OT: New computer

[Java Jive]

W7 is definitely better than w8. What follows is a mostly a regurgitation of a recent post of mine to a thread entitled UEFI in uk.comp.os.linux. But first, note the point about UEFI! Any modern PC is likely to have its boot system hard-wired into Windows, and probably W8 at that. If this is likely to be a problem to you, ensure that the BIOS allows a legacy non-UEFI boot option.

"I bought a Dell Inspiron recently that came with UEFI and W8. ... I gave the it about a week before I gave up, contacted Dell, and asked for a W7 installation disk. I wouldn't have been able to, survive W8 even that short time if I hadn't disabled mouse gestures. I can't comment about it on a phone, and have absolutely no desire to try it out, but on a laptop I think it's virtually unusable.

It's a bit like having your PC controlled by the alternative 'School Marm' personality of the computer in Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's not just as very awkward and unergonomic to use as every version of Windows has become increasingly since W2k - the only GUI that I would feel happy about describing as 'professional' - the willy-waving 'wizardry' of W8 actually constantly obstructs normal use.

I've heard others express equally low opinions of it.

I'm not particularly keen on W7 either. At least it is almost usable, but I find it significant that now I have a choice between 2K, XP (all three machines having the same basic OS build, the XP version being upgraded from the 2k version), and W7, I still do most of my actual 'hard graft' work on my older Dell Latitude (XP - day-to-day office work like emails, letter writing, research, and browsing; being used to post this) and the two self-built P4s (W2k - long-process jobs such as scripted data format conversions, video processing).

MAINLY because it runs W7, the new laptop is delegated to the role of a media player device costing about double what it would have cost to buy together a networked media player and a much larger screen size TV. And I would have got HD into the bargain!"

It's not really my field, but I believe solid state drives can only survive a given number of write cycles, which, though large, is likely to limit their useful life compared to a conventional HD. Certainly, if using one, even more so that with a conventional HD, I'd ensure that my back-up system was working flawlessly.

TBH, I usually ignore such lists. I reckon to know what I want better than anyone else.

Can't comment on the other, but ABSOLUTELY NOT SCAN!!! Had two bad experiences with them, seperated by a number of years, and the second one, after deciding to give them a second chance, was just about my worst experience ever with faulty goods. In the end, I asked my credit card to intervene, hoping that it would end with Scan being taken to court, but this they declined to do, preferring to refund me from their own guarantee system instead.

I'm obviously getting seriously out of date, quite happily managing to get through a lot of work on just a slow Dell Latitude running XP, and a couple of P4s (one currently unserviceable) running W2k. The working is P4 is currently running flat out doing a geo-conversion job, which I anticipate will take it about 2 days to complete. I suppose it would be nice to have it done quicker, but I suspect the nature of the job would meant that it would still take over a day, even with newer hardware, and, with so much still to do on the new house, it seems mad to go spending money when my current kit is actually doing what I want.

The other thing I would point out is that it is getting very tiresome trying to build one's own PCs. It used to be a very easy thing to do, but when I built the P4s, I had a great deal of trouble that I could have done without.

Because P4s chuck out so much heat, I couldn't use my favourite, much-loved desktop case, so unexpectedly I had to buy a new case, and couldn't find a desktop design I liked, so had to have a second tower.

Because the motherboard power connectors were changed for the P4, I unexpectedly had to buy two new PSUs. These both had such absurdly short drive power cables that I've had to use extensions, which have proved very unreliable.

The upgrade to SATA has given a new raft of problems with the data cables. With IDE, the problem was gett So, I suspect that when I upgrade a desktop, I'll just go for a cheap HP server option, or something like that.

[Bob Eager]

I find W7 fine but it's been tweaked to look like XP! Since I get it free, I can't complain.

My i5 system chucks out a good deal less than the old Prescott machine it replaced. And it's a lot quieter, and uses about 60W less, quiescent.

Depends on the PSUs. I've been paying a bit more for 80+ Corsair modular PSUs recently and the cables are fine. Again, the extensions (if you need them) vary a lot in quality.

Latching SATA cables are the ones to go for. I do find great variation in quality, again.

Current price for the new microservers is under £98 inclusive of VAT, delivery a little extra. That's from serversplus, who I have found very good. They are noisier than the new i5 though (mainly because the i5's case cost more than a whole microserver!)

[Michael Chare]

The Haswell processors are due for release next month!.

[Clive George]

I find W7 fine too, just run it in windows classic more (ie Win2K lookalike, not tellytubby XP). I reckon it's better than Win2K and XP, though at least part of that is that it's when the 64 bit version matured.

[Bob Eager]

I use the same approach, and I put the Quick Launch toolbar back too!

[dennis]

I have had about 20 laptop drives and one SSD in the last 5-10 years. So far I have had one HDD fail and one SSD fail. The HDDs are the ones that end up in the drawer as they are replaced with bigger drives.

[Martin Brown]

I have a span of machines and OS's back to Win95. I haven't had to use that for ages (in fact I know it would require work to boot). But I am loathe to throw it out because some very old custom hardware I have will only work properly on older slower machines. And I have a couple of chip programmers that need real legacy parallel ports under DOS.

Virtual machines are wonderful for most things but they don't fake peeky pokey legacy hardware IO support at all.

I have a rule that I only buy new kit every time the performance is threefold better than what I have. Enough speed gained to be worth the effort of reinstalling everything and starting again on a new box.

