Omega Owners Forum
Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: Grumpy on 04 June 2008, 12:27:53
-
There seems to be a fair few Oofers on here with detailed
computer knowledge, so I would like to take advantage of
that.
Although I normally use a pentium desktop, running XP,
which seems perfectly adequate, I also sometimes use my laptop.
My 6 year old laptop is struggling to keep up with modern
resource hungry requirements. So as they are now so cheap
to replace, I thought I might treat myself to a new one, rather
than trying to upgrade this one.
Murphys Law states that as soon as I've spent the money
upgrading the old one, it'll vanish in a puff of smoke. :)
All the ones I see now seem to run Vista. From what I read
on Vista, it seems to be very resource hungry.
So would a minimum spec required to run it be a twin processor
and 2mb of Ram?
Or should I be looking at something higher than this?
I don't need the computer for running anything particularly heavy.
For instance, what I normally have open is two web windows.
One used for stock trading software and the other browsing
for news etc..
I also have open a couple of spreadsheets. One about 1mb in size
and the other a few thousand K.
All comments appreciated.
-
I'd be inclined to go for whatever is PCWorld's offer of the week. Or any other supplier if you don't like them.
What you need seems to be more or less "entry level", so you should be able to pick up something decent for about £400 or so.
If you're very lucky, you may even manage to find one that doesn't have Vista ;)
-
Just converted one friends notebook from vista to XP..
Although notebooks come bundled with Vista home , still XP is more suitable I think..However if you still prefer Vista even 1 Gb Ram and duo core is sufficient.. And for disk, I would prefer 7200 RPM (% 40 latency drop ) if battery life is not #1 for you..
-
i bought this 2 yrs ago, paid 495 for it
advent 7105 xp pro.
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/advent/laptop/7105.htm
has been good to me apart from losing dvd drive a couple of times, i
-
dabs.com have regular good offers.
If you can find something with Windows XP then a pretty minimum spec should be fine.
If you are going to be lumbered with Vista then the minimum recommended RAM is 1 Gb, by all accounts that is an absolute minimum and 2 Gb will perform much better.
Was looking at one of these for my son
http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4YHX&CategorySelectedId=11105&PageMode=1&NavigationKey=11105,46460000
the Acer stuff I've had has been reasonably OK touchwood.
Although it would be nice to see before I buy, some of the keyboards on cheaper laptops are pretty rattly.
And FWIW my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo has lasted reasonably well, not great battery life but that might not apply now.
-
2Gb should be fine, surfing the net isn't particularly memory-intensive. Consider buying a 1Gb model and then buying an extra chip from someplace like ebuyer.com and inserting it yourself - it'll be cheaper than paying for the 2Gb when you buy the laptop. Just make sure it's got a spare memory slot, rather than 2 smaller capacity chips hogging all the slots.
-
Well personally id be inclined too spend a little more and get a much better spec laptop.
Ive just bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 with 205GB hard drive and 3 GB ram and its a nice 17 inch screen and lots of other features i wont bore you with.
And best of all it only cost £600...and its gonna be able to cope with just about what ever you ask of it. :y
-
Well personally id be inclined too spend a little more and get a much better spec laptop.
Ive just bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 with 205GB hard drive and 3 GB ram and its a nice 17 inch screen and lots of other features i wont bore you with.
And best of all it only cost £600...and its gonna be able to cope with just about what ever you ask of it. :y
Not for long though - the rate of improvement/development in the PC industry puts the car industry to shame. (Gordon) Moore's Law and all that....
-
Well personally id be inclined too spend a little more and get a much better spec laptop.
Ive just bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 with 205GB hard drive and 3 GB ram and its a nice 17 inch screen and lots of other features i wont bore you with.
And best of all it only cost £600...and its gonna be able to cope with just about what ever you ask of it. :y
Not for long though - the rate of improvement/development in the PC industry puts the car industry to shame. (Gordon) Moore's Law and all that....
Absolutely spot on - you can't future proof a PC. I've just chucked out a PC that cost me over £3000 some 10 years ago - it remained start-of-the-art for about 3 months, and after about 3 years it had to replaced. What a waste of time and money!
Buy only what you need now - the new toys will be cheaper late on.
-
Well personally id be inclined too spend a little more and get a much better spec laptop.
Ive just bought a Dell Inspiron 1720 with 205GB hard drive and 3 GB ram and its a nice 17 inch screen and lots of other features i wont bore you with.
And best of all it only cost £600...and its gonna be able to cope with just about what ever you ask of it. :y
Not for long though - the rate of improvement/development in the PC industry puts the car industry to shame. (Gordon) Moore's Law and all that....
Absolutely spot on - you can't future proof a PC. I've just chucked out a PC that cost me over £3000 some 10 years ago - it remained start-of-the-art for about 3 months, and after about 3 years it had to replaced. What a waste of time and money!
Buy only what you need now - the new toys will be cheaper late on.
But im not talking what it will be able to do in 2018 im talking about in 2008 thats the difference....and even then i dont really agree with what your saying,ive still got some old Toshiba satellite pro 4200"s thats are 5/6 yrs old now minimum and they still do 90% of what i want or need them too do.
