I need to upgrade my computer ...seriously
whiteoxe
Posts: 794
Hi All,
For months I have been using my laptop as my desktop has been with my parents due to me travelling around a lot. I am waiting to hear back from Canberra CIT to do an associate Dip in Electromnic Therory and Microcontrollers to settle down for awhile.
So the laptop Ive been using is a PIII 667Mhz 128Meg ram , 1 x USB, I X Serial Prt, 1 X Parallel Prt, 1 X RCA and running XP Slowly.
When I did a search on ebay for laptops under $600, there was an avalanch of laptops NEW and used.
Any tips on what to look out for when buying a new PC ?
For months I have been using my laptop as my desktop has been with my parents due to me travelling around a lot. I am waiting to hear back from Canberra CIT to do an associate Dip in Electromnic Therory and Microcontrollers to settle down for awhile.
So the laptop Ive been using is a PIII 667Mhz 128Meg ram , 1 x USB, I X Serial Prt, 1 X Parallel Prt, 1 X RCA and running XP Slowly.
When I did a search on ebay for laptops under $600, there was an avalanch of laptops NEW and used.
Any tips on what to look out for when buying a new PC ?
Comments
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- Stephen
P.S. Would you be willing to sell that laptop?
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Computers are microcontrolled.
Robots are microcontrolled.
I am microcontrolled.
But you·can·call me micro.
Want to·experiment with the SX or just put together a cool project?
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Transistor parts wholesale
-Phil
There are plenty of old laptops where the battery is near dead but the unit itself is fine. Don't ever ever buy "ex-gvernment" computers, the ones they advertise. These units are over-priced and they are not recent models either, I don't know which government in which country had them or what century, but they are a joke, pensioners are conned into them.
For a new laptop I would always go for anything dual core, Intel or AMD works for me. When it comes to serial ports well you can forget that because although there are the odd few with serial ports you find you are paying more than the usual amount for the units, just not worth it. I have never had problems with USB serial ports and I know of one radio station that has racks and racks of PC style controllers that rely upon USB serial ports, lots of them. Works for them.
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*Peter*
You can save some serious coin by going 2nd hand - I have my favourites (a couple of reputable ebay sellers and two 'bricks and mortar' locations in Australia). PM me if you want any more detail..
I do agree with Peter - More Ram = Good.....
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USB serial ports are also really good when you do something dumb and let the smoke out. A motherboard (particularly on a laptop) is not quite as economical to replace.
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If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.
My travel / work computer is on a lot, and gets banged around a lot. Absolutely no issues at all, and I deserve to have a few, frankly.
Whatever you get, make sure it's got 2GB RAM or more, if you can afford it. If you are going used, this isn't a big deal as RAM isn't too many dollars above the machine. The other thing I would do is obtain a nice, big 7K RPM disk, with a big cache. Many laptops ship with 3.5K or 5K RPM disks, and modest to small caches. This significantly impacts the overall performance of the machine. With Laptops, I/O isn't exactly stellar, so you want to minimize doing it, even if that means a slightly slower CPU to fit your budget.
Top of the line CPU, RAM starved will run slower than one that's a tier or two down, with a nice compliment of RAM.
Once you've got that licked, when it does need to hit the disk, make sure it's for the shortest time possible. That's what the 7K RPM / large cache disks do.
If you are on the cheap, get the disk, then download a live Linux, such as Ubuntu, and use it to image the factory disk before you load a bunch of stuff on it. Keep that disk in storage, and operate off of the newer one. You never know what the state of your Microsoft license is, meaning it never hurts to have a little insurance. Plus, if the disk is big, you can then dual boot, or run virtual machines with ease, and that opens up a ton of options, when planning to run the machine over the long haul.
On IBM machines, always perform your disk image with the target bootable disk fitted in the machine, and the original source disk external, via USB. Rip apart an enclosure to get this done. The Thinkpads use some proprietary disk speedup stuff that more or less means the bootable disk must be in the machine to work. This really should only affect SATA, though I've heard people have trouble with lesser disks... Just to be on the safe side, I've made this my default clone the system disk procedure and have had no trouble since. Ubuntu has a great partition manager that can do all the tricks. Create, move, copy, resize, etc... Just copy your system disk partitions verbatim onto the new disk. Boot it to know all is well. Reboot Linux, resize, let win32 do it's check disk thing, and you should be golden. Just don't forget to make the system partition active... #1 mistake here.
As much RAM as it will hold, then the fastest CPU you can buy, then the best graphics. From there, obtain additional RAM, if not fitted when you get it, 7K large cache disk, and an evening futzing around with cloning your system disk. You won't regret that order of things.
Edit: If you are looking for lots of older style ports, find a dock for the machine you get. Often these have additional ports on them that can be used when the machine is docked. My last dock had SCSI and old-school serial. Nice for having a workbench, where stuff is connected up.
I'll second avoiding machines that have the legacy ports on them too. They tend to be bulky and over priced. Either dock, or USB / PCMCIA adapt the ports you need, using external HUB, if you want to let the smoke out of something besides your primary computer.
