General computer talk/advice

This is the R7 1700. I couldn't justify the extra cost of a 1700X/1800X, as they all perform the same clock for clock.

My motherboard is the MSI X370 Gaming Pro Carbon. It's priced right, delivers all of the features I want (M.2, increased number of power phases, etc.), and has RGB lighting (which I couldn't care less about, tbh). Hoping to eventually go to 32 gigs of ram too, but we'll see.

 

I really hope someone at Tesco made a typo...

 

£190...?

 

I'm cutting a bit the ryzen hype

Since the Emachine 10" laptop was really to bad at everything, I had started to search for an older lapotop to buy, when I remenbered that my sister had an old laptop, but since she used it as a dowloading computer, I wasn't to sure if I wanted it.
Luckily she didn't care (And probably didn't remenber) about it, and she gave it to me for free !

After searching, this computer worth around 60-70 €.
But the computer was laggy as hell, and the C was full. After 1 or 2 hours of cleaning, I've cleaned around 20-30go of errors report, caches and malwares.
Now it running very well !

it's a Asus laptop from like maybe 2011-2012, with a 500go hard disk, 4 go of ram, an Intel celeron 900/ 2.2ghz.
But the battery is 100% dead, like if I unplug the charger, the thing shut down...
A battery cost around 15€ so it's ok I guess.


Btw it have a weird Windows 7 version, it supposedly run under Windows 7 pro, but it doesn't look exactly like it :


Look good enough on my desk

 

You should just reinstall Windows, as it's an OEM laptop it will probably have a recovery partition which will allow you to completely reinstall the operating system. It usually works much better than just cleaning

 

Maybe, don't know, i'll see, i've already install softwares and stuff, but why not

 

I have an HP G60 with the Celeron 900 in it. It's a single core processor based on the Penryn core (so it uses the mobile Core 2 architecture) and it sucks at everything. That laptop will be from around 2009, and is maxed at 4gb of ram, as it uses DDR2.

Your best bet is Linux, you'll soon learn that the CPU especially can be an absolute dog under Windows. My G60 is much nicer with Linux Mint, you'll find it even more responsive and it'll boot way faster.

 

Ahah ! I've found the model (Couldn't find it) https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Notebooks/P50IJ/
It's the Asus Notebook p50ij/p81ij series

I believe you, but you know I'm not going to do gaming on, I might use it for watching videos and using simple softwares like Photoshop or sketchup, Blender seems to run well for now.

 

You'll see slow down opening and closing programs and whatnot. Wait until you have to render with Blender. I'm absolutely aware it's not a gaming machine, I know that first hand too.

But, hey, if it works, it works. Can't complain, am I right?

 

I guess ^^
But I got it for free, I'm not going to complain !

 

What are peoples thoughts on buying laptops on ebay?

Im currently looking into buying a refurbished one from a seller that has 99.6% positive feedback and has sold other high value items fairly often.
Stuff which you may not care about
Reason why I am considering this as an option is because my parents would be pretty pissed if I were to spend over £600 on a laptop. Since my income is currently from them I would rather not do such a thing. Truth be told they would probably be equally pissed off at me for buying second hand without a warranty (even with a 15 day return policy) since they always buy everything new.
Having had to carry my desktop PC (full size with a lot of heavy stuff in it) to game jams before it is not a pleasant experience and means I can't go home or sleep during the jam, since I ain't leaving something as valuable and vulnerable as my desktop in a public location without me being around. However I want a device with a digitiser so I can use stylus input for art software and note taking, which means I have to pay the 2 in 1 premium where everything is £100 more for a slightly different hinge design.
The current atom based tablet (which was given to me for Christmas by a relative, which was super awesome) is functional for note taking but for a games computing student developing software (including Unity games) is not always practical, mostly because Visual Studio and Unity would barely fit on the device in the first place. Equally the wifi is abominable meaning within uni it can take over 10 seconds to load a website and constant drop outs when on campus where other devices with dual band wifi etc seem to cope without issue.
Then when I go home or away to see relatives the tablet has to become my primary PC. Which means I can't do work away from my flat or much of anything else since it lacks in power and wifi reliability.

Not to say its a bad device, the battery life is great and its really nice to have a tablet that can break without it being a big deal. It can also run some basic indie games pretty well, surprisingly even antichamber runs. However Super Meat Boy and N++ run in slow motion, so that is a pretty good gauge on performance. For multicore the Atom isn't bad, but for single core performance its lacking.

Main issue being that I haven't used ebay before so don't really know what to expect out of it. Whether to expect to get the item in the condition described etc

Any thought from ebay regulars appreciated

Another option is that I could wait until the summer when I will hopefully have some form of internship, then use the money from that (if there is anything left over if I have to move away from uni and pay rent on two apartments simultaneously :-[)

 

Welp, I just bought a laptop. I feel both excited and ill

So hopefully I should have a refurbished Lenovo Yoga 12 Thinkpad within the next 4 days (DPD next day tracked delivery).

• I7 5500U
• 256GB SSD
• 8GB ram
• 1080p IPS touchscreen
  
• Digitiser stylus with slot built into chassis
• Intel dual band AC wifi
  
• Windows 8.1 pro (However I am student, therefore have already grabbed a free Win10 pro licence key from Microsoft in advance, so I can format the device)

Hopefully it should be a solid device to keep me going for a few years. Only time will tell though...

