New computer advice

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Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
Put that into the browser and a big green screen came up about being space travelers came up. What is that all about? Is that the right site?

Will I need to add more than 8GB? For the use and the processor I could get is 8GB not enough? Would I get any benefit going up to 16GB which I guess is the next jump up and the max possible with many laptops I think?

In my ignorance of these things I kind of have the idea that the ideal system is one that all the components are of the same level. So if your processor is mid range then putting a lot of RAM in won't make to much difference because the limiting factor is the processor. Likewise a i7 with 2GB RAM is pointless. If I can get an i3 or i5 then perhaps 4GB or 6GB is enough with 8GB being a little excessive.
 

jmagee

Forager
Aug 20, 2014
127
10
Cumbria
Sorry wrong address

It's uk.crucial.com apparently.

You may be right although the A10 is top spec so may be able to use 16gb.

I just know many tech people won't touch HP.

It's a tough choice but do you need the A10 for the extra £60?
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
being greedy. I see a higher spec for a few more quid and suddenly my budget is blown and I'm back looking at celerons for £145!! I'm dithering and dreaming of a high end laptop without the money to obtain it. Situation is I can get by without a new laptop, I will be digging into savings I should not spend and will no doubt get a bit of grief along the lines of "why do you need that?!!!" from people. my partner did admit to never getting by without a laptop. She has 3 or 4 so not a problem (1 work, 1 11" and rest at her parents but are old and slow). i have work one which could be used but is slow now and would mean I could be monitored. Also I am loathe to save anything onto it that is my own files. Also I rarely take it home now since I commute a lot more by bike (random days so unable to plan).

It's a balancing act between needs, wants, budget and guilt at buying expensive stuff.
 

Adze

Native
Oct 9, 2009
1,874
0
Cumbria
www.adamhughes.net
with 8GB being a little excessive.

There's no such thing as 'too much RAM'

If you look at the clock speeds of late generation Core i processors and earlier pentium dual cores, there's not a huge amount to choose between them. I currently use a 5 year old Pentium Core2 Duo T5870 in an HP Pro Book, with 4GB RAM and a HyperX SSD. It'll start my preferred Linux flavour in 19 seconds from a cold start (excluding POST) and Windows 7 Pro in 26 seconds, under similar conditions.

The laptop came to me 2nd hand with a busted hard drive and, if memory serves, cost me £20 (yes twenty, it's not a typo) The SSD was about £90 and an extra 2GB of RAM (you can upgrade some HP's) for another £10 from the bay of evil. Total outlay £120.

Here's a comparison of that processor and a late Core i5...

http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core2-Duo-T5870-vs-Intel-Core-i5-5200U

Too close to call? How is that possible for such an old processor compared with the latest generation of Core i5? Simply put, it's the cost vs practicality. If you're after amazing graphics performance for gaming or video editing, then the i5 is the way to go, but for every day spreadsheet work you need RAM not processing speed and the clock speeds of the Core2 (2Ghz) and the i5 (2.2Ghz) just aren't different enough to make the extra spends ($5 on Amazon for the Core2 and $400 for the i5) even vaguely worthwhile.

The Lenovo, linked above, at £239.99 really is the answer and you get Win7 Pro with Win8.1 Pro on disk at the same time.
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
Just seen this. Costs more and only i3 but 8th with 2tb hdd. Seems like that's a big drive and overkill. Perhaps a case of put something in to grab attention but doesn't matter. Like putting high ram in with a very slow processor.
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
Sorry about going on about this and being indecisive but I have decided to spend up to £400 and have found this offer.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compu...urbished-15-6-laptop-silver-10011521-pdt.html

I know it is spawn of overpriced satan in PC World but it looks ok. Refurbished HP Envy with A10 processor and 8GT RAM. Plus a 1TB hybrid drive with SSD which I thinks help to speed things up. No optical drive but 4 USB 3.0 sockets which should allow enough options for a cheap external drive if I end up wanting it.

Now am I correct in thinking the A10 is top AMD processor and about i5 level? I think I heard it is better on working with video encoding and graphics than i5 but perhaps slower on the multi tasking. Or is that the other way around.

Also it is HP which means problems with accessing the RAM to upgrade but seriously I doubt I will go above the 8GB installed. The Currys computer expert told me at the weekend that HP sometimes has a lot of screws on the back to undo but then the top lifts off for access to the innards which is the opposite way of doing it. Think he was full of **** personally. Anyway a classic untrustworthy salesman that leaves you checking your watch and pockets when you leave.

Any views on this for £389.99??
 
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Macaroon

A bemused & bewildered
Jan 5, 2013
7,209
362
73
SE Wales
Sorry about going on about this and being indecisive but I have decided to spend up to £400 and have found this offer.

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/compu...urbished-15-6-laptop-silver-10011521-pdt.html

I know it is spawn of overpriced satan in PC World but it looks ok. Refurbished HP Envy with A10 processor and 8GT RAM. Plus a 1TB hybrid drive with SSD which I thinks help to speed things up. No optical drive but 4 USB 3.0 sockets which should allow enough options for a cheap external drive if I end up wanting it.

Now am I correct in thinking the A10 is top AMD processor and about i5 level? I think I heard it is better on working with video encoding and graphics than i5 but perhaps slower on the multi tasking. Or is that the other way around.

Also it is HP which means problems with accessing the RAM to upgrade but seriously I doubt I will go above the 8GB installed. The Currys computer expert told me at the weekend that HP sometimes has a lot of screws on the back to undo but then the top lifts off for access to the innards which is the opposite way of doing it. Think he was full of **** personally. Anyway a classic untrustworthy salesman that leaves you checking your watch and pockets when you leave.

