It seems like only yesterday I was in the market for a new workhorse PC laptop. I ended up with a Samsung Series 7 (Intel i7, 8GB RAM/1TB HD, 64-bit OS), which I haven’t been entirely happy with. Anyhoo, now it’s a few years later, and that PC is a wheezing wreck that is about to get handed down to one of the other inmates, and I’m in the market for a new laptop.
Any recs? It has to be a PC, and I prefer a 17″ screen, backlit keyboard and numbers pad. It has to be a tough mofo because I’m on it all day with multiple tabs open. Mostly I’m on Word and Excel for work, but occasionally I use more demanding apps (video, web and photo editing). Also, I don’t want Windows 8, so I’m hoping to find a deal on a laptop with Windows 7 Pro.
If you don’t have any tech advice for me, please feel free to talk about whatever.
Baud
Wow. The specs on your old computer are what I was thinking about for my new computer.
WaterGirl
So, Betty, why does it have to be a PC?
P.S. I hope they are doubling your pay while you are keeping us in threads!
Corner Stone
Goodness gracious. Why don’t you just rig a shoulder harness and strap in a 32in wide screen HDTV while you’re at it.
*Notice I said “strap in” just in case Botsplainer stops by this thread later.
Corner Stone
@Baud: I know. I was nodding my head while reading it until I got to the “few years later” part, and I did a surprise, “Gosh!”.
FlyingToaster
Do you need clicky keys or silent keys?
(Note, I prefer Macs, but I use everything.)
JustRuss
Yeah, that’s a pretty beefy laptop. It’s probably getting wheezy due to Windows bloat and cruft. Back up your data, wipe it clean and re-install Windows. Even if you do get a new laptop, whoever inherits this will thank you.
Your old laptop is running Windows 7, I assume, any new machine you get will have Windows 8. I hate 8 with the passion of a thousand burning suns. You might be a lot happier sticking with your old laptop.
Ripley
I’m not sure of currently available specs, but Toshibas are some tough mofos. They seem to be one of the few that offer number keypads that I’ve seen, as well.
TXkid
My Toshiba i7 that I purchased 3~4 years ago is still going strong and is a monster compared to my Macbook Pro that I use at work. Hell, my Toshiba from ~10 years ago still boots up and works fine (albeit slowly). Nowadays, you will actually have to pay extra to downgrade back to Windows 7 if you don’t want Windows 8.
Tone In DC
Betty, this may be in your wheelhouse.
http://www.microcenter.com/product/428264/Inspiron_17_173_Laptop_Computer_-_Moon_Silver?ob=1
I agree, Windows 7 is decent. And 8 is just a glitchier ME or Vista without the Start button.
CJoffe
I have an AMD based ASUS that’s pretty decent. I think you can still get them with Win7. M$ has finally ‘enhanced’ Win8.1 to the point where it’s nearly WIn7.
I run Win8.1 and Ubuntu on mine.
Baud
They ain’t made a computer powerful enough to take on FYWP.
catclub
@CJoffe:
Plus, Libreoffice is getting very good.
Aaron
The computer you have is already awesome. Damn an i7. Your laptop is more powerful then every single one of mine. Back up the data, wipe it, do a clean windows install and then reinstall. Unless your running high end games, (end maybe even then) your current machine is really good.
Also, the clean and wipe thing- good idea to do it every year or two.
cthulhu
I am in the process of doing the same. I do a lot of heavy stats analysis and large dataset manipulation along with some programming and so I tend to gravitate to gaming rigs; good to have lots of RAM, SSDs and separate video. However since it is my employers purchase, options like MSI, ASUS, and Razor are off the table. In fact I was pushed rather heavily toward Thinkpad/Lenovo and settled on the Y50. The X1 Carbon looked to be a very good productivity machine at an amazing weight (I am used to lugging around a big brick) but I don’t think it would be appropriate for video editing. On thing I did notice in my shopping research: much harder to find 17″ screens; seems like 14-15″ are common even on the hardcore gaming machines with the expectation that you’ll port to a separate monitor or HDTV if you really want a big screen. I will be going from a 17″ to 15″ and frankly will be glad to lose some of the bulk.
On a side note, I’ve frustratingly noted that my employer was easily willing to pay more than retail until I pointed out what a rip-off some of the bids were. I would probably be bothered less if I didn’t work for a public university.
Michael G
Toughest laptops I’ve owned have always been ThinkPads. Lenovo bought the name from IBM a few years ago, and so far they’ve kept the quality up. (At least on the thinkpad line.)
Barry
@JustRuss: “Yeah, that’s a pretty beefy laptop. It’s probably getting wheezy due to Windows bloat and cruft. Back up your data, wipe it clean and re-install Windows. Even if you do get a new laptop, whoever inherits this will thank you. ”
Do this with new PC’s. They will all come with crud and sh*tware.
The Other Chuck
Any new laptop you get will have Windows 8 on it. Install Classic Shell (google it) for Windows 8 and you’ll get an identical experience to Windows 7, same start menu and everything. Just with slightly more boxy window decorations.
Still, I wouldn’t count that laptop as obsolete yet. Replace that hard drive with a SSD and you’ll see a world of difference.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
I agree with others that you may not need a new laptop. Before doing a wipe and reinstall, maybe consider (carefully!) using something like CCleaner. It can clean out cruft from your registry and fix lots of things that can slow Winders down (and free up a lot of space). But be careful with it.
Also, a new SSD can do wonders to speed up old machines. They’re pretty cheap now (but of course will be cheaper in the future).
HTH a bit. Good luck.
Cheers,
Scott.
Goblue72
@JustRuss: Ditto to that. I’ve got a 6 year old MacBook Pro that’s still running just fine, save for maybe needing a new battery.
On other hand, I’ve got Win 7 running on a partition on it via Bootcamp. Only installed it a few years ago & its already bloated itself to consume all the available HD space on the partition.
Makes me remember why I made the switch years ago.
