Its time for a new laptop. Not that my Acer's done bad, but it's limping like a senile three legged donkey on hot coals. The 40GB hard drive wasn't too bad in its day, but that was several years ago.

I don't really care about that though, i'll use an external for my music/video/photo archive libraries.

I'm more interested in RAM, processor, screen, toys..

And i've got a monkey to spank - ideas?

Depends what you want to do really and what your budget is. I have a Samsung R60+, 2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 15-inch display. Does just fine for web browsing, should be cheap to get one now too.

Acer 5735

I got one the other year, was gonna sell it but i was actually impressed with it. Seems pretty hardwearing, relatively quick. But i dont really use it for much other than D/ling shit, watching shit and the occasional bit of CAD. Runs windows 7 64 no problems.

This > All.

Edited 29 August, 201115 yr by Prox

This > All.

Wondered how long it'd be till that post occured

Personally I'd never buy a macbook due to how insanely overpriced they are. *waits for torrent of abuse*

apple = shit anyway mate, using old Fat32 drives.... about time they pull there finger out and using NTFS which doesn't have a stupid 4GB file size limit. Like their phones though, wait no thats a lie. I hate itunes, i hate apple i HATE syncing, miss the good old days of drag and drop on walkman phones from sony.

For the love of god don't buy an Apple PC. The ratio of performance to price compared to other manufacturers is fucking ridiculous. My custom built PC specs are as follows:

Intel i5 @ 4Ghz

4GB RAM

GTX 460 graphics (Factory overclocked)

Gigabyte USB 3.0 motherboard

BenQ 22" monitor.

Add a power supply and a DVD drive and that cost me £800

How much do you reckon a Mac with similar specs would cost? £1000? £2000?

And in-before the 'Macs just work' argument. Windows works fine.

Edited 29 August, 201115 yr by MattLoaf

And in-before the 'Macs just work' argument. Windows works fine.

The thing that irritates me is I don't have an issue with people slagging windows or using other OS. A while back I was running Ubuntu on my EeePC and I had to admit it was pretty slick.

However, most mac users I know, have windows installed as a second OS, or at the very least, use "Office for Mac". I mean cmon, if you're going to insist on being elitist and justifying your £2k purchase because "windows is shit" don't go and install software from Bill...

Also the custom pc sounds good, wasn't sure if there'd be any other pc builders on these boards! I bought a GTX570 when they came out and it's incredible.. the one thing I use to spend more money on than my car was my computers

Tempted to get a thread started but I tend to do fairly well at hiding my geeky side..

Back on topic, I use to be pretty involved in a few computing forums and as much as everyone hated to admit it, when it comes to value you're often hard pushed to beat a Dell, particularly in the low end side of things. I bought a studio laptop when I started uni and it was brilliant for the price, slick piece of kit too, with touch media controls, backlight keyboard, way before those things had become common place. When it comes to things like laptops your best bet is to set your budget and then just look around, see what deals the local pc world can do for you, at the end of the day there's not much in them around the same cost brackets.

Mikey it really depends on your budget!

Edited 29 August, 201115 yr by AMD_Man

old Fat32 drives.... about time they pull there finger out and using NTFS which doesn't have a stupid 4GB file size limit.

care to clarify a bit more? i quite regularly use files way, way over 4gb, massive photoshop and illustrator, CAD files etc of production engineering models of whole cars, and i've never had a single issue, even when running dual boot in windows. (on an i7 MacBook Pro, with the upgraded graphics card and 8gb ram)

This > All.

x2

had mine over 2 years without a single crash, unlike my pc.

oh look a pc vs apple argument, it is strange tho 9 times out of 10 it is the pc owners that make the first THEY ARE SHIT comment.

If windows works fine for you then stick to using windows?

I have numerous mac's and it is what i have used since i was a kid all those moons ago, i have tried PC's and they just did not work for me, so i stick with apple that do the job for me.

It is down to your own choice, depends what you want out of it? gaming? speed? graphics? an operating system that is 10 year behind?

Tempted to get a thread started but I tend to do fairly well at hiding my geeky side..

Fine, I'll do it.

Personally I never stated they are shit, and still stand by all of my comments

You can not escape the fact that you pay a premium for Apple hardware, now I'll happily concede until recently it was not available elsewhere as they used proprietary components, so there was a definite difference in your typical pc compared to a mac.

But nowadays, with your macs running intel core i7 processors, you can much more easily compare between a pc and a mac. And last time I checked, you still pay a big premium for what is essentially the same hardware inside. Is white paint really that expensive?

Joking aside, I have no qualms with the mac os, and if people can justify the premium to get a machine running this os, then fair play to you. I chose to put my money towards 2 more hard drives and doubling my ram personally. Every day I use atleast two programs that aren't available on mac, so again, for me, it's not really an option.

Windows 7 being 10 years behind? Now I've only used macs for 30 mins at a time so this is not a sarcastic comment as I'm not very familiar with them, but I'm genuinely interested, how are they 10 years ahead? Again, I'm not looking to argue here, just intrigued..

Edited 29 August, 201115 yr by AMD_Man

^^ It's certainly looking like Windows7, seems alright to me.

i7 is all very well, mac or windows, but it's out of my budget with what else i want. I certainly can't fit what i want in my current unit - the screen resolution is not good enough anyway.

