Which laptop?

[tommy the cat]

I've had too much Southern Comfort tonight to get too deeply into this, but the whole "don't bother to learn anything about what you're doing and just use Windows" thing leaves me a bit cold. I regularly see people sending five megabyte spreadsheets to each other by email when all they want to do is tell their correspondent the price of a bag of sugar. Windows or not Windows, if you spend just a little time learning something about what you're doing, you can make truly staggering improvements in efficiency.


It might be worth mentioning that 100% of the botnets on the planet are made up of Windows machines. I spend ridiculous amounts of time defending networks against attacks from such things so I suppose I can be expected to have a fairly jaundiced view of Windows machines in general, but looking at it from another point of view there are huge sums of money being made selling anti-virus packages for Windows machines, and I don't even consider such things for my GNU/Linux boxes. There are essentially no viruses in the wild which attack GNU/Linux machines, nor Apple machines either for that matter. Almost every Windows machine I've seen has been subject to some sort of a compromise at some time. My personal best was a customer in Sutton-in-Ashfield who had over 1,300 assorted viruses on the MD's secretary's Windows XP box. That's a security company. Still a customer. Still using Windows. To give them their due, they store no customer information on their computers, but what an indictment of Information Technology that you daren't use it for customer stuff!

When I actually try to get anything done on a Windows machine I find that the best way to make progress is to install something on the machine that gives me as near a POSIX environment as I can get, so that it doesn't feel like I'm blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back and a sock in my mouth. If it isn't a Windows box, I don't have to do that -- I can just get on with the work.

Okadokay then is it the Acer your saying then.?!

 

[RM27]

Okadokay then is it the Acer your saying then.?!

Got a link?

 

[ged]

Okadokay then is it the Acer your saying then.?!

I suppose I'm saying that there's more to it than the size of the screen. Knowing what you're going to use it for is a good start, I think from what you've said that the school work needs to be looked at more carefully. Are there any applications (programs) that are absolutely essential for that work? That might dictate what you can and can't get.

The competition amongst manufacturers of this kind of thing is fierce, so to a degree you get what you pay for. If you want a laptop then fair enough but although they tend to be more portable they're usually much more expensive per [pick any measure of performance] than desktop machines, finding and fitting expansion cards is usually somewhere between a nightmare and impossible, and they're pigs to service. I was once quoted sixty-five quid for a p0xy little power connector that should have been sixty-five pence tops. But it wasn't available anywhere else so I told the supplier to take a running jump at himself and fitted a chocolate block instead. Not pretty but the customer was happy that it worked again and the repair didn't cost more than the machine was worth. Laptops are much more easily lost or stolen than desktop machines.

My recommendation before you buy one is to get as much feedback as you can from people who have used one. Has it been reliable? If it had to be repaired was it costly? How long is the warranty?

Some of the low-budget laptops are a repair bill waiting to happen. In my experience the more expensive brands tend to be more reliable, but for example the HP hardware can sometimes be a bit, well, different from the mainstream. That might not matter if you don't intend to do anything out of the ordinary, but if, say, later on you wanted to fit a bigger hard disc drive then your options might be limited and expensive.

 

[EdS]

Remember though not all software will run / is supported on GNu/Linux machines -- memory map and Quo mapping for a start.

 

[sandbender]

"...Some of the low-budget laptops are a repair bill waiting to happen. In my experience the more expensive brands tend to be more reliable..."

Indeed, I purchased an Apple 'Pismo' Powerbook in early 2000 for a price which at the time thought was very expensive, I used it for home and office for a couple years then for three years it banged around construction sites being used to program lighting and HVAC control systems. I retired it in late 2005, my nephew used it for a couple of years and my sister is still using it today.

Money well spent.

 

[Tadpole]

I've had too much Southern Comfort tonight to get too deeply into this, but the whole "don't bother to learn anything about what you're doing and just use Windows" thing leaves me a bit cold. I regularly see people sending five megabyte spreadsheets to each other by email when all they want to do is tell their correspondent the price of a bag of sugar. Windows or not Windows, if you spend just a little time learning something about what you're doing, you can make truly staggering improvements in efficiency.