Mustang Bobby
I’ve had Toshiba and HP laptops. The HP crapped the motherboard within a year and when I got it back from warranty service it lasted barely another year. Went back to a Toshiba with Windows 7 and the number pad. That was in November of 2009 and it still runs great. I already had a big plug-in monitor and wireless board and rodent, added a 2TB external drive and I’m very happy with the set-up.
I have a former student who opened up a geek shop in South Miami. Every six months or so I take the laptop in for a cleaning and tune up and that keeps it happy. Costs about $75 and worth every penny.
Villago Delenda Est
Via Powder Blue Satan, this is fucking insane.
20 years, my ass. Execute him with his own fucking .45.
Robert
You might look at one of the MSI ‘gaming’ laptops. 17 inch screen, dual SSD boot disk with a larger HD drive for data. So far my only issue has been the relatively crappy wifi drivers, but I think the newer model has a better chipset and drivers (though I could be wrong). Quite nice for the price (Newegg or Amazon).
SatanicPanic
@Villago Delenda Est: “On Facebook in July, Pickering shared a message from a group called “Cold Dead Hands” that blasted gun control. Pickering urged voters to “ditch the retards that are taking this country down the drain.””
Is this controversial? Sounds straight out of the Texas Republican party platform
gene108
I got an HP Envy for work.
Very fast.
It’s 15″ though, but it does have a number pad.
Mouse pad tries to copy a Mac, without distinct right-and-left click buttons, which is annoying, so I use an actual mouse with it most of the time.
BGinCHI
No way am I going to suggest that you get a Mac so that you don’t have to suffer through Windows.
No way.
coin operated
Betty,
That laptop should still be a screamer. Agree with the above…clean it out with a fresh install of the OS, turn off that stupid Windows Virtual Memory (you don’t need it with 8GB of memory) and have another go at it.
If you must, I have a Lenovo W530 for work. Screaming I7 8-core processor, 8GB of memory, and a SSD drive. I do a lot of Word, PowerPoint, and quite a bit of scripting work on here using Cygwin, and this thing is awesome.
MattF
My only advice is to get an external HD backup, like this one:
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=870
I’ll admit to being something of a backup fanatic (I’ve got at least two copies of everything)– but HDs always fail eventually, and in the modern world of today people have vast amounts of data at risk.
Linnaeus
You want the Ono-Sendai Cyberspace 7.
Waynski
My goodness. Apparently, the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement is now the kiss of death for right wing nut jobs. Is peak wingnut upon us?
Incitatus for Senate
I hope that Samsung was extremely cheap, because it should be good for another 3-4 years. If you didn’t need a huge screen it might be cheaper in the long run to buy a macbook and install windows on it.
catclub
@MattF:
and external disks are CHEAP compared to the cost of regenerating the data.
Botsplainer
@Corner Stone:
Strap what?
srv
Defrag the filesystems, reboot and if you’re not really using a TB then get a smaller SSD.
Origuy
I work at HP, I think I’ve mentioned before, though not in the PC division. I’ve had pretty good luck with the HPs I’ve bought. I think the business systems are built better than the consumer ones. The consumer models I’ve bought have had heating trouble, which may be due to the higher-power video cards. I just checked the online consumer store; they have three models that come with Windows 7, but I don’t think it’s Pro. The SMB store has W7 Pro models.
Betty Cracker
Thanks to everyone who suggested backing up the data and wiping the hard drive. That might be the thing to do. I haven’t ever done it with this machine — not since about a month after I got it to try to fix a vexing problem that has plagued me since I owned it: It’s always been really slow to boot up, which drives me nuts. And you can’t put it in sleep mode without crashing it. I spent a ridiculous amount of time in chat and on the phone with Samsung trying to resolve that, but to no avail.
@WaterGirl: My clients use PCs, so I have to as well. I’ve run into compatibility issues when I don’t.
Mandalay
@The Other Chuck:
You can order a new laptop from Dell with Windows 7: http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops.aspx?~ck=mn#!facets=280848~0~18078819&p=1
Roger Moore
@JustRuss:
This. Also, too, you should be able to say “I want a Windows laptop” without having to justify it to anyone. I’m tired of people who think any time somebody is talking about buying a new computer is a great chance to push their favorite OS. Switching is a pain, and nobody should have to justify their unwillingness to do so to a bunch of random schmucks on the internet.
goblue72
@BGinCHI: *like*
Michael G
@MattF: I gave up on backing up my own stuff and put everything in the cloud. $10 a month gets me a terabyte of storage and I can be super lazy. Yes the NSA gets to enjoy my stuff too but I’m so dead inside I don’t care anymore.
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub: Yes, but to realize that, you need to think more than short term.
And short term thinking totally rules the executive suite nowadays, thanks to the vile, corrosive influence of the MBA mentality.
The Golux
@JustRuss:
I, too, dreaded Windows 8 until my Win7 laptop decided to start typing on its own (I had already replaced the keyboard once), and had to get something in a hurry. $300 later at Sam’s Club, I had this little Asus notebook, and Win8 is no big deal. I hardly ever see the chiclet screen, and I’ve devised workarounds for the start menu.
When I got this, I assumed it would be a temporary replacement, but I’ve fallen in love with the portability of this thing (11″ screen, compact AC adapter). It’s probably underpowered for many people, but I’m mostly editing programs, so it works for me, as long as Firefox isn’t eating 60% of the memory.
pacem appellant
Your computer is fine, you OS is dragging you down, potentially your HD as well. Upgrade the HD to an SSD (you can find good deals at newegg.com). Install a fresh version of your preferred OS on your new SSD, and you’ll be amazed at the performance improvement.
gene108
TECH BLEG:
I have a 2008 Mac Book Pro.
The hard drive has an issue that cannot be fixed. It is still run, though a bit slow and buggy. I was told, when I took it to the Apple Store, that it is “vintage” model they no longer service and that one day my hard drive will truly die and I should regularly take back ups.
