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Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1


Steve Burke

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In all honesty if your not adamant about boot times then have you checked the pc world sale??

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/laptops-netbooks/laptops/laptops/hp-pavilion-15-n096ea-15-6-laptop-21748974-pdt.html

Some seriously good deals on at the moment.

SSD is sweet but your paying a lot for not very much payback in real terms. Is it really important to save 30 secs when you turn on?

Just a thought! Lol!

In a pc tower the choice is easier because you can have multiple drives..so an SSD and a standard drive for storage works really well....

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I've decided to go with the Lenovo.

 

Granted, there are some good deals at present on consumer machines. However the build quality and reliability doesn't appear so high thus limiting their life. So in the long run you probably get what you pay for. I suspect the cost per year of ownership is probably similar, without the aggravation of the computer being out of action.

 

Additionally, I use my computer many hours per day and so going for a business grade machine, albeit not the top range, makes sense.

 

Going for a faster machine may cost a little more, but divided over the lifetime of the computer costs literally just a few pence per day. Even with my now modest earnings per hour the extra productivity makes sense!

 

Many thanks to everyone, especially Kiri, for all the help!

 

 

 

 

Wingham Specimen Coarse & Carp Syndicates www.winghamfisheries.co.uk Beautiful, peaceful, little fished gravel pit syndicates in Kent with very big fish. 2017 Forum Fish-In Sat May 6 to Mon May 8. Articles http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/steveburke.htm Index of all my articles on Angler's Net

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Expanding on the productivity savings in my last post, here are some calculations.

 

Compared with a conventional drive Lenovo charge an extra £88.20 for a full 128GB SSD drive (I already have a spare conventional drive for extra storage if needed, although I've never used as much as 128GB before). Assuming a lifetime of 4 years this costs £1.84 per month or 6.6p per day if the machine is switched on for 28 days per month.

 

It seems that you save on booting up plus every time you launch a program. There's a useful test report here with some figures: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/4.

 

Obviously everyone would be different, but let's say you save 1 minute per day in total. How much would you need to earn per hour to justify paying an extra 6.6p per day. There's 60 minutes in an hour so the answer comes out at just 6.6p x 60 = £3.96 per hour!

 

The same principle could be applied to a faster processor and more memory, although I've no figures for these.

Edited by Steve Burke

Wingham Specimen Coarse & Carp Syndicates www.winghamfisheries.co.uk Beautiful, peaceful, little fished gravel pit syndicates in Kent with very big fish. 2017 Forum Fish-In Sat May 6 to Mon May 8. Articles http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/steveburke.htm Index of all my articles on Angler's Net

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Cheers, Kiri. Your input was very useful - many thanks!

Wingham Specimen Coarse & Carp Syndicates www.winghamfisheries.co.uk Beautiful, peaceful, little fished gravel pit syndicates in Kent with very big fish. 2017 Forum Fish-In Sat May 6 to Mon May 8. Articles http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/steveburke.htm Index of all my articles on Angler's Net

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I wouldn't say a massive retreat...but I think we will see the desktop returning with a far more integrated view of "apps"

so you will be able to have live apps running on the desktop, and snap apps to windows etc

the trouble with windows 8 is the two systems; apps and desktop...just don't gel together and you end up with desktop version of apps and app version of apps....

take IE for exemplar....you can browse in the app version..or switch to desktop mode...and occasionally things don't decide to play nice..so you will be happily surfing in the app IE interface or maybe your mail app and then BAM!! you click a link and it opens the desktop version! or vice versa!

a classic is the default file viewer app....don't get me wrong its bloody handy to not have to head off and download every content viewer under the sun to look at pdf's and jpg's and whatever else there might be...but at the same time if your working in desktop mode; it wrenches you back to app mode and cause untold confusion when you have to figure out app control interfaces to get you back to desktop.

ok; to me, its nothing..i just swap happily between the two....but with a new client or user, you try to set them up on the desktop mode to ease them into windows 8...then POW!! your in an APP and you have to show them how to control them on top of everything else!

I don't think MS need to do much other than just merge to two interfaces into one happy blending...if they can get that right it would be really cool.

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I downloaded the iobit start button dooda and rarely use the other thing except to turn off the live tiles

Its as if it wasnt there ,i did leave the corners on so its appy if i want

Believe NOTHING anyones says or writes unless you witness it yourself and even then your eyes can deceive you

None of this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" crap it just means i have at least two enemies!

 

There is only one opinion i listen to ,its mine and its ALWAYS right even when its wrong

 

Its far easier to curse the darkness than light one candle

 

Mathew 4:19

Grangers law : anything i say will  turn out the opposite or not happen at all!

Life insurance? you wont enjoy a penny!

"To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical." Thomas Jefferson

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  • 3 weeks later...

I've just been spending the last few days switching over to the new computer and doing a lot of housekeeping I should have done in the past. Lenovo don't hold your hand like Dell in actually setting up the computer, but Peggy was a great help here. There's also a lot of bloatware, plus despite ticking the box for no anti-virus software it came with a free trial of Norton's. I've now installed Webroot and Malwarebytes in addition and will let Norton's lapse when the trial is over. The screen is a big improvement on my old Dell with visibility not being so dependent on the angle.

 

I've found Windows 8.1 surprisingly easy to adapt to. It may be because we went straight from Vista to 8.1, and Peggy had already switched over. Granted, a few commands are hard to find at first but you soon get used to them. I almost never referred to a help screen and just used trial and error. As a result I learnt a lot very quickly.

 

I'm definitely a convert to a full SSD drive! It's amazingly fast at booting up, and will be fractionally faster still when I get rid of some of the bloatware. However I haven't figured out why the capacity is only shown as 100GB even though it's a 128GB drive (Samsung). Yes, I'd have expected a small drop, but not that much. It's of no real importance as just about the only images I'll be putting on are fish photos from Wingham to ID them. All other images will be stored on a large conventional external drive and online in the cloud.

 

I also haven't yet figured out how to see in 8.1 what's on the disk. A third of it is already full and I've put no files on it yet! The only big program is Office 2003 Professional (that I'll be replacing soon as support ends in April).

 

Any ideas?

Wingham Specimen Coarse & Carp Syndicates www.winghamfisheries.co.uk Beautiful, peaceful, little fished gravel pit syndicates in Kent with very big fish. 2017 Forum Fish-In Sat May 6 to Mon May 8. Articles http://www.anglersnet.co.uk/steveburke.htm Index of all my articles on Angler's Net

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