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Post Edited (potatohead) : 11/16/2009 8:13:42 AM GMT
as good as each other.I have changed my view
@Micro-> I do kind of lke the idea of having every type of port.was onlya litle
while ago I started progamming for ports and the parallel port was the first
port I got familiar with. But I doubt I willworry about parallelport.
Am thinking of running maybe puppy linux on the old laptop. Am surprised to find
latest versions of Linuxare more resource hungry than XP.
@Phil _> I will seriously think about the ThinkPad. I am typing this reply
on an brand new ACER TRAVELMATE(im at someones place i hope they dont see what I'm typing)
and it feels Smile compared to my old LapTop
and sometimes a keypress is not recognised.
@Peter _> That was dead funny :[noparse]:)[/noparse]) I did once look at a shop with this exgov stuff.
looking for a desktop. I only lasted 5 or six minutes inthe store
when I saw the machine specs and prices. Totalrip off.
@Pacman-> thanks I will likley take you up on the offer befoe I purchase....
@Brad_> I guess you are talking about USB Serial Port adapters.
@Potatohead_-> Thanks for the lesson,Imgoing to have toread it again in the morning when
I am not so tired.
@All -> I AM NOT GOING TO BUYA TRAVELMATE.
@ALL-> THANKYOU.
and
I just had always assumed Linux could run on way lower specs than windoze. Not sure where i got the idea from.
Post Edited (whiteoxe) : 11/16/2009 11:52:57 AM GMT
Puppy Linux is the smallest fastest windowy GUI OS out there*, at least before version 4.0.0;
Likes to boot into at least 128M RAM, freeing up the CD drive and doesn't even need a hard drive.
(Save data on removable media,CD,flash, and fear no crash.)
Although supposedly good for any Win98 machine, my brother squeezed it (even Puppy 4) into a 64M Win95 laptop.
*except perhaps QNX and Minuet, which I've seen running on only Floppies!
1) Backup all your data off the laptop
2) Wipe the drive (I actually installed a new drive and put my old one in a USB enclosure)
3) Run the restore CD.
4) Load any updated drivers.
5) Install antivirus software
6) Run Windows update until it is finally up to date (I use an XP SP3 CD to save download time)
7) Once Windows is completely up to date, load your essential programs.
My old laptop boots XP in 45 seconds now, compared to 4+ minutes before I reloaded from scratch. Anyhow, something worth trying if you can. Won't solve the fact that you only have 128MB of RAM and Windows needs that just to get to the "Starting Windows" screen.
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Andrew Williams
WBA Consulting
WBA-TH1M Sensirion SHT11 Module
Special Olympics Polar Bear Plunge, Mar 20, 2010
XP is about 7 years old. Go back 7 years and look at the hardware requirements for a Linux distribution back then and make the comparison. Now compare the latest Ubuntu (that I have installed in less than 3GB of disk and 512MB of Ram including a full office suite, and all the fruit.)
I run a GUI based linux distribution (very basic I grant you) in 64M of ram and < 100MB of disk that is perfectly capable of development for the Propeller.. so yes, linux can run on _way_ lower spec gear.
The difference is most machines these days are built for the Windows Bloat, so the Linux distributions have increased to fill the available space.
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If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got.
@Brad_> 7 years!! , time does fly , I guess as I never upgraded past XP I always pretented to have the latest version, if not the best [noparse];)[/noparse] When you point out the difference of years of dev that I am comparing, Linux starts to look like the champ
I thought it was. However I was still surprised at some of the recommendations suggested to run latest Ubuntu , I have to qualify my 'surprise' by admitting I know sooo little to begin with though!
ThinkPad
I nearly got a Lenovo, was hoping it would be like the quality you say from IBM. I do like the look of the thinkpads. It was on ebay sitting @ $270 for the last hour.
In last couple of minutes I bid $350, it went up again to $385 and sold. I could have bid again but i thought better . It had the works, even firewire(good for my video camera)
and core 2 duo and 2Gig ram.
Anyway there are heaps of ThinkPads on ebay, I dont think I have to worry about the one that got away....
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Andrew Williams
WBA Consulting
WBA-TH1M Sensirion SHT11 Module
Special Olympics Polar Bear Plunge, Mar 20, 2010
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Chris Savage
Parallax Engineering
50 72 6F 6A 65 63 74 20 53 69 74 65
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I ran DSL on a 233MHz machine with only 32 MB of RAM. The whole distribution is only 50 MB, and installs in a matter of seconds on newer machines.
Only thing is, they've been having some issues with murgaLua licensing and have since not been making too many new releases.
As for other Linux distributions, you could use a "low-tech" window manager like Fluxbox or FVWM for some more speed at the cost of looks, but GNOME (the default for seemingly most of the larger distributions) is pretty darn fast, so it's not necessary.
My previous machine had only 384 MB of RAM and an 800 MHz processor and ran Ubuntu 9.04 comfortably. After having installed an old Radeon 9250, I was able to run GNOME, full-blown with 3d compositing effects and all that.
-Phil
Btw some Dells come with serial ports too. But many people complain about poor build quality.
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P.S. The wireless slot in the lid is actualy a usb port with a nonstandard connector. A mouse and flash drive work fine with a home brew adapter. I will probably hack a usb wifi module in there soon.