I like the track pad on Mac’s much more than PC’s, which maybe the deciding factor, but before I make a decision on such a minor point I would like some more information.
I was wondering what exactly the performance difference is between Mac’s and PC’s.
I see RAM, Hard drive memory, etc. as routinely being higher on PC’s, but I am told to configure a PC to be as efficient as a Mac, the prices would be the same.
I do not intend to start a flame war, I just want some info as to any substantive differences between the two, in terms of the hardware they pack.
CONGRATULATIONS!
The Samsung CD/DVD drives are shit. I’ve had 4 out of 6 break on the last lot I got.
That being said, the specs on that machine are better than any machine I use (not better than any machine I’m responsible for, I do IT). I’d backup the stuff you need, wipe and reinstall 7. I’m fine with Win8 but it pisses a lot of people off because it’s quite different – and quite stupidly – designed. There are workarounds but little point to learning them as the next MS release is going to get yet another total makeover.
If you’ve got to get a new one with all the goodies, well, I just ordered a Lenovo for our CTO that had balls to the wall everything. It’s a damn nice machine. Think it had 24GB RAM. SSD for the OS. Cost about 4 grand.
ETA: really happy with Dell’s new stuff, you can get Win7 for $50 more, and no known backdoors. Unlike Lenovo.
Keith P
Just for grins, check out an Intel NUC. They have a bunch of different specs (mine is an i3, but they come in Celeron, Atom, and i5 flavors). They’re not powerful systems (comparatively), but they’re good for most normal activities; I might start using another one as a development machine. I use mine as a Media Center since my DVDs and music are on a server.
Corner Stone
@Botsplainer: Indeed.
Mike E
I have a 4 year old Compaq/hp Presario, and while it is definitely feeling its age it still rocks right along. Biggest issues have been the battery life, cooling fan and the AC brick getting nuclear hot when the battery is depleted. l don’t know what I’ll get next, prolly a Chromebook or somesuch.
PaulW
Betty, I am liking my Toshiba, although I had to go with a Windows 8 because 1) i’m a masochist and 2) I have to teach it off and on at my library so I needed to use it.
It will cost more to go to a retail store to get a laptop with Win 7 still on it. Best bet is to go online and order one.
I know Dell has an Outlet store that sells refurbished laptops that are actually quite good – my library got 8 on order, they’re working great – and their website is http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/22/campaigns/outlet
I tried typing in Toshiba Outlet and got a referral page to eBay so here’s the link http://www.toshiba.com/us/OutletCenter
Corner Stone
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
I think I already know the answer to this, but what would a CTO need that machine for?
JGabriel
Betty Cracker:
@JustRuss:
Win 8.1 is really not that bad, once you take a few steps to customize the interface. And it tests faster than Win 7 on the same hardware, so it’s probably worth taking those step rather than sticking with Win 7.
I installed the Classic Shell Start Menu, configured it to boot directly to the desktop environment instead of the Win 8.1 Start interface, and turned off UAC (User Account Controls that get in the way of installing and running desktop programs) – and, wallah!, it’s basically a slightly faster Win 7 64, minus the some of the Aero eye candy.
PaulW
And can you turn off that goddamn autoplay ad?
Citizen_X
@Villago Delenda Est:
Another responsible gun owner!
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: Really fast Minesweeper games?
Villago Delenda Est
@Corner Stone: Really fast Minesweeper games?
burnspbesq
@Roger Moore:
Only if you didn’t get it right the first time. ;-)
different-church-lady
@gene108: Not that hard to replace a laptop hard drive on your own. A couple of months ago I did it on the Mac Book Pro I am currently typing this on. A 500 gig drive was about $65 bucks from Other World Computing. I think they even provided the how-to video on their website.
The old drive (which was making a disconcerting CLACK CLACK of impending death every once in a while) is now in an external USB case from Microcenter that was under $20, and I use it for my daily backups (which happen more bi-weekly).
Villago Delenda Est
@Waynski: The Teatards are really a muddled up lot. They are part of the party of the 1%, yet they’re not of the 1%, but they do know that they hate brown people with the heat of 10,000 burning suns.
A mass of conflicting impulses is what the teatards are. They’ll gladly take it up the butt from the Kochs if it means that they have a micron thick status above the hated browns and darker shades.
Villago Delenda Est
@Citizen_X: How big a yard does this guy have that a riding lawnmower isn’t just a King of the Hill joke?
JGabriel
@CJoffe:
Hail and well met, fellow multi-booter. I’ve got Win 8.1, Linux Mint 17, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Hybryde, and Sparky installed on my hard drives, plus a pen drive configured with about 50 Linux live distros to play with. At some point I’m planning to add Arch, Gentoo, and Linux from Scratch partitions to the hard drives as well.
cthulhu
@gene108:
Short answer: PCs can be configured at a far wider performance range and, if you know what to look for you can get great bang for the buck (including building your own machine). Apple makes mid to high performance machines that look nice and are more likely to be trouble-free: you pay a premium for this but many consider it worth it.
For a number of professional and personal reasons, I prefer PCs but Macs are nice machines especially if you like the OS.
srv
@gene108: Buy an ssd and replace the harddrive. Problem solved.
Laptop quality:
1) Some macbooks
2) Some thinkpads (not most)
3) Everything else is a piece of crap
JGabriel
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
@Corner Stone:
Oculus Rift Virtual Reality Pr0n.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Corner Stone: Not the typical ego bullshit. He had me spec it and paid for it himself. He uses it for astrophotography and the image processing involved with that. Kind of scary to see a machine with that much horsepower running with every core pegged for hours on end.
raven
I installed Yosemite on one of my mac this morning.
Baud
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
So hi def porn.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: I think we had this conversation when you bought the last computer. IIRC, you said then that you’d consider it next time.
All my clients have PCs and I don’t have any compatibility issues. :-)
catperson
I’m a huge fan of the 17″ HPs. The Lenovos (from what I hear) are cheaper and nearly as good.