2GB RAM, 120GB HDD, 15-inch display

No.

This > All.

.. an Apple PC..

My custom built PC..

If i wanna use PC i'll use our household PC. We, that is the wife and kids, have our own laptops/ipads too. It's 2011, Matt.

And i've got a monkey to spank

Mikey it really depends on your budget!

What did you think i was going on about..?

It is down to your own choice, depends what you want out of it?

Good point, but the fact is i don't entirely know! I do very little office work, i've only really used any computer for photos and music, with this laptop being my personal media station for the last several years. The only accessories used with it are scanner and stereo.

But i'm looking to expand into new stuff - various art and design, in particular.

I do understand, spec wise, you can get a lot better if you buy a windows computer

but i find the OS is a lot better, i've had so many PCs and since i bought my iMac a few years ago now, i feel no need to upgrade, rarelyyyy crashes etc

And i've got a monkey to spank - ideas?

for those not fluent in cockney rhyming slang (or those that thought mikey had a bizarre fetish. spank a mokey is to spend £500, so anything apple is out.

seen some good offers for big ol laptops with i5 processors for £399 thats probably the most power you will get from your monkey, spend the rest on peanut butter and ladies.

And i've got a monkey to spank

Mikey it really depends on your budget!

What did you think i was going on about..?

Masturbation.

And i've got a monkey to spank - ideas?

spend the rest on peanut butter and ladies.

Edited 29 August, 201115 yr by AMD_Man

honestly if all you want to do is web browsing, maybe watching a few videos and perhaps the odd bit off office work on it then you can't really buy a new laptop that isn't up to the job. By far the most important thing is keyboard comfort and screen quality (which both are a personal preference thing to some extent). Best thing is to go into some shops and try them out. Even if you then go and order the same one online somewhere.

As for Macs using FAT32 or NTFS, you have no idea what you are on about. Macs have NEVER used either file system format by default although they do have drivers to read and write FAT32 file systems since it's still commonly used on a lot of USB sticks and the like. Both are Microsoft only formats. Modern Macs use HFS+. OSX was based on BSD Unix and neither that or Linux have much in the way of NTFS support and have never used FAT32 as a default hard drive format (most Linux systems use the EXT format, currently EXT4 is common).

whether or not modern NTFS or HFS+ is better is something I don't really know as I don;t know enough details about them. But I do know that on Macs and Linux systems NTFS is to be avoided if possible as the drivers for it are pretty ropey. Most default to being read-only so that you can't damage the data on the NTFS partition you have as they expect to have bugs.

I've always been unsure as to the whole ntfx support in linux story. When I had a pkay with redhat a while ago it was a major arse ache and I prettty much gave up trying to access my music on my ntfs windows disk. However I'd been using ubuntu earlier this year and it happily reads and writes to my ntfs drives. One thing I never got working was accessing windows shares though.

you need to install Samba to access windows shares. Fairly sure Ubuntu has this by default so not sure why it's not working.

The problem with NTFS is that it's a microsoft proprietary "standard" and so the people who make the drivers for Macs & Linux have to attempt reverse-engineering to figure out what the driver should do. I've never really had much luck with NTFS in linux, it's a pain and unnecessary for me anyway. Just offload your music collection to a NAS/file server and use Samba shares or NFS over the network. Then all your computers can access it.

Edit - in fact, best thing to do now is to put your music and video collection on to a file server that supports DLNA and then use that to access it over the network as this is fast becoming the standard way of doing this. I have this at home and can access all my stuff on my Android phone, iPad, PCs, touch screen music player and my Internet-enabled TV.

I was trying to access the 3tb shared on my desktop running windows, iirc it would see the shares but there was a privacy issue - the shares were set to allow anonymous access, without any windows encryption etc hence my confusion.

I was running a dual boot on my netbook, might get ubuntu back on the netbook and try again as it definitely felt more responsive than the windows 7 install currently on it, need that for VCDS though so will have to go down the dual boot path.

I've bought one! Acer Aspire 7750

G series

My one includes..

1600x900 17.3in screen

Intel i5 (2.6/2.9)

2xUSB2 1xUSB3

HDMI

4GB RAM stock, expanded to 8GB (4x2GB)

640GB memory (still expandable)

Usual toys like webcam and DVDrw, on Windows-7 home premium.

It's well posh, tips £600 in this spec but it's looking ideal for my needs.

sounds good mikey

i bought a similar spec dell not too long ago for a lot more

what graphics included?

bought an acer for my daughter last christmas and its bulletproof

I've bought one! Acer Aspire 7750

G series

My one includes..

1600x900 17.3in screen

Intel i5 (2.6/2.9)

2xUSB2 1xUSB3

HDMI

4GB RAM stock, expanded to 8GB (4x2GB)

640GB memory (still expandable)

Usual toys like webcam and DVDrw, on Windows-7 home premium.

It's well posh, tips £600 in this spec but it's looking ideal for my needs.

Specs seem good for the price. I would look after the connector for the power though, a few friends with Acers have had theirs break on them thus rendering their laptops basically useless. 650GB should be fine, I have a 500GB drive and I've barely used a quarter of it, assuming you are using it for basic web browsing and stuff.