The I7 variant of this: http://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Yoga-12-Convertible-Review.139033.0.html

 

im in a similar boat to you, although i dont take my PC to game events, i would like to video edit and it aint gonna happen on an intel atom, (or at least i havent tried)

 

I've tried on a Bay-Trail Pentium (which is based on the same architecture as some Atoms).

It works, would not recommend though.

 

Im currently on a BayTrail Atom Z3735F. Its a quad core 1.33Ghz CPU that turbo's to 1.86Ghz. Would have been a miles better CPU if it were a dual core with more powerful cores. The multithreaded performance is not that bad, for single threaded applications it struggles. 2GB of RAM under windows is also surprisingly usable too, albeit not amazing especially if you aim to have multiple tabs open at once.
For day to day use its ok, even if the screen tearing is pretty extreme. My grandparents use the same tablet as their primary PC and run a 1080p screen off it for dual monitors. Seems to do dual screen Microsoft Office and web browsing just fine for them. I find that One Note works about as well as you can expect One Note to work on it too, try to draw a diagram though and things get sketchy real fast (budum tsh). This was genuinely the best I could get out of it with a cheapo capacitive touch stylus, I didn't expect much, but hoped for better than this.

The bright spots on the screen are from internal components pressing against the back of the display

It makes for a really fantastic 12 orbits device though. That game runs on pretty much anything and with a touchscreen you can do 12 player local multiplayer without any extra input devices. Can only imagine the new portable PC will do it better though.

 

Everything I've ever bought of ebay has been spot on as described. I got my current laptop from it and (other than being a HP) its doing just fine. If something isn't as described then that is the sellers fault and if you contact them they will more than likely help out and let you return it for a full refund. If they don't even reply or ignore you completely then you can just open an automatic case that holds the money and it will refund you after the week or so that it runs for. Overall its hugely bias towards buyers which means that you will have no problems with people ripping you off or whatever.

Other than having one item lost in the post (which I was refunded for totally) I've not had anything out of the ordinary happen.

 

Some old school Pentium 3 chips are surprisingly nice and fast, only single core/single thread and don't win prizes at benchmarks, but in normal desktop use they make things to fly, faster in practice than some Core 2 laptops, which is crazy.
When it comes to laptops there are some more variables in play, power and heat management may bring even very fast CPU to grinding halt, sometimes slower in specs is then faster, depends a lot how well designed laptop is.

I would not buy a laptop without testing same spec same model first, for me of course noise is important factor and from that you can't find any proper specs.

I have bough few thousand laptops, mostly business models, I started working with PCs when 286 was new and super powerful, what I have seen in these years tells me that they are out there to get you, every now and then they make something they can sell just because it is new, product itself is completely useless junk and every company seem to be doing this, with laptops this seems to happen more, especially at lower price range.

So know what you are buying, be aware that there is same fever as when buying new car that will lie to you, make you ignore about weak points etc. With computers there is lot of hype with every single new release, new is automatically something wonderful and many manufacturers count on that for sales. They don't mind if you switch brands next time, because they know other brands do the same and new will always sell, so to not step astray, one needs to really test the product.

Many magazines and these days websites are publishing reviews, but truth can be many things, most can't afford to buy stuff they review, but manufacturers give products to test, now anyone can think how much products will be give those that are too critical towards the product.

So with over 30 years of experience from the business, I have come to conclusion that especially with laptops, best place to buy is where you can test it yourself, but 2nd best is shop which is ok if you test it well and accepts returns/change of product. Often you can buy laptop by specs and all goes well, but sometimes they get you fooled.

Not sure if that is help to anyone, but maybe, maybe not.

 

The difficulty there is when you are buying models that are no longer sold in shops. But I absolutely get what you are saying. I looked around at reviews of laptops before buying anything and generally notebook check tends to be the best website I have seen, very comprehensive. But even so different people often have wildly different opinions on certain products and you never can guarantee that opinions haven't been compromised. Since its an enterprise laptop that originally retailed for over £1300 I would hope for it to be fairly well put together, but you can never really know. User reviews tend to be pretty good for it too, but the average user tends to be a moron so that only counts for so much

I would concur though that the budget segment of the market tends to be pretty naff. My sisters laptop was pretty much dead after 2 years, most people would have probably ditched it at that point, but we were able to figure out that the hinge design on that laptop was not so kind to cables and got a replacement cable off amazon for not a lot of money. I wouldn't be surprised if the cable snipping hinge was a 'feature' of the laptop though.

 

Yup, my experience is with a Pentium N3530. Bay-Trail, 4 core/4thread, runs at 2.16 GHz. It's basically a superclocked version of your chip. Clockspeed definately wakes Bay-Trail up. It's paired with 4 gigs of ram, which is usable for most people (but not for me). I once had to render a 3000 frame Blender animation with it. Yea, that took 6 hours, 2 and a half if I disabled the reflections.

I wouldn't normally complain, as my first laptop had a Pentium M, but I got screwed out of $500 for it. Only because I didn't realize at the time that Bay-Trail was more than purely for the Atom line.

Oh well, my current Latitude E6430 will stick around for a while. It's faster than my ancient MacBook Pro, mops the floor with the Pentium-based HP15, and cost me a measly $180 (minus the SSD I put in it).