and create an account on their servers, and the data associated with those apps will not be on your local PC, they'll be on Microsoft's version of the Cloud, which they call SkyDrive. If you don't mind sharing a lot of data with Microsoft, go for it, but I certainly do, so I didn't.
I confess a bias against touch screens. On a smart phone or a tablet they're great, but for a home PC, especially if you've got a good sized monitor that sits relatively far away from you, they're too hard to reach to be useful. And they get smeared up with fingerprints quickly, which I really dislike. Also, certain apps that come with Win8, notably the email, messaging, contact management, and calendar apps, will not work unless you give Microsoft your email address and create an account on their servers, and the data associated with those apps will not be on your local PC, they'll be on Microsoft's version of the Cloud, which they call SkyDrive. If you don't mind sharing a lot of data with Microsoft, go for it, but I certainly do, so I didn't.
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Yer welcome. I'd strongly recommend a tower type over a laptop for the main home PC, you can get much higher end components for the same price, and greater flexibility for upgrades and component replacements. I bought the laptop at a time when I was traveling a lot, so I could have all my stuff with me and have a place to backup my photos as I took them, I'm a little paranoid about backups. I made a mistake though, bought too big a laptop, a 17" one. Lug that thing around airports for a few days and you'll wish you had something smaller.
Or, you can go to an Apple. A much more intuitive operating system and stability and you don't need a bunch of extra software to protect you from nasties like viruses, Trojan horses and such. The military strength security encryption gives a little more peace of mind. Just another choice to look at.
My daughter has a Mac-book and when I was visiting her a couple of months ago, There was some photos on my laptop that she wanted....so I just plugged in my USB key that has a whole bunch of other stuff on it and transferred them to her Mac-Book.
Well, when I plugged it back to my notebook a few days later, I was prompted to scan and repair....and every time I would plug it in it would do that...so I checked it for hidden files and found some that the Mac had installed (Guess it's own filing system???) so I removed those files, but while I wouldn't get the message every time...I would still get it often enough to bug the hell out of me...
No fixes were to be found on the net....
In sheer frustration, I moved all 8 gigs of files to my Notebook and Formatted the USB key then put everything back on.
That seems to have fixed it for good......If anyone ever gets a similar problem...........try that.
Well, when I plugged it back to my notebook a few days later, I was prompted to scan and repair....and every time I would plug it in it would do that...so I checked it for hidden files and found some that the Mac had installed (Guess it's own filing system???) so I removed those files, but while I wouldn't get the message every time...I would still get it often enough to bug the hell out of me...
No fixes were to be found on the net....
In sheer frustration, I moved all 8 gigs of files to my Notebook and Formatted the USB key then put everything back on.
That seems to have fixed it for good......If anyone ever gets a similar problem...........try that.
I'd never go to Apple. I think they're way overpriced to start with, I find them completely counter-intuitive, and you simply can't find out what the machine's really doing, it's all locked down and hidden. Microsoft has taken a page from Apple's playbook in that regard with Windows 7 and 8. The attitude to users seems to be, you don't want to know, you don't need to know, everything will be taken care of for you, so just shutup and don't ask. It's as if Apple and now Microsoft think they should run your system, not you.
I don't know enough about Apple's OSs to comment much further, but from the perspective of this old engineer, Microsoft's OSs are a terrible design, major flaws have been perpetuated all through the development cycle since they first appeared, when Windows was just a shell on top of DOS, and they've added some awful new ones, most particularly that idiotic "My Documents My Music My Pictures My Videos My Downloads My etc." directory structure in the user profile. The system partition is the last place those things should be, there should be a C: partition with only the system on it, and at least one more, a D: partition, with everything else on it. First rule of OS design is, keep the system, the applications, and the users, separate from each other; no version of Windows will let you do that, can't even come close. But at least you can find out how messed up it is. In two hours with an Apple system belonging to a brother-in-law I couldn't find out where anything really was on the disk.
The apple OS is part of the computer. They were designed to integrate flawlessly. Windoze is a software company. PC computer manufacturers are usually only hardware manufacturers. Microsoft is now contemplating making hardware to match but they are light years behind.
Dex, I have sold hundreds of Macs to ex-PC users. The hardest part is for them to forget how the operated a PC. They try to give their Mac PC commands at first, but soon learn to use the OS. My experience has been that they would call me during the first two weeks and ask what they were doing wrong, then I would never or rarely here from then until they decided to upgrade. 2 hours is not enough to change your using habits. All of these people said they would never go back to Windoze because it is just too complicated. But I can understand why an engineer would want to tinker with his machine. If you spent the time, you would figure it out. If a bonehead like me can, anybody can.
One thing you are most emphatically NOT, Cliffy, is a bonehead. My issue with Apple, and Win7 and 8, is that I need to know exactly what the machine's up to, and I need to feel in complete control of it.
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And just to forestall some REAL bonehead from calling me a controlling personality, that need for control applies only to machines, they're here to serve my needs, I'm not here to help them, so they'd bloody well better do what I want. I know better than to treat people that way.
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And just to forestall some REAL bonehead from calling me a controlling personality, that need for control applies only to machines, they're here to serve my needs, I'm not here to help them, so they'd bloody well better do what I want. I know better than to treat people that way.
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I am going to go through the same process next year upgrading to a new laptop
Mine I got in 2006 it has Intel as well. Don't know much about computers but I
am open to options and not in a hurray to just get something. I just want the damn
thing to work Yes I still have Vista but I have figured out the clinks and clunks so I
know what's happening.
Mine I got in 2006 it has Intel as well. Don't know much about computers but I
am open to options and not in a hurray to just get something. I just want the damn
thing to work Yes I still have Vista but I have figured out the clinks and clunks so I
know what's happening.
See now you feel the need to know that whereas I was fed up with constantly having to maintain my personal system (you update X and now there's a conflict with Y, then you need to download and install the patch, etc) which is why I switched to an iMac earlier this year. It's not that counter intuitive, I found my way around easily enough. It did take a little bit of "relearning" but now it's a piece of cake.
Uhuh. Once I load an OS into my computer, it becomes a part of it, too.
Yeah, there are no oopses in Apples.
Meh. I like the choice of what goes into my computer, hardware AND software. I don't have to stick with any particular brand and I can tailor it to what I want.
I've no doubt I could learn my way around the Mac OS, but I don't want to. I've seen enough of it to know I don't like it, I don't like what it hides from me and the things it won't let me find out about it, the machines are designed not to be upgradeable, and I can't write my own software for it.