Maybe in 3/4/5/20yrs time a £600 spec laptop wont run the with big boys but im sure it will be just as usable as my old tosh"s are 5/6 yrs on from when they were made. :y
-
Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.
-
Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.
I know we all use Vista Ultimate now days but you cant really call XP pro that old....heck they just released service pack 3 ;D
I do appreciate what your saying though.. ;)
-
Bought my laptop 5 years ago, base model and it can still do the necessary today - I would not spend more than necessary to buy a machine to do basic surfing/document writing unless you have a specific task/application in mind in which case you probably know what you want already.
Avoid Vista if possible, and if your Microsoft Office apps (Word Excel etc) are too slow on your machine then download Open Office for free (this is legitimate), it has 99% of the functionality of equivalent MS and will open Word and Excel documents.
-
Bought my laptop 5 years ago, base model and it can still do the necessary today - I would not spend more than necessary to buy a machine to do basic surfing/document writing unless you have a specific task/application in mind in which case you probably know what you want already.
Avoid Vista if possible, and if your Microsoft Office apps (Word Excel etc) are too slow on your machine then download Open Office for free (this is legitimate), it has 99% of the functionality of equivalent MS and will open Word and Excel documents.
Why avoid vista.....?
-
Thanks for everyone's input, so far.
Much appreciated.
Looks like with the economic crunch we're now facing, stuff is
getting cheaper as we talk.
Just followed a link in an Amazon e-mail that they sent me and
came across this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Toshiba-Satellite-L40-17H-Trubrite-DVDSMDL/dp/B0013EWQ22/ref=pd_ts_zbw_ce_14014431_5?pf_rd_p=178249991&pf_rd_s=right-5&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_i=405287011&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=01T39C0BVWK2RW9AH6MS
Toshiba with dual core pentium and 2gb ram.
£299 :o
How much lower can stuff go??
Edit: I put 2mb ram. Should obviously read 2gb
-
T
Murphys Law states that as soon as I've spent the money
upgrading the old one, it'll vanish in a puff of smoke. :)
I think you'll find that's Moore's Law ;)
Anyway starting with hardware...
RAM: 1GB min, 2GB preffered
CPU: Dual-core, 1.8ghz
Hard disk: 80GB min
Graphics: Integrated, shared video memory
Optical drive: for the price, may as well get a DVD-RW
Thats about the basics you'll need for a modern computer. The more RAM you have, the more stuff you can have open at once without fear of the dreaded Windows slowdown.
As has already been said, avoid Vista. Whatever anyone says, it's still crap. I went to MS SQL 2008 launch party and we were told in a seminar (by Microsoft!) that Vista was basically built on top of XP. Only it has a load of crap added nobody wants, which uses up valuable resources and makes the end-user experience god-awful. Vista is not the "fresh" and "new" operating system everyone thinks it is. Stick with XP but make sure you get service pack 3 and a good virus scanner.
Good free virus scanners include AVG and Avast!. Always better to get one with some level of support though, but avoid anything made by Symantec, Norton or McAfee - resource hogs. I recommend Kaspersky Anti Virus personally.
Ebuyer.com have some really good deals on all the time - I'd recommend them all day long. Dell are also quite good. I'd just phone them up to get the better deals, as they can go a lot cheaper than their website advertises. I managed to get a £750 laptop down to £499 (I was buying 22 of them though!).
Wouldn't set foot in PC World if I were you. You will get stung somehow.
-
Reply to stuart30, why avoid vista?
Because as far as I can see there are no significant advantages over XP, still some glitches, lots of drivers still not compatible and because of feature bloat it is slow and resource hungry....
-
Reply to stuart30, why avoid vista?
Because as far as I can see there are no significant advantages over XP, still some glitches, lots of drivers still not compatible and because of feature bloat it is slow and resource hungry....
Hmmm well id disagree with you....i personally didn't like Vista at all when i first tried it but now i find it really rather entertaining,it does everything my Xp pro does and then some.
It maybe resource hungry but with a reasonable machine i find it quite literally flies....of course im sure some people have problems with it but touch wood so far im very pleased and its been trouble free.
-
For a laptop now (which will be Vista), I wouldn't drop below a Core2 Duo (around 1.8G or more), 2G RAM, current generation of integrated video. Virtually everything will have dvd writers and wifi. If you need bluetooth, make sure its there, same with firewire.
A lot of the sub £350 ones are Core Duo, not Core2 Duo.
I think, much below this spec, it will struggle in 3yrs.
RAM may be cheaper to buy seperate - eg http://www.crucial.com/uk
-
Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.
Yes, but........
I type this on my main PC running Win98SE. It works, doesn't screw up too often, and when it screws up I can fix it. Also virus writers have moved on to other targets like XP and Vista, and leave the old systems alone. We have a hardware firewall in the ADSL Modem, and in the Router, which keeps most at bay, plus I have Spybot S&D plus AVG which keeps most things happy.
