General computer talk/advice

Then if you are weird freak like I am, who likes to live on a small farm, without driver's licence at middle of nowehere between forests and swamps, far away from any proper computer shop, trying to test some laptop before hand is going to be rather challenging

Used higher end model for same price as new budget model is probably more win in most cases indeed.

Most people indeed review things without full understanding, they of course review based on how they feel, because they live and experience by a feeling, emotion drives so many, quite few have scientific rational approach and even fewer can actually be critical about their own views (me included), that is life.

I mostly read negative reviews. While many of those can be quite ridiculous, you can quite often pick things between the lines that are useful in making a decision.

What I did love about Compaq brand was that you could trust they did not try to sell completely useless stuff or anything with purposely made weak parts, sadly then HP bought it and HP has different business model, they make sure product is not going to last very long.

I still have Compaq laptop with 366Mhz Celeron, even battery still works, nothing can break those.

 

I laughed

 

Listen, I've been up 18 hours.

 

Well, it is an AMD, they take a lot of heat

Once I got to diagnose issue with then new Pentium machine, that original 60Mhz Pentium P60, it was slow and not very stable, opening the case revealed there was a CPU alright as that golden color and text in CPU kinda jumped on eyes, but there was no heatsink or fan of any kind, that stone ran tad warm.
Well, faster 486 machines were faster than first slowest model Pentiums, so slow performance was not entirely fixed by installation of the heatsink.


Later times my own then just two days old Athlon 1400 did also got bit warm as water cooling failed during the night, hose actually got separated from the pump because I did not bother to use a clamp, motherboard was burned all brown and warped, chip had kind of hole in it, but what was amazing was that with new CPU everything worked perfectly on that motherboard.

At work had one Duron machine that had removed fan from the heatsink, fan had melted and dropped to bottom of the case, they had forgot to connect fan's power connector at the factory, plastic does not melt at 123C yet, so I guess that Anonymous is fine with those temps, surely chips can take a lot more than people can believe, with new fan that Duron worked just fine, no need for new CPU

 

I still have an AMD Athlon 1300 Mhz

 

can i just ask, if under full load on all cores do you get 1.8ghz or 1.5ghz? my tablet only seems to go to 1.5ghz with low temps (below 60c fanless)

 

Anyone know why stuff slightly overlaps on my second monitor and how to fix it??

yes. that's right, I met Roman Atwood and Yousef Erakat at a show I payed to go to.

 

Dear god, that PC could even be used as an oven.

 

I did really like my Athlon that few days it lasted, I think even some magazines did fry eggs on it.

From YT you can find still all kind of weird stuff:

 

Mine seems happy to run them all at full clock speed though but will throttle down to just under 1600Mhz with a sustained load.

I watched a tear down of my tablet the other day. They seem to be using foil as a heat sink which was interesting, the CPU is also thumbnail sized.

 

I have no idea how this thing is a grade B refurb. It's literally in mint condition...

There isn't a single scratch on the entire thing. The screen is perfect (bit of cardboard on it in image) and so far things seem to all be working.

Whoever put the fn and control key in that order deserves time in hell though

Just checked the warranty status. It has almost 2 years left in warranty too...

 

That was a good deal!

Some sellers are making sure they deliver more than they promise, those are ones that will stay in business for long because, as you found out, customer satisfaction will be much better that way.

 

Noice. You'll get used to the FN and CTRL key layout, trust me, then when you try to use another laptop you end up hitting the CTRL key looking for FN and vise versa.

 

Yeah, I am very happy with it. 2 years ago when it was new this model of laptop would have set me back around £1400, whereas I spent £549 on it, so less than half price. It even has that new electronics smell to it. So IMO that was a pretty decent deal.
Hopefully I do get used to the fn position fairly quick, its mainly through habit while doing copy/paste etc that it is irritating since ctrl is usually bottom left.

 

Get into the habit of using the TrackPoint too, once you get the hang of it you'll never use the trackpad again. Looks in really good nick, probably came from an office environment.

 

Already ahead of you, I am using it all of the time, its fantastic.

 

I miss that from Toshiba and IBM machines I had really long ago, sadly not many desktop keyboards have it and none of which have features I like to have in keyboard.


Not sure if it is common knowledge, but HDMI audio and HDMI audio are not the same.
Sometimes I use only speakers of my monitor (27" cheap Fujitsu), with Intel HD sound quality is really horrible, audio is not clear and there is no bass at all. However with NVIDIA sound quality is not that bad considering it is only crappy monitor speakers.

Some so called HiFi experts claimed years ago to me that HDMI is much better than optical output as amplifier does the sound instead of cheap soundcard, I guess not all experts are so good.

I still rely mostly on copper wires and analog audio though, but it is nice to realize GPU can improve sound too if one has home theater setup.

 

It probably just uses a different EQ than the Intel driver. More than likely boosting the treble and bass as a sort of make shift "Loudness" function. But yeah, computer monitor speakers aren't generally known for producing HiFi snob quality audio.

 

HDMI audio and optical should have no difference in sound quality, they are both digital formats. Unless as stated above processing is applied to one of the outputs.

Usually your computer turns the audio into analog, sends it along a 3.5mm cable to whatever output you like. Often these outputs may turn the audio back into digital, mess with the data and then turn it back to analog again for the speaker drivers to output. By using a digital output such as hdmi or optical you bypass the extra conversions.

Not sure if one of the formats has better support for 5.1 or 7.1 audio though. Things may change then.

Strangly enough a couple mins ago I plugged my headphones into my laptop and they sounded a bit crap. Went into the audio driver and found that it was applying some dolby processing to the audio. Once that was disabled things sounded fine. However the laptop speakers sound terrible without it turned on.

Long story short, with good audio outputs less processing is usually better. If you are using laptop speakers or some other trashy audio output digital processing can make things sound way better.

 

There is enhancements tab, but loudness is not checked, however who knows what it really outputs, I'm not really much of HiFi snob, but have learned speakers and even amplifiers do have difference.

What my ear tells me is that there is more dynamics, it is like sound over GSM vs sound from TV, sure neither is good, but other one is better.

Normally I have TPA-3116 amp running 2.1 speaker setup, 3-way with 8" + 4" cones + tweeters in reflex case and 10" enclosed sub that I took from car, certainly not HiFi snob stuff, but so much better than 80's home HiFi setup I had before for computer and even that was miles better than any computer speaker setup that I had chance to listen. Clarity, how easy it is for example pick up words from a song is big difference and of course I get more than enough boom with current setup.


Would be nice to test HDMI audio differences with home theater amp some day, but not sure if it really would make much difference, there certainly is limit which after I can't tell improvements in audio and with my non HiFi ears it might be already reached with current setup
--- Post updated ---

Crappy speakers really need some processing to work, with good ones opposite is indeed true. Only options I can find seems to be those in pic, putting check mark on disable all enhancements does not change anything, imo. I have two HDMI inputs, so it is fairly simple to compare and there is clear difference.



I guess it is possible that there is some hard coded enhancements, but to those one can't change.