It might be worth mentioning that 100% of the botnets on the planet are made up of Windows machines. I spend ridiculous amounts of time defending networks against attacks from such things so I suppose I can be expected to have a fairly jaundiced view of Windows machines in general, but looking at it from another point of view there are huge sums of money being made selling anti-virus packages for Windows machines, and I don't even consider such things for my GNU/Linux boxes. There are essentially no viruses in the wild which attack GNU/Linux machines, nor Apple machines either for that matter. Almost every Windows machine I've seen has been subject to some sort of a compromise at some time. My personal best was a customer in Sutton-in-Ashfield who had over 1,300 assorted viruses on the MD's secretary's Windows XP box. That's a security company. Still a customer. Still using Windows. To give them their due, they store no customer information on their computers, but what an indictment of Information Technology that you daren't use it for customer stuff!

When I actually try to get anything done on a Windows machine I find that the best way to make progress is to install something on the machine that gives me as near a POSIX environment as I can get, so that it doesn't feel like I'm blindfolded with my hands tied behind my back and a sock in my mouth. If it isn't a Windows box, I don't have to do that -- I can just get on with the work.

Nearly right, the first linux botnet was found over a year ago, Notice I say found, there may be others out there, sitting and working un-detected.

 

[rik_uk3]

Remember though not all software will run / is supported on GNu/Linux machines -- memory map and Quo mapping for a start.

True Ed, I had a lot of trouble getting a wireless adaptor to run on ubuntu on an old laptop. Nowt wrong with linux and it is a learning curve but most of us want stuff to work straight from the box.

 

[tommy the cat]

Thanks for all your thoughts.
I have a pc but it's along way away from my router so the signal is week+ it's in a coldish bedroom that means the missus moans I'm not spending time with her!
But yep you get what you pay for so I'm staying away from the 'entry level' basics but don't want to spend much more over £500 as I've got the tower upstairs as well.
Ta again d

 

[rik_uk3]

Thanks for all your thoughts.
I have a pc but it's along way away from my router so the signal is week+ it's in a coldish bedroom that means the missus moans I'm not spending time with her!
But yep you get what you pay for so I'm staying away from the 'entry level' basics but don't want to spend much more over £500 as I've got the tower upstairs as well.
Ta again d

Do you need a laptop then? I've plugged an old tower into the bedroom telly and put it on the home network, wireless keyboard and mouse and away you go.

 

[ged]

Richard is right, you might be better thinking about how you can better use what you have already. The tower is probably at least as powerful as any laptop you would buy and the tower probably it isn't doing very much most of the time, so it seems a shame to waste its potential. All you really need is a way of connecting to it to tell it what you want it to do and see what it says on a screen. Without going back into the operating systems debate, most of the machines I use are (a) remote from me and (b) serving many other users simultaneously. Computers can do that sort of thing easily, it's only people like those who run Microsoft who will tell you "another user is logged onto this machine, if you continue they may lose their work". Microsoft deliberately cripples its software. I think that by now, the cost to British Industry of that, plus all the aggravation from botnets and viruses has far exceeded the cost of all the damage that the Luftwaffe ever did..

I use a laptop most of the time, but to me it's more or less just a screen and a keyboard. I can drive any of the other machines I use from the laptop just as if I were sitting next to the machines I'm driving. But they're spread all over the world, so it's physically impossible to sit next to them all at once. I just have a dozen or so windows open (most of them hidden, I don't like a cluttered screen) and when I want to take a peek at, say, my mailserver in Sheffield I just switch windows. These windows are 'X' windows by the way, not "Windows(TM)" windows.

You can set up your tower to be driven remotely. Look up "remote desktop". Then a very cheap, not very powerful PC can drive a more expensive powerful tower and you can have the best of both worlds for very little outlay.

Not sure what you mean by 'the signal is weak' but there are plenty of very easy ways to get around that. I'd recommend a wired (Ethernet) connection if at all possible. More secure, cheaper, faster (within the home LAN, you can easily do a thousand Megabits per second -- wireless will typically do 54 Megabits per second tops). The LAN speed starts to be important when you use 'remote desktop' and similar. Where possible I avoid it with my systems, you can too if you install something like Cygwin, but don't go there for now.

 

[tommy the cat]

I like the fact rik I can watch you tube or surf the net whilst her is watching cack tv! All I need is headphones and I'm away.
D

 

[ged]

Nearly right, the first linux botnet was found over a year ago, Notice I say found, there may be others out there, sitting and working un-detected.

No, not "nearly right". Right. That was not a botnet, it was just (to put it politely) a security lapse. Granted it was on a fairly large scale for non-Windows machines in that it was almost a hundred machines, but (a) it was never a botnet and (b) it was quickly shut down by the service providers so it no longer exists.