Back to laptops,
Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?. The time is right, the summer hols are looming and everyone is after holiday dosh, so machines get sold for reasonable money. The HP DV6000/9000 series are quite nice, cost a fortune when new, but are not too bad at pres. One advantage of the DV9000 is you can fit 2 SATA hard drives, one for O/S plus progs the other for storing films etc which can then be removed and replaced. The only down side is some of them tend to suffer from bad soldered joints under the nforce chip, however HP will currently repair this for free!.
Avoid Sony's at all costs, spares are next to impossible to get (price to us for a replacement keyboard is £87 plus vat and post), plus they are a bitch to repair, and spares are very hard/expensive to get.
Acer are OK'ish but plastics tend to be thin and break easily. The recent acers are a bit naff, cheap, not well made. We have already had one in for repair, 3 months old !.
Its a jungle out there,
Best of luck,
Ken
-
Yes, but an old machine would be dog-slow with a modern operating system, and if you stick with an old O/S you'll find MS will have stopped releasing security patches for it years ago, leaving your machine more vulnerable than it needs to be.
Yes, but........
I type this on my main PC running Win98SE. It works, doesn't screw up too often, and when it screws up I can fix it. Also virus writers have moved on to other targets like XP and Vista, and leave the old systems alone. We have a hardware firewall in the ADSL Modem, and in the Router, which keeps most at bay, plus I have Spybot S&D plus AVG which keeps most things happy.
Worms tend to exist for many years. Also, flaws found in today's Windows often existed in earlier versions, only MS won't be patching. Really shouldn't be running such stuff now.
-
Hey, if it 'aint broke don't fix it :y :y :y
OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again :-X
Ken
It's good this, I can agree and disagree at the same time ;D ;D
-
Hey, if it 'aint broke don't fix it :y :y :y
OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again :-X
Ken
It's good this, I can agree and disagree at the same time ;D ;D
Trouble is, older OSes are broken. And there are millions of PCs around the world that are compromised without their owners knowing. Tonights slowdown is one of the consequences of that
-
Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?.
Don't think that's a good idea. Every laptop I've seen for sale secondhand, including those on ebay, has been overpriced. Sellers are trying to recover as much as possible of what they paid, and their expectations are unrealistic, yet they often get what they ask from people who know no better.
You don't know what condition a second hand laptop will be in, either. For the prices expected, you can often get a new machine with a 12 month warranty.
-
OK, I am considering a bit of an upgrade, trouble is I still use a lot of older software that prob won't run under XP, so I'd have to buy all the soddin' stuff again :-X
I keep a 500Mhz Compaq small form factor PC with Win98 on it for those few occasions I need older programs.
No way I would attach it to the interweb, though! :o
-
Laptops tend to depreciate very fast as soon as they are sold, Why not consider a 2nd hand one from fleabay?.
Don't think that's a good idea. Every laptop I've seen for sale secondhand, including those on ebay, has been overpriced. Sellers are trying to recover as much as possible of what they paid, and their expectations are unrealistic, yet they often get what they ask from people who know no better.
You don't know what condition a second hand laptop will be in, either. For the prices expected, you can often get a new machine with a 12 month warranty.
Aye you are right, but they won't sell. Give them a few weeks, holidays looming and prices will drop. Last week, DV9000 wireless cards were £12 plus, I have just picked up several for £4.99, nobody else interested. Don't forget last Xmas people were selling "broadband ready, Wifi Enabled" laptops for £175. These were Tosh 4600's which are pretty nice but are at least 6 years old ( P.S. I've got one for a very reasonable price if anyone's interested!). Last week there was a DV6000 which went unsold at £220. Now that is potentially a nice machine, capable of taking a good processor either Core2Duo or Turion X2, and having lots of ports. Guarantee's are useful, but if you get it cheap enough, and it last over a year then who needs a guarantee?. Unless you pay extra for several years, and some companies refuse to honour the guarantee if for example the ram is not approved by them, or Hard Drive, etc. There are plenty sharks out there. My current laptop is an Acer with a 64bit AMD proc. The plastic is crap, keeps breaking, but it works and does what I want most of the time. I see so many Celeron based machines that are so slow, although they are not doing much. Trouble is the market got flooded with these things recently, and they keep ending up on our repair rack. Don't forget, for not a lot, you can fit a brand new 160GB SATA HD, and even less, a new DVDR/W, Dual layer to most machines, so an older machine will most likely have worn out the drives but the guts will still be good. One repair I did today was on a Compaq C300, fairly new but the light was pinkish. THis is a clasic sign of the backlight tube going. Its a bitch of a job to change but can be done for not a lot.
Ken
-
I think it's all luck and timing, then.
But I wouldn't want to pay £250 for an 18-month old machine when I can get a new one for £350. That's the sort of thing I was seeing las September when I needed to get a machine for my son.
But as you say, that was after the holidays...
-
Another good place for cheap lappies is www.bigpockets.co.uk - I just got my missus's niece a cracking little Gateway machine from them for £235.99, albeit Vista with a Sempron processor. looks really nice and well built too. 241.99 delivered with 1 year free back to base warranty.