But I think the recommendation to try and clean all the junk out of your old one is a good one.
I prefer Glary Utilities to CCleaner but that may just be because I was used to Glary before trying Ccleaner.
willard
I like Windows 8.1 with Classic Shell. It sucks that it takes a 3rd party app to get the “Start” menu back. The 8.1 update greatly improved mouse and keyboard useability.
Buy a laptop with a touchscreen to future proof it a little. Windows 8.1 feels faster than 7 on the same hardware.
I am a linux guy and I normally have a severe aversion to anything Windows, but Windows 8.1 is pretty good (provided you ignore 95% of the metro crap).
Baud
@JGabriel:
You beat me to it.
Mike with a mic
Older i7s aren’t that fast. Clock for clock a gen 1 i7 is half as fast as a gen 4. Uses slower memory and slower south bridge to access drives, and laptop parts are crippled and weak compared to desktops and thus show their age much sooner.
Look at the msi gs70 series for 17 inch
Mike with a mic
Older i7s aren’t that fast. Clock for clock a gen 1 i7 is half as fast as a gen 4. Uses slower memory and slower south bridge to access drives, and laptop parts are crippled and weak compared to desktops and thus show their age much sooner.
Look at the msi gs70 series for 17 inch
Corner Stone
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Ok, so more of a personal thing, and he can work on it also if sometimes needed.
I read it that since you ordered it, it was work.
Origuy
I mentioned that I’ve had trouble with overheating on my HP laptop. I found out a way to fix that which may be applicable to other models. I went into the HP Power Manager, chose the Advanced options, and changed the Maximum Processor State from 100% to 99%. I don’t know why this works, but it seems to have kept the system from getting really hot. Other manufacturers probably have similar utilities.
Robert Sneddon
@MattF: If you only have one backup you have no backups. Two backups are a good start.
The key thing is to decide what’s essential to backup (work files, medical and financial personal records etc.), what’s important (photographs, emails from friends and family, media you’re going to revisit etc.) and what’s not really necessary (work files from jobs three employers back, old financial records, TV shows you’re never going to watch again etc.). Cheap bulk storage tempts folks into saving EVERYTHING and then backing it up because, well…
As for new hardware choices for Betty, there aren’t many laptops with 17″ screens still on the market. However 24″ desktop displays of decent quality are now cheap enough that just putting one at each location you normally use the laptop in might be more effective, just connect the machine when you need the extra screen real estate and go with a good-quality 15″ display laptop instead. As I and my eyes get older the idea of a larger screen becomes more attractive — I’m just back on my usual 27″ 2560×1440 IPS desktop display after a trip abroad with a teensy 10″ netbook and it’s good to be home. Saying that I’m starting to investigate pricing and reviews for the new affordable 28″ and 32″ 4k resolution screens coming on the market. The tech isn’t quite mature yet though, it requires jumping through some obscure hoops to get them to work.
If you want a laptop you can use to beat a spammer to death with and still run Excel afterwards, Panasonic are the folks to go with. They can take a licking and keep on ticking, run hard for hours a day and not wear out other than cosmetically. They’re not pretty, cheap or light though.
You might want to try replacing the existing hard drive on your Samsung with a big modern SSD (and maxing out the RAM if it’s not already full) before you splurge out for a new machine. Installing an SSD is the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade you can give a PC, it is really eye-opening just how snappier it makes an older machine, desktop or laptop. A 500GB SSD should be enough gun for you but 1TB drives are affordable. Any good local computer shop could do the installation for you if you’re not into doing your own plumbing and drive cloning.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Is that a play on words?
Baud
@WaterGirl:
Ha! Not intentionally.
RareSanity
@gene108:
A lot of the “performance” differences between Macs and PC are more perceptive than substantive. OS X has always been faster to boot than Windows, and this is usually the most significant contributor to these perceptions.
I’m a software engineer, have been one professionally for 15+ years. I have used every operating system from UNIX, to Linux, to Windows to OS X…and just about every mobile operating system to boot. Every last one of them has pro and cons, so don’t let anyone ever convince you that there is one holy grail of operating systems.
At work I primarily use Windows 7 with a heavy dose of Linux, depending on the development project I’m working on…and at home, I mostly use a MacBook Pro, but also regularly use my Windows 7 desktop.
But there is nothing inherently better, or particularly different, about the hardware used inside of Macs and PCs…if you are comparing a high-end PC to a Mac.
Here’s the thing, none of the flame wars matter. You have to go with the thing that best fit what you use your computer for, and tell any detractor of that decision to kiss your ass…unless they are going to be writing the check for it.
Roger Moore
@JGabriel:
That’s “voila”, not wallah./pedant
draftmama
Windows 8 sucks but you can work around it very easily – I basically ignore all the cutesy new tools and pretend it doesn’t exist. I do have a Flexdrive to store stuff on rather than keeping anything on the computer itself, and once a week I clean off
my 1tb hard drive and copy the flexdrive to that. And THAT 1tb stays in a drawer, not attached to anything. Howdy boy have I learned as I get older lol.
Roxy
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I’m looking CCleaner right now to clean my Dell Windows 7 laptop. You stated to be careful. Can you give more details about this warning?
Thanks
Bob In Portland
For Mnem. From the open thread yesterday morning. Not all Russians are the same. Just like Ukrainians.
Betty Cracker
@WaterGirl: We did, but in the interim, I ran into a couple of minor issues while using Office for Mac on my iPad and on my kid’s MacBook, so I’m gonna have to stick with PC. In my line of work, one badly converted em dash can be catastrophic!
Roger Moore
@burnspbesq:
I know that’s intended to be humorous, but it’s just wrong. The problem isn’t right and wrong, it’s different ways of getting to the same place. Once you’ve learned an interface and gotten really comfortable with it, switching to a different one is a lot of effort with little or no immediate gain. If your goal is to get stuff done rather than to learn the software, switching is a huge distraction, even if there will be a payoff in improved productivity down the line.
