Researching for a new laptop

[Brian Roth]

I'm an aging (age 68) guy who USED to be at the top of all technologies in my world. Now, I'm semi-retired and chugging along with projects in my region such as maintaining eight Ampex ATR-100 recorders and a vinyl disc cutting system. Obviously, not SOTA anymore! lol

My "newest" computer was a Dell laptop I bought 4 years ago. It sat most of the time on my desk connected to a 24" HDMI monitor and my wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse. But, if needed, I would stuff it into a "Go Bag" and travel.

It's was an "appliance".

Recently, the Dell's hard drive crashed. I had backups of my important (tax files, etc...decades of tech files, etc) manually copied onto the tiny SD drive gizmos sold at OfficeMax. I am now running on a small/cute HP laptop originally purchased to be connected to the "TV" in my bedroom.

Now shopping for a new "appliance".

1. Windows 10 Pro operating system. Win 11 is beta (alpha?). Linux fan-boys, don't start with me...my science fair days were decades ago and I have no time or interest to fiddle-fart with it.

2. Decent size (16"??) screen and a decent keyboard for times I do travel.

3. Maybe a terrabyte of onboard storage. Are SSD drives now reliable?? I recall they are basically USB drives "on steroids" and have limited read/write cycles before dying.

4. Plenty of ports....at least 4 USB (spaced apart, so I can easily use dongles/cables) for printer, etc. HDMI for my external monitor.

5. Ethernet port.

6. Decent WiFi.

7. SD (or better?) port for large capacity external storage.

8. VERY optional...an internal DVD/CD ROM drive. More than a few apps I use came with those discs, but I can "sneaker net" from my ancient WIN XP machine via thumb drives if needed.

9. Speaking of apps....Firefox and Thunderbird. Libre Office. My ancient DesignCAD, and KiCad. Foxit. 7-zip.

10. Price. Looking at Dell and HP "business" machines, prices trend upwards to $2000. Considering the machine is (at best) usable for only a few years...BAD choices for me.

Bri

 

[CJ]

maybe go for a non fragile desktop and use the phone for travel,

but what do i know,i'm typing this on an HP vista machine runnin at 2 gig,

 

[john12ax7]

Have you considered just getting a new hard drive for the Dell? Put an SSD in it and it will be a lot faster and useable for a bunch more years.

 

[Brian Roth]

@ CJ...."a phone for travel" is just a phone to call AAA if I have a flat tire. It's otherwise useless for reading tech notes, looking at schematics more complicated that a 2 transistor fuzzbox, etc. Have you ever tried to chase through the schematics of, say, an Amek desk on a phone?? <g> In that case, I'm more than happy to have the three-ring binder so I can pull out pages! My (now dead) Dell was barely usable in the field for looking at service docs. Often, I'd squint, zoom, pan to find the desired page(s) via the LCD screen, copy the page(s) to a thumb drive, and find a nearby Kinkos to have the page(s) printed on 11 x 17 or 18 x 24 paper.

@john12ax7....it looks like I can take out a dozen small screws, pop open the Dell to see what's inside, but a new drive won't have the OS, so that project would be a waste of time. Perhaps in a perfect world, I coulda/shoulda figured out a method to store a pristine copy of the disk image before I did ANYTHING after the original purchase. Thinking back, I don't know how that would have been a possibility. After the initial powering of the brand-new Dell, I spent maybe a half hour answering questions and filling out forms on the screen before the machine even got me to the usable Windoze desktop. In Ye Olde Days, there would have been a CD ROM shipped with the machine with the OS for restoring the drive....but not anymore.

A year ago, my best friend/roomie had a bright idea...using one of his old PC towers and some available HDDs to create a NAS system (RAID drives) for our "Camp Chaos Computer" household <g>. He was working on a Linux system for that, after doing some reading/research. Alas, he passed away last spring before our mass storage/backup IT concept was completed. RIP, Chad....

Bri

 

[Brian Roth]

Sidebar....a bit ago as proof of concept, I copied the distro CD of my DesignCAD app onto the ancient WIN XP Dell I still have. I then copied that onto a USB thumb drive and sneaker-netted it to this cute/petite HP (which doesn't have a CD/DVD drive) that I'm using on my desk. Ran the install app, filled in the serial number...and DesignCAD seems to work perfectly.

Bri

 

[ruffrecords]

You can download WIndows 10 direct from Microsoft for free and create a bootable USB stick. As long as you still have the licence key (which is usually on a sticker on the back of a Dell) you should be able to reinstall Windows to a new drive from the USB stick. You will need to go into the BIOS to enable this.