Nobody is saying that if you're incompetent your computer can't be hacked into. But they are saying that there is nothing comparable to the millions of Windows machines which have been 0wn3d by automated means and corralled into zombie networks, all without any unreasonable action on the part of the operators of those machines. That just does not happen outside the Windows world.

http://www.itworld.com/security/77499/first-linux-botnet

As for what may or may not be Out There, that presumably also includes Little Green Men.

 

[Tadpole]

.....................edit

 

[Xunil]

This is starting to get a little tense...

tommy the cat: is there no way you can relocate your current setup to a more convenient/acceptable location ?

The trouble with desktop computers is that you really need to devote a room (or a large chunk of one) to them. I stopped using desktop PCs at home about 3 years ago because of that.

Laptops are portable (obviously) and you can put them away when you're finished with them, but they have almost zero upgrade path apart from adding more memory or replacing the hard disk. If you can accept that and work within those parameters then a laptop makes a lot of sense.

One of my clients refuses outright to spend more than £500 on his reps laptops because his reps appear to be completely unable or unwilling to look after them. Despite that budgetary constraint he has had one hardware failure out of 24 laptops and, because it fell within warranty term, the offending part was replaced onsite at the reps home the day after reporting it.

The same client has stopped buying MacBooks for his marketing team and graphics designers because he has had 6 out of 11 units fail spectacularly just out of their initial 12 month warranty. I advised him to buy into the extended AppleCare warranty cover but he didn't. That said, you would expect a MacBook to soldier on for longer than 13 months, wouldn't you ?

I think he was unbelievably unlucky but he has lost all faith in the brand because of this bad experience.

Cheap need not mean you need to expect trouble, but it will mean you get a machine with less grunt overall (from the quality of the screen through to speed, heat output, weight and so on).

I used to buy my former wife a Toshiba or Acer laptop of around or under £500 every couple of years - the older one was always re-purposed to the in-laws or to relatives or friends. She never had a hardware failure from any of them, and worked productively with them from the first day until they were replaced.

I could provide endless links discussing how quickly you can compromise a default Linux installation, and endless links on Windows problems as well. Provided you take some pretty basic precautions and don't go wandering to places you really shouldn't go online then there is no reason why you shouldn't enjoy stable, reliable and secure performance from any Windows machine.

I think it's pretty fair to say that if your online habits are sensible and self-policed, if you use antivirus software and if you don't routinely open unsolicited emails with attachments or click the links in the email body then there is no reason to expect your computer to become compromised.

A hardened Linux machine is a tough nut to crack, but so is a protected Windows computer. A default installation of either is a very different kettle of fish.

If you do buy a laptop you can power it up, answer a few simple questions and be online in a few minutes. If you want to play with any other operating system after that then you can make that call, or if you want to just get on and use your computer as is, you can.

Ebuyer.com has plenty of sub - £500 laptops in which offer great value for money and that will do everything but high-end video editing or playing the very latest graphics intensive games. That could be a way forward if you can't think of a way to relocate your current setup to allow better use of it.

And finally, my sincere apologies for starting the whole Linux/Windows debate.

 

[ged]

This is starting to get a little tense...

Maybe it would have been better if I'd said 99.995%...

By way of relaxing the tension, it's worth mentioning that some of the machines I drive remotely are Windows machines. They are all customers' machines of course, I don't own any Windows machines. The remote desktop facility on XP and later versions of Windows works fairly reliably, and although I prefer other methods I routinely use the 'rdesktop' utility on my GNU/Linux laptop to drive Windows boxes if I need to see what's rendered on the Windows screen. If you have a reasonably modern Windows you should be OK but I wouldn't use it for older versions than XP. Windows 2000 for example seems to crash fairly reliably if I try to do that, so I use Cygwin and ssh, which I prefer anyway. You shouldn't really be using Windows 2000 and older anyway, there are no longer any security updates. Unfortunately there are still a lot of those machines around. On a typical day my mail servers block anything up to ten thousand attempts to send spam to me. I use OS fingerprinting on incoming connection attempts, and half of those attempts come from Windows 2000 boxes.

Anyway if your PC in the cold room has Windows XP or later on it, you might want to consider driving it from a Linux laptop, then you'll have what both worlds have to offer. The school work can run on the Windows machine if it needs to, and your browsing, photo editing and whatever can be done with whatever tools feel most comfortable, and you won't have to buy another licence for your anti-virus package.