Gene108
Thanks for the suggestions. I think I will go with replacing the hard drive.
Bob In Portland
Also, Cervantes was demanding accurate third-party reporting from Ukraine. His default position is that you can never trust the Russians, that you must trust the MSM until Judith Miller is led off in handcuffs and that it’s hard for him to type with fingers in his ears.
Well, you’ve probably viewed this guy as a neutral, third party, eh?
different-church-lady
@RareSanity:
Which is the kind of question that quite simply never gets asked by anyone offering advice. “What kind of computer should I get?” should immediately be responded to with, “What do you want to get done with it?” etc, etc.
I learned this philosophy over many years working with creative clients of different stripes, but it really hit home one day regarding music recording. Someone on a bulletin board (remember those?) asked, “What would be your perfect drum mic setup if money were no object?” A whole lot of people (some of them not at all novices) rattled off their choices. I was the only one who thought to ask, “Hey, what kind of music am I recording with this stuff? Because my choice of mics for a rock kit are not going to be anything like my choice for a jazz player.”
Something similar, but far worse happens with housing: ask anyone “Where should I live?” and the answer will almost always be, “Oh, my town!”
Ruckus
@gene108:
I was a MS person from way before windows because programs I used (Cad/Cam) only ran on MS. About 2 yrs ago I had a problem that only MS could help with and they so pissed me off I told them I’d fix the problem myself. First go buy an Apple and then run over the PC with my truck.
All of that said there really isn’t a lot of user difference involved. Yes details are different but Firefox is still Firefox, all of the current programs I use are available in both MS and Apple versions and work about the same. Apple is more of an open the box and start it up, MS to stay running good requires a bit of effort from the user. MS is easier to use to do those things, which I think is why it can be more infuriating. But Apple is not perfect and when things go wrong(and they do, like all things designed/made by man) it can be just as infuriating to get it fixed and generally requires you to take it to an Apple store.
Bottom line, purchase what you like and what meets your needs if you use it for work. Both have systems with lots of power if you need that, both have detractors, usually for reasons that really aren’t valid, like my hate for MS for their customer service and my dislike a lot of the design cludges they do.
JGabriel
@Roger Moore:
Wikipedia: Wallah
Urban Dictionary: Wallah
Though voila would have been appropriate too, wallah is what I chose to go with.
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
And if you don’t test your backup from time to time, you don’t have a real backup, either. It’s a very bad feeling to go to restore from a backup only to discover that the backup is corrupted or dead.
Backing up everything is a reasonable strategy if you have a plan for how to do it efficiently. Incremental backups make it relatively simple to backup even a very large amount of data quickly and easily; it’s only a pain when you have to restore the whole thing or make a new backup because one of your backup drives has failed. Even with that, it’s probably easier and faster to back up everything than to make the decision about which things are really worth backing up and which ones aren’t.
Corner Stone
@JGabriel: I thought it was a shout out to your long missing betrothed.
JGabriel
@Roxy:
Make sure you look at what it’s about to clean up so you can deselect anything you want to keep. Really, though, CCleaner is fairly conservative (as opposed to aggressive) in its cleanup choices, so it rarely causes any real problems.
That’s been my experience with it anyway. Your mileage may vary.
JGabriel
@Roxy:
Make sure you look at what it’s about to clean up so you can deselect anything you want to keep. Really, though, CCleaner is fairly conservative (as opposed to aggressive) in its cleanup choices, so it rarely causes any real problems.
That’s been my experience with it anyway. Your mileage may vary.
guachi
@The Other Chuck:
This. I bought an HP Spectre for my wife for Christmas. After a day or two to ensure it was working ok, I installed Classic Shell. No complaints about the interface.
WaterGirl
@Betty Cracker: Ah, yes! The em dash, it’s all coming back to me now. As I think of it, you must have purchased your last computer shortly after you started at BJ. I wouldn’t have guessed that it was that long ago – do you recall when you started here as a front pager? Time flies!
ruemara
@gene108: I use both & have for a while. My ’08 pro feels as strong as my i5 Dell from 2012. Switching can be confusing, but I run Adobe CC on both with no issues. The minimum MacBook Pro is on par with the gaming rigs in quality, just check specs on processor speed and display RAM & bus speed.
Trollhattan
I stick with HP, even in the Whitman era, and have had better success than the spousal unit, who insists on Dell.
To your specs I’d add a discrete video card (not motherboard video) and consider a solid-state drive and fast, fat external drive for data storage. Get the highest resolution monitor you can spec unless you normally work at a desk, then opt for an external monitor and keyboard when not going mobile.
Staying with Win 7 cuts your options by probably 80%, but there are still quite a few.
Bob In Portland
Some of you may have missed this. It may help Juicers to begin to understand what’s going on over there.
Also, I’ll make my daily request as to whether any of you can articulate America’s national interests in Ukraine. Not Ukrainian nationalists’ interests, US interests. Heck, for bonus points maybe you can articulate US interests in Afghanistan.
Trollhattan
@Betty Cracker:
Confess I’m not merely Mac-neutral I’m anti-Mac, even if the new Power-Mac mini-me Cray is the kewhlest kid on the block, evah. “Lord Vader, your new computer is now fully operational.”
Roxy
Thank you @JGabriel:
Trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Two of my good backups ganged up on my weak backups, killing one and badly injuring the other and then one of the good backups got caught in the crossfire and now he’s daid too. It was a
bloodsiliconbathcatclub
@different-church-lady:
Not my town. Go far away. Go north. Go east.
different-church-lady
@Roger Moore: The way I describe it to people is that your computer is your personal “environment”. Over time it takes on a particular set of characteristics that are unique to that user — the various combinations of software versions, add-on utilities, preference settings, etc.
Rebuilding all of that from scratch is a BITCH. Everything you’ve been taking for granted for months (if not years) no longer works quickly or exactly the same way. Things as simple as special keyboard shortcuts or not having your bookmarks handy can bog you down when you need to get things done.