Cheers

Ian

 

[Brian Roth]

OK, since the Dell is essentially a doorstop, I am now thinking WTF and will crack it open to inspect the innards. With my illuminated magnifier (Luxo clone...my eyes are crappy..lol) it looks like I have nine #0 Phillips head screws to remove. I looked closely....don't think they are Posidrive or some other mutant head variant.

I am very picky about choosing the correct tool! Too many years fussing with tape recorders from the USA, Europe, and Japan.

I have an empty Altoids "tin" to collect the screws since I am also "anal" about NOT losing parts! Now I need to see if I have a #0 Phillips driver here at the house. Otherwise, it will wait until I get back to my shoppe and find the correct screwdriver.

Bri

 

[JohnRoberts]

OK, since the Dell is essentially a doorstop, I am now thinking WTF and will crack it open to inspect the innards. With my illuminated magnifier (Luxo clone...my eyes are crappy..lol) it looks like I have nine #0 Phillips head screws to remove. I looked closely....don't think they are Posidrive or some other mutant head variant.

computers suck, old computers suck worse.

You need to find a competent young person (not me).

I am very picky about choosing the correct tool! Too many years fussing with tape recorders from the USA, Europe, and Japan.

I have an empty Altoids "tin" to collect the screws since I am also "anal" about NOT losing parts! Now I need to see if I have a #0 Phillips driver here at the house. Otherwise, it will wait until I get back to my shoppe and find the correct screwdriver.

Bri

I have an old HP with crashed HD that I haven't given up on completely just yet. One strategy I read about was connecting a second good HD to the internal controller, hopefully to extract and transfer files from the bad HD to the good HD.

I still haven't tried this and the longer it goes the more I can live without the old stuff.... while that computer had my only working eagle PCB license.

Good luck

edit- I've been using computers since before PCs were a thing. I have run my business on a combination of PCs and Apple (mac mini). I have long disliked apple, and was always irritated by how they dumbed everything down, but now as I get older and dumber, I appreciate their pretty effective security. I have no problem recommending apple for general web surfing and email /edit

JR

 

[Matador]

Now shopping for a new "appliance".

I suggest looking at Intel EVO-branded platforms that are released from several companies. They all tend to sell for around $1K, and check off all of the boxes you list above. They are essentially an agreement to use a bundle of Intel chipset products, and are a really good balance of power and battery life, and are optimized for weight. My wife recently got one from LG for $1,100, with a 17 inch screen, a full sized keyboard, that typically goes for 11-12 hours on a charge, and weighs about 2 pounds.

AND BUY A CLOUD STORAGE PLAN. Dropbox "plus" is only $10 a month, and gives you 2TB of online storage. I personally use GitHub for all of my Eagle and KiCad projects (it's roughly $5 a month), however it isn't "drag and drop" like Dropbox, but on the upside, you can "version" all of your electronics projects (including having multiple different layouts/PCB's for a single KiCad schematic/project, which is something KiCad doesn't support natively unless you break it into multiple different projects).

 

[user 37518]

 

[Rusan]

Brian, concerning your question #3 about SSDs, I have a Kingston PCIe SSD in a heavily used computer that's been in service for about 10 years now. According to Kingston's SSD monitoring software suite, it has zero bad flash cells and plenty of life remaining. A few years after that, I built two computers for my church using Intel SSDs, and the SSD monitoring software indicates no performance deterioration and about 75% life remaining. All three of these boxes were built with motherboards equipped with long-life solid polymer electrolytic capacitors; they might not have made it until now otherwise, especially the 10 year old one.

I put a SSD in my wife's HP laptop about 5 years ago, and it's still chugging along. The computer I'm typing this on has a Corsair Gen. 4 M.2 SSD that runs stoopit fast, and it boots to the Windows 10 desktop in 12 seconds.

You'll want to go into your Windows settings and turn your paging file off, which if you're not familiar with is an area of your HDD that Windows uses as RAM. You don't need it with a SSD, and you can also deactivate Windows Prefetch, because SSDs run so much faster that they pretty much obsolete it. These things will help to minimize the number of unnecessary read-write cycles, and reduce "wear" on your SSD. Although, now that the technology has greatly matured and there have been millions of them in service for a long time now, it's been discovered that read-write cycles don't deteriorate them nearly as much as once believed. Having said that, I do still frequently back up my computers to an external SSD.

To me, there's no reason not to have a SSD, especially now that the prices have fallen so much from what they once were.

 

[JohnRoberts]

The relatively modern mac mini I upgraded to last time has SSD on board and a plug in SSD for the automatic back up... This is remarkably faster than the last generation mac mini .