Any views on this for £389.99??

What's a Curry's computer expert? I must have been asleep for a very long time and awoken in an alternative universe!
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
Well he had his smartphone set with links to intel and other sites so he could get the information quickly so I guess that means he was a Currys expert. A true expert would not need the websites I guess. I mean it is not as if they have much stock really. IIRC the store had at most 40 computers and tablets if that. After 5 or 10 minutes I had checked them out and could probably recite what was there, well out of the laptops at least. I guess to the spotty youth that was working there he was the wise old sage. That youth BTW actually had to ask him a simple question as easy as how to turn something on.

Does it make you feel old when the computer salesmen start looking too young to be out of school? Actually come to think of it a lot of school kids probably know a lot more than the main Currys computer guy, I guess they just had a saturday kid on duty who wasn't fussed about learning the job only getting pocket money.

The refurb A10 with hybrid drive and 8GB RAM, is that any good? I'm guessing about as good as one of the decent i3s (latest gen). I think I should get an i5 8GB machine for about that price refurb.
 

Far_Wanderer

Full Member
Oct 29, 2009
161
3
Lancashire, England
In my experience Intel is better at video encoding as they tend to handle different instruction sets that are more in that line.
You also can have too much ram as you get bottle necking due to memory bandwidths and how many channels it is.
Having a ssd will help massively with most tasks. If need be just get an external 2.5 inch drive for storage
 

Old Bones

Settler
Oct 14, 2009
745
72
East Anglia
Since clearance at JL started this week, you might do OK with Branch markdowns (red tickets), but there are still special purchases. Since you'd mentioned the refurbed HP Envt from PC World, there is the Toshiba with a very similar spec, but new, with a two year warranty for £399 - http://www.johnlewis.com/toshiba-sa...op-amd-a10-8gb-ram-1tb-15-6-metallic/p1965710

Have a look there before parting with any cash - you can ask questions, and look at the thing first.
 

Greeny

Member
Jun 21, 2015
31
3
Cheshire
Scanning through this, I picked up on a few bits.

Pretty much all known brands right down to base models will happily run Excel, clunky running may be a limitation of internet download speeds if it's a 'cloud' (gag hack, hate that buzzword) based version of office.

All the 'cloud' means is that the resource/storage of data, is on someone else's computer somewhere and you are running it from their machine via your internet connection.

With regards to throwing loads of RAM at a machine, this is only if you are running a 64bit version of Windows. 32bit versions can only address 4GB of RAM so any more is totally pointless.

When using intel processors, the Celeron is a less able version of CPU, so if we were looking at a Pentium processor you could have one with a lower number of Ghz than a Celeron but it would perform better than the Celeron.

With Microsoft Office I believe it is still the case that if a member of your household is in full time education then you are entitled to a discounted student pricing for Office (which is DIFFERENT to the student/teacher versions you see on the shelves which are cut down and offer only some of the Office applications)

Also if you have a member of the household at school/college/Uni, their educational establishment may have a Microsoft licensing agreement which allows them to offer you the option of purchasing the entire version of Microsoft Office for about a tenner (Yes I did say about £10 !), they just send you a link to purchase and download it.

(Not all educational establishments understand or make it known that this is the case so push them to find out )


Hope any of this is of some use

Just an edit - other possible reasons for Excel running like a dog is if your spreadsheet is linked to other documents, particularly if linked to Access.
 
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Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
It's as much about multiple files and programs open and copying details from them. Also some include external links and macros. Indeed it's often bad with just macro enabled excel files.

Of course e450 processor isn't a good one I reckon. It's running w7 64bit apparently. Also avg which IMHO is a real dog of an av package. It's tendency to auto set up scheduled processes over night that actually go off in the day because I turn laptop off at night. Then again the it company that supports the company likes one of those programs on the laptop that allows them to take control remotely I'm actually not keen on that since it doesn't seem too secure to me.

All that means I need my own laptop.

Will have to check up on that uni ms office deal since other half a registered uni student. Thanks for the heads up on that greeny
 

Greeny

Member
Jun 21, 2015
31
3
Cheshire
You're welcome paul_b, as I say it is dependant on the type of license agreement they have, but it costs nowt to ask. If they don't have that as an offering then try to track down the version in the stores/online that students can buy (I recall you don't get the product off the shelf just a box with details how to purchase it online - don't take that as 100% accurate though as it's a while since I looked at that)

AVG should allow you to set when processes run, and allow you to chose for it to run in the background with less impact on performance. At work I have advised either that or Microsoft Security Essentials for laptops for a good while (I do have to say AVG has picked up things that MSE has missed). Ultimately though it has to be a program you have confidence in, is easy for you to use and is effective enough for your purposes.

The remote software should only impact when in use, but other corporate stuff may do. Oh and notorious for dragging down performance is that hateful 'virus' iTunes !!! Spawn of the devil :lmao:
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
ITunes? Got that on for my shuffle I got cheap. Don't use it at all now so probably remove if it slows down everything.
 

Greeny

Member
Jun 21, 2015
31
3
Cheshire
It seems to constantly 'chatter' to the internet, probably checking for media licenses, album covers. track info, itunes updates (oh and iTunes installs usually installs stuff like safari and Apple software updater too).
just make sure to back up all your music somehow if you choose to delete iTunes.
 

Paul_B

Bushcrafter through and through
Jul 14, 2008
6,151
1,544
Cumbria
My music was converted from mp3 tracks anyway as I only got the iPod shuffle because I'd lost a better mp3 player from creative. Get rid of iTunes I'd be able to delete the duplicated music files in aac format.
 

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