So what I tell people is: there’s your files and there’s your environment. The files are the most important things to back up, because they can be used in a different environment if you need to. If your goal is to have a backup for when you accidentally delete your bookkeeping spreadsheet for April, then back up your files extremely frequently.
If, on the other hand, you want to protect yourself from an overall hard drive crash/failure, back up everything. This should bring your entire environment back to life almost as it was before (if not entirely), with relative ease compared to reinstalling everything from scratch.
A good plan, I would think, is back up your changed data daily, and your environment monthly.
I know all the recommendations about three backups, offsite backups, etc. And you know what? We’re mortal individuals, not archivists for the federal government. Blathering on about that kind of stuff to the typical computer user will just make them tune out everything you’re saying about backups. There’s one standard for your typical home computer user, and another for institutions. There no need to describe the inner workings of a Peterbilt 379 to someone who’s going to tow a UHaul trailer across town.
Trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
alt+0151. Yeah, it’s one of a half-dozen I actually commit to memory.
Roxy
@Betty Cracker:
I have a Dell laptop with a 17″ screen and love it. It would be very hard for me to go back to the 15″.
JGabriel
Trollhattan:
You’d probably both do better with a Toshiba. It’s been a few years since I had a laptop, but from what I remember, Toshiba was always the workhorse brand. I’ve got Toshiba Pentium 90 Satellite and an ancient Toshiba x86 the size of 3-4 of today’s laptop, and they both still run with all of their original pieces.
Things might have changed since I last looked at the market, but I suspect Toshiba is still probably the most robust of the mainstream laptop manufacturers.
catclub
Just in case you haven’t seen Outbreak, exciting news!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/07/25/west_africa_s_ebola_outbreak_is_spiraling_out_of_control.html
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker: Good god, woman, Boot Camp!
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: My primary backup system is an old PC with a lot of disk drives (eight at last count, about 3TB in total), older IDE and SATA drives I’ve accumulated over the years configured as JBOD with essential data duplicated on multiple drives. It only gets powered on two or three times a week to do the backups and then gets shut down again so I expect the drives to last for several years. I regularly run chkdsk and other tools on the drives and partitions to verify the hardware is still good. I don’t do incremental backups, I copy everything where the files have changed or are new — the connection is via GigE so although it takes a little while it’s quite snappy, even including the verify-after-copy process.
My secondary backups are to external USB 3 SATA drives, for essential information only. One drive is kept at a friend’s house a few miles away on a rotating basis, the others go into a supposedly-fireproof lockbox in another room. I also do cloud-based backups for essential data but that’s on an opportunity basis rather than on a regular schedule, and is limited mostly by upload bandwidth on my internet connection.
Yes, I have lost important information in the past when I didn’t jump through all these hoops, why do you ask?
WaterGirl
@Trollhattan: So where were you a couple years ago when I was having to figure out what key combination to use for the em dash when I was putting together a test document for betty cracker? Huh? Where were you then? :-)
JCJ
@Betty Cracker:
This will be a little odd of a suggestion, but you can buy PC’s without an OS installed in Thailand – a few years ago I bought one that way for my daughter who then installed Windows 7 Pro. The bonus is you can get it with the keys having Thai letters as well! (useful for her, maybe not so much for you other than as a novelty) Hers is an ASUS with an i7 processor. It has 8 GB of RAM and it has an Nvidia graphics processor for her gaming. I don’t remember what the hard drive is. I am leaving for Bangkok tomorrow. Come along and I’ll take you shopping! They have great selections in the big stores.
Oh! You can also custom make your own at Pantip Plaza. I would not buy the Windows program there as so much of it is pirated.
JGabriel
Slate via catclub:
You know things are pretty bad when a 60% mortality rate is the good news.
Trollhattan
@JGabriel:
Spouse strayed to Toshiba for one cycle and the fvcking usb connectors all disintegrated and couldn’t be replaced (was out of warranty) so that sadly constituted strikes 1 through 3 for me. Sample set of 1, but what the heck?!?
My desktop threw a bluescreen and subsequent memory error message on Monday, so I had thoughts of the buzzard of creeping computer death circling overhead, but I yanked four of the six cards (guessing, since it couldn’t/didn’t ID which card was bad) and bang, not only did the error vanish but the box became faster than it had been in months. Weird, but I’ll take it.
Trollhattan
@WaterGirl:
I was hunting wabbits, so was being vewy, vewy quiet.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Roxy: As JGabriel said, just be sure you want it to wipe out things that are selected.
E.g. If you like your web browser keeping a history, or keeping stuff to fill out forms automatically, be careful to uncheck those things. Similarly with “unneeded” file associations, etc.
I’ve only used CCleaner a few times, and the first time it surprised me when I let it do everything that had been automatically selected.
Also, be careful if you use some software that is locked to a particular machine. E.g. I’ve had issues in the past with MathCAD on aggressively cleaning out “unneeded” cruft. IIRC, if a certain empty directory is removed, MathCAD required the install CD to run again. That may have had nothing to do with CCleaner, though.
IOW, read the prompts before letting it do all its magic the first few times. :-)
HTH a bit.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suffern ACE
To combine many recent Betty Cracker threads, she should skip the computer and invest in a pair of these shoes for her next vacation. They look like skate shoes and are usefull for folks who might get lost in new places. Why use the GPS on your phone when your shoes themselves can guide you?
JGabriel
@Trollhattan:
Ah, well, in that case, I can’t blame you for avoiding them afterwards.
Trollhattan
@JGabriel:
Am sure it was an anomaly, but the memory lingers.
I still buy their hard drives, IIUC they are industry-leading in longevity. OTOH I have definitely bought my last Seagate.