JR

 

[user 37518]

Brian, concerning your question #3 about SSDs, I have a Kingston PCIe SSD in a heavily used computer that's been in service for about 10 years now. According to Kingston's SSD monitoring software suite, it has zero bad flash cells and plenty of life remaining. A few years after that, I built two computers for my church using Intel SSDs, and the SSD monitoring software indicates no performance deterioration and about 75% life remaining. All three of these boxes were built with motherboards equipped with long-life solid polymer electrolytic capacitors; they might not have made it until now otherwise, especially the 10 year old one.

I put a SSD in my wife's HP laptop about 5 years ago, and it's still chugging along. The computer I'm typing this on has a Corsair Gen. 4 M.2 SSD that runs stoopit fast, and it boots to the Windows 10 desktop in 12 seconds.

You'll want to go into your Windows settings and turn your paging file off, which if you're not familiar with is an area of your HDD that Windows uses as RAM. You don't need it with a SSD, and you can also deactivate Windows Prefetch, because SSDs run so much faster that they pretty much obsolete it. These things will help to minimize the number of unnecessary read-write cycles, and reduce "wear" on your SSD. Although, now that the technology has greatly matured and there have been millions of them in service for a long time now, it's been discovered that read-write cycles don't deteriorate them nearly as much as once believed. Having said that, I do still frequently back up my computers to an external SSD.

To me, there's no reason not to have a SSD, especially now that the prices have fallen so much from what they once were.

All my files are stored in my OneDrive folder, which gets automatically synchronized to the cloud. Numerous times my computers have been damaged beyond repair, and I don't worry about my info or backups anymore.

 

[JohnRoberts]

I am not all that comfortable trusting the cloud, but luckily I am old and not as data intensive as I used to be (sadly I can't say that about passwords).

JR

 

[Tubetec]

I got my first SSD back around 2012 , that 64Gb drive is still as good as new , never an issue ,never a problem , it lived a few years in an old laptop where the battery was dead , the power plug got pulled out regularly , I didnt get any corruption, mostly the system would re-boot normally , very very ocassionally it would report Windows was not shut down properly , after a normal re-boot it worked perfectly again.
I wouldnt even consider using a spinning system drive anymore , way way more prone to failure than SSD's and slow as wet week.

Cloud storage , wouldnt touch it with a barge pole ,
Ive only a handful of passwords I use regularly , there located in my grey matter(use it or loose it) and written down on paper as a back up ,
Ive never ever allowed the computer store passwords either , never made sense to me why anyone would .

 

[Matador]

Cloud storage , wouldnt touch it with a barge pole ,

Why? If you value your data even a little there isn't a better, more practical way to protect it. If you are super concerned about someone reading your data, you could always set up file-system encryption and not worry about it. Even DropBox by default symmetric key encrypts all resting data even above and beyond what the customer may have done to it.

I was called into a local studio (yes, they still exist) to repair a JCM800 for a session, and was appalled to hear their data backup policies, such as manually connecting hard drives and doing manual copies, all of which were stored on the premises. One errant cigarette dropped on the shag carpeting in the control room and thousands of projects would have went "poof".

At least in the old days, you could just take the 2" tape home with you when you left.

 

[eskimo]

Ive never ever allowed the computer store passwords either , never made sense to me why anyone would .

On the computer, no. In a password manager. Hell yes.

I have 1 really hard password to "Lastpass" and store 175 impossible 99 character ones there.

 

[user 37518]

I got my first SSD back around 2012 , that 64Gb drive is still as good as new , never an issue ,never a problem , it lived a few years in an old laptop where the battery was dead , the power plug got pulled out regularly , I didnt get any corruption, mostly the system would re-boot normally , very very ocassionally it would report Windows was not shut down properly , after a normal re-boot it worked perfectly again.
I wouldnt even consider using a spinning system drive anymore , way way more prone to failure than SSD's and slow as wet week.

Cloud storage , wouldnt touch it with a barge pole ,
Ive only a handful of passwords I use regularly , there located in my grey matter(use it or loose it) and written down on paper as a back up ,
Ive never ever allowed the computer store passwords either , never made sense to me why anyone would .

I thought the same thing about cloud storage, but to be honest it has proven to be the best thing. Hard drives fail, you have to continuously make sure the thing is backing up, and, Murphy's law dictates that when your computer fails, the data wasn't being backed up at that time. Also, being able to access your data wherever you are without having your hard drive with you is something very valuable. Over the years, I can tell you that all my hard drive backup systems have failed some way or the other, either the hard drive itself fails, or the system wasn't backing up at that time, or I just forget where I place the hard drive. I've had zero problems with cloud storage, on the contrary, it has saved me tons of times.