This used to be roughly every couple of years but has now stretched out to nearly 5 years. And I had to take a bleeding edge i7-3770(2012) to get a performance more than 3x better than my previous Q6600(2008).

Last year was a bad one for replacements. My older big orange portable took it upon itself to go belly up just after I had been forced to rely on it exclusively working away from home. It got replaced instantly by a very nice secondhand Samsung RF711 that was sat in a nearby CEX. I had to think a bit first about whether I could live with the keyboard.

Battery life is a bit rubbish but it mostly gets used tethered to mains. There is a spare drive bay for an SSD when I get a roundtuit. I am impressed with the Samsung SSDs 830 and now 840 they handle highly compressed data very well - unlike some of the other makers kit.

An SSD is probably a cost effective way to extend the life of an older PC provided it contains a CPU with a CPUbenchmark of 3000 or higher.

Someone asked which benchmark elsewhere in the thread. I favour this one as a pure CPU capability measured downhill with a trailing wind.

You will only see the full benefit on a hyperthreaded multicore CPU if your applications really can use them efficiently (most apps cannot).

Moores law only says that the number of transistors that you can put on the chip increases exponentially with increasing time. It still holds for now but doing finer lithography is getting ever more difficult. And the latest news on this is not particularly good - more delays for EUV.

This rapid progress has meant initially faster clock speeds, then more threads, more cores, clever pipelines and fancy caches. But they have basically run out of gofaster stripes to pinch from mainframe architectures now. And more cores >4 doesn't make most software run any faster it just lets you run more things at once. Memory bandwidth then becomes a problem if you have too many cores to feed with data.

Too many horrid things happen when the clock speed corresponds to a wavelength comparable with the physical dimensions of the chip (~5GHz).

[Martin Brown]

That probably means don't buy it just yet. Wait for the premium priced gamers to move on and then buy a cut price last batch i5 ivy bridge.

[The Natural Philosopher]

clock speed/no of cores

[fred]

My desktop machine at home is still running Vista. I find it very stable. I never heard so much rubbish talked about an operating system mostly by those who had never used it.

Office machine has Windows 7 which I find very comfortable

Portable has Windows 8 and an SSD. It is definitely the quickest of the bunch and it is very easy to drop into a Windows 7 type environment if you wish.

[Brian Gaff]

Well from some friends experiences watch out for bundled software by sellers, often they keep the price down by installing software as trial versions from all over the place and most of it needs to be removed before you can really use the machine. Slows it up and makes some very strange effects occur. Also these days you seldom get discs either it seems so stuff that uninstalls cocking up other stuff is quite common, and thus its often better to pay a bit more and get a small reputable company to do the building than get a pc world type machine at rock bottom prices and then suffer for weeks trying to get rid of crap!

Brian

[polygonum]

never heard so much rubbish talked about an operating system mostly by those who had never used it.

and it is very easy to drop into a Windows 7 type environment if you wish.

Part of my role was supporting people using a variety of Windows computers - mostly XP, some Vista, and increasing proportion of W7.

The "issues" were massively disproportionate with Vista being ahead of W7 despite a much smaller installed base. And only the large majority of XP kept that at the top of the pile.

Running a home machine with Vista is possibly different to trying to support users across many sites, all networked, and remote accessing. Indeed, I am willing to believe that Vista might be acceptable for that. Would still choose W7.

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

"Wear out" is the (out of date) worry that they'll stop being writeable too as the cells wear out from overuse.

Failure is just dead of brokenness, not the same thing.

Cheers - Jaimie

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

As a photos and spreadsheets user, Chris (the OP) should not muck about - go directly to 27" 2560x1440 and don't hesitate about the price. You can get them for about £450 now, eg Dell refurbs.

Cheers - Jaimie

[GB]

Hi Jaimie, that last comment has me puzzled. Does the failure mode really matter? Presumably, once dead, they are dead?

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

Well, yeah.

But the thing that people are frightened off with SSDs is that the flash will actually wear out through use, unlike HDDs. I'm just pointing out that this isn't anything to worry about since you'd need to write many thousands of times a drive's size to it to get anything close to wearing it out, which'll take a decade or three.

Either of them can still just die, of course, same as any electronic device.

Cheers - Jaimie

[GB]

My hope was that my SSDs, being solid state, would be ultra-reliable compared to HDDs. However, the stats are not looking great, not that either of mine has failed (yet). Or is that an issue with early controllers that has now definitely been resolved?

[Jaimie Vandenbergh]

The last collection of stats I saw (from 2011 though) puts SSDs at about half as failureful as HDDs on average - there's a lot more electronics on an SSD than an HDD, so that's probably fair.

But SSDs are much less susceptible to mechanical shock, so will do better in portables than HDDs do.

Hard to tell, since they're not old enough yet to have enough stats behind them...

Plus failure rates weren't well distributed. Intel SSD deaths were about quarter the average in the study - you pays your money... Here's the link. It'll tell you interesting things about HDD failure rates too.

Cheers - Jaimie

[tony sayer]

Running WIN 7 here and like you made to look like WIN 2K and no problems at all. The first time that u_snot have got it right...

[Steve Firth]

Jaimie Vandenbergh wrote: [snip] .

Bloody hell, that makes a refurbished 27" iMac look like a bargain.

Also has the advantage that MacOS is much better for photography than Winblows. For a start colour matching between image and output will be correct, rather than the usual Windows lottery.