Roxy
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Thank you Scott
Steeplejack
@Michael G:
LOL. I’m getting there.
danielx
I recently purchased a Toshiba with a 17 inch screen (nomenclature L75D-A7283). It’s discontinued, but they have several models with 17 inch screens that might fit your needs, although I don’t know about the backlit keys, which mine doesn’t have. It does have all the other good shit (AMD quad core, HDMI, USB 3.0 etc). Now about Windows 8….yes, Windows 8 majorly sucks, but it’s going to be near impossible to find a machine from a retailer with WIndows 7. I visited multiple online vendors and several brick and mortar retailers and they all told me yas, yas, we KNOW Windows 8 sucks, but we can’t get Windows 7 even though customers are screaming for it. And yes, Microsoft did fuck up in a major way when somebody decided that a touch screen metaphor operating system was mandatory for all devices running Windows, including non-touch screen devices. I suspect it’s not a coincidence that Ballmer resigned during that whole debacle.
HOWEVER….you can get a free add on called Windows Classic Shell from cnet.com among other places that will restore the start button, start menu and all the stuff with which you are familiar. I’ve been very happy with it, as opposed to having to learn a new operating system and a very kludgey one at that.
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
I keep my data on a RAID 1 to protect against hard drive failure and back up to USB drives for my actual backup. I have a couple with the same capacity as my RAID and cycle them back and forth between home and work. I use rsync to do incremental backups, which makes them easy and as fast as they’re likely to get. rsync is really the best solution I’ve seen. I just point it at my home directory and it backs up everything that’s different between the computer and the backup. I don’t have to think about what to back up and what to ignore; it does everything, and it does it efficiently enough that the incremental backups take too little time to worry about. It only takes much time if I have a big change, like when I’ve just downloaded a vacation’s worth of raw photos.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Think you might have missed some humor there. You’re giving us pedants a bad name.
ETA: Okay, so not humor. It’s tough for a pedant out there.
Xboxershorts
@srv:
not always. Not all SATA interfaces are created equal. Older early corei7 laptops may very well have an older SATA interface that might require a BIOS update in order to be able to consistently communicate with the much faster SSD drive.
Otherwise, you could wind up with periodic boot problems.
I’m with the “backup your data, strip and reload” crowd. Windows is entirely capable of self destruction by design.
Also, turning off virtual memory in windows is a bad, bad idea.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack: If it’s any consolation, I look to you for all my pedantry needs.
Steeplejack
@Corner Stone:
Thank you. I assume they are somewhat minimal.
I had your back on the marriage counseling last night, by the way.
Ramalama
@different-church-lady: @gene108 I agree with different church lady. not too hard to replace a hard drive and if you do, go for the ssd.
Other World Computing sells quality stuff but I have found ifixit.com to be much better with How to instrux.
am
@Michael G:
You made my day with that one! I’m effectively greppable by the right 3 letter agency. I figure that anything else would just slow them down and/or annoy them.
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
It’s really hard to tell. I think there’s a bad-spelling equivalent to Poe’s Law.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Poes’s Law.
Ramalama
All this computin’ talk makes me want to pitch out the word about World Computer Exchange.
If any of youse have a good computer (it has to work) but isn’t up to date enough to run your work software, etc., donate it!
Check it out: http://worldcomputerexchange.org/
Roger Moore
@Steeplejack:
ITYM Poes’ Law. Or would that be the equivalent for improper punctuation? In any case, unless you drift into straight LOLspeak, it’s hard to tell what’s humor and what’s authentic bad spelling and grammar.
Corner Stone
@Steeplejack: I, for one, am counseling nothing. I know nothing about their lives together except her perspective and what she has previously posted here.
But, it always amuses me when someone posts something so personal on a blog and idiots always want to chastise people for commenting on the post.
polyorchnid octopunch
I’m going to echo the others about how good the specs on your lappy are. Get rid of Windows and install the latest Ubuntu. I’ve been running Samsungs for the last few years and they are excellent on the linux compatibility front. It will run like the wind with the latest ubuntu on it. Nice thing about unices… they don’t require repaving every few years either.
Get out from under on the Windows stuff and join the open source world. You’ll have a learning curve to deal with, but it’ll be absolutely worth it in the long run, if for no other reason than you won’t have your data hostage to proprietary vendors of software.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@Corner Stone: Am I an inferior pedant? Not to suggest that Steeplejack isn’t the tits, of course.
Steeplejack
@Roger Moore:
Okay, you do need a humor transfusion.
C.V. Danes
@JustRuss: True, dat. I have an Alienware M11x R2, with an i7 chip and 8 gigs of ram. I just replaced the original disk with an SSD. Made a big difference to a machine that was already speedy!
ThresherK
@PaulW: Additional thumbs up for Dell Refurbished, at DFSDirectSales.
Don’t know if they’re still doing it in July, but in January I bought one with Win 7 Pro. It was “cosmetic Grade A” and had nary a speck of dust, nick, or fingerprint on it, even between the keys.
And the keyboards available on brand new laptops all seem to be imitations of the IBM PCjr chiclet device. You have to go backa few years to get something that touchtyping seems built for, say my fingers.
Trollhattan
Uh-oh you guys, you’ve gone and made Hodor! really mad now.
Won’t someone think of poor Maria?
Steeplejack
@ThresherK:
My little Lenovo ThinkPad X130e has a fantastic keyboard. Just wish it was backlit.
Bob In Portland
@Trollhattan: Some history for you here.
J R in WV
@Roxy:
Back up your registry before you alter it by cleaning it with any registry tool.
Bob In Portland
I just got a Windows 8 computer to replace an older one. I am having trouble but presume I’ll find the off button somewhere eventually. A couple years ago I bought a MacBook with 17 inch screen and spent years trying to get it to work. Not the OS, but everything in it seemed to be for shit. It must have gone down the assembly line right before the guy jumped off the roof. Replaced the hard drive, doubled the memory, but it kept dying until the Geek Squad replaced the logic board. Hopefully, now that it’s been gutted and the insides have been replaced I’ll have smooth sailing. Hopefully.
Bob In Portland
@Trollhattan: Maybe these guys came knocking. You know, they’re everywhere.
JustRuss
@JGabriel: Yes, Win 8’s guts are pretty good, but even with the Start Menu hack the UI is a disaster. If you don’t really touch it I suppose it’s OK, but if you need to dive into it to configure things there’s no avoiding the User Interface Formerly Known As Metro and it’s just painful. It just pisses me off that the biggest damn software company in the world screwed up this badly just because they could. Too Big To Fail lives!
RandomMonster
Advice you won’t appreciate: get a Mac and never look back. Especially if you’re doing any photo/video work at all.
My work laptop is a Toshiba. It would be okay except for the win 8 aspect. That OS couldn’t even blow a donkey right.
Robert Sneddon
@JustRuss: I’ve been running Windows 8 since the first early betas on regular non-touch desktop hardware and I have no problems with TIKFAM (The Interface Formerly Known As Metro) as I don’t use it or interact with it. For laptops and tablets touch is useful, for desktops the conventional UI that underlies Windows 8 is pretty much the same as Windows 7 was but with embellishments. The one thing I dislike about Windows 8 is the file search options which are poorly documented and not selectable from a menu the way they have been since XP.
Roger Moore
@JustRuss:
In the case of Microsoft, I don’t think it’s so much that they’re too big to fail as it is that a toppling giant takes a long time to hit the ground.
The Other Chuck
@Trollhattan:
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
coin operated
@Xboxershorts:
Really? Would love to hear your explanation for this.
With 8GB of RAM installed, why in the hell would you use the slowest part of your computer as transient storage?
Before XP, I might be inclined to agree with you, but I’ve been running systems with 4GB of RAM, turning off virtual memory, since XP Pro was born. The hottest product in the manufacturing / CRM space, SAP HANA, runs ENTIRELY in memory.
Virtual memory is a relic. Most desktop/laptop systems run just fine, if not significantly faster, without it.
Xboxershorts
@coin operated: Windows uses this as swap space. When an application is not active in the foreground or exceeds the amount of RAM it’s allocated to use, windows will place non critical functions of that application into the swap area managed by Virtual memory. Turning off virtual memory disables this swap space.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/what-is-virtual-memory#1TC=windows-7
8gb isn’t as much memory as you think with today’s extra large photos and HiDef video editing. But I s’pose if you’re not using hi resource consumption activities, you will gain a performance edge by turning off virtual memory. But there may still be a premium to pay because crash dump info would likely be lost because that is maintained in the page file within virtual memory.
Groucho48
I’ve only read the first third or so posts, so, pardon me if this has been said. You didn’t mention if you have a graphics card or not. With a 17″ screen, the onboard graphics might be slowing you down. If you aren’t gaming, you don’t need a top notch card, but, a mid-level one should boost performance significantly.
And, I third or fourth the recommendation of an SSD drive. They really pep things up.
coin operated
@Xboxershorts: Dude…I know what swap space is. Been doing this in Unix systems before MS 3.1 came along. Most Unix systems let you turn that shit off, as they understood it was a waste of cycles trying to use spindles as memory long before Windows came out with a 64-bit memory space.
I play DirectX 11 games on W7 without virtual memory, and have never had an issue. I also run multi-threaded script jobs that peg all cores of a P7 LPAR without issue. I don’t know what you do for a living, but working in enterprise spaces doesn’t appear to be on the resume.
And, if you think M$ gives a flying fuck about your crash dump, I want a hit of whatever you are smoking. Been there…done that…gotten better response from a Google community.
kenneth tiven
Second monitor is smart choice as extra word space helpful. SSD drive will make things MUCH faster. Load Word 7 on it and you will be startled. BTW, Mac runs Office, and its own software will save in MS format….But try the above, along with a conscious effort to prune the junk off the drive you are using now.
Xboxershorts
@coin operated: I’ve been in IT since 1984, I don’t do much in MSDOS, nor CP/M anymore. And I only use Windows 7 because I have to. For the last 12 years, I’ve been doing network engineering in a Juniper Advanced Services role, I specialize in MPLS traffic engineering and Class of Service for carrier class networks.
In the Netware 286 and 386 world, swap space on the server was mandatory. In Windows 3 and 3.1 and in 95/98 before 32 bit addressing was a thing, swap space was critical.
I may be wrong as far as Windows 7, my MCSE was in Windows NT 4, so I defer
Your tone, however, is pretty fucking harsh dude. Grow up some and have a real discussion without the harshness and maybe some day we’ll trade war stories over brews.
Monty
@JGabriel:
Its possible to buy new laptops from HP with Windows 7 preinstalled at the factory. I had a friend order one a few wks ago.
Also If anyone has windows 8 and wants a change its possible to purchase Genuine Windows 7 Disks from Amazon. You do have to wipe the HD and build from the ground up but you can get rid of Windows 8.
Robby-D
In my experience, if you want a reliable, stable laptop, get a middle-of-the-road spec from a good manufacturer with RECENT good reliability ratings. Bleeding edge stuff is unreliable due to it’s newness, while el cheapo computers have terrible hardware and build quality. Your machine is terrifically spec’d but might suffer from being bleeding edge at the time it was made, but shopping for a new computer and setting it up will take more time (and money) than the wipe so you’re better off trying that first and running with it for a while.
As to all the ranters about Win8, I have 4 Win8 machines and no stability issues. Know why? Win8 is really just Win7 with a new shell (user interface) and some improvements to take advantage of newer hardware and designs (touch, pens, etc.) Plus, wIth an SSD Win8 will start WAY faster than Win7, and interfaces change, suck it up, learn to use it, because we aren’t ever going back to XP. You probably all complained that the Start button didn’t say “Start” right on it when Win7 came out.
ASUS makes terrific machines. I have heard mixed reviews on Samsung. HP used to be crap, haven’t looked in a few years. In the end though the specific PC makes far more difference than the manufacturer, as all manufacturers make poor machines and almost all make good ones.
Xboxershorts
@coin operated:
If you have no swap space, you get no crash dump to google….you just crash. Swap space is the dump.