Nerdtastic ramble (probably best ignore)

[susie_flo]

Well my attempts at finding a new laptop have left me deeply unexcited.  What is going on right now?  Nobody - and I mean nobody - appears to have a sexy machine for sale.  All of the upper-end Vaios are suddenly duller than Dull McDullard from Dullsville.  And the Macbook Air may well be a thing of slender beauty but is simply too low-specced to justify its price bracket.  Even the Macbook pro doesn't really offer enough memory or disk space for the price.  Samsung have the odd "quite nice" model... but nothing that has really set my heart aflutter.

See - being the undercover geek that I am, ill-performing machines are liable to make me very sweary indeed - and I am quite picky.  My strategy with laptops is always to buy the highest-specced, sexiest machine that I can afford at the time of purchase, with a view to not replacing her for a good 3 years.  Whatever I buy will become my constant loving companion and must be as well considered as a partner.  She has to let me have 30-odd applications running at once for weeks on end without giving me egg timers or spinning beach-balls - and she has to store many thousands of high-res images without complaining - and process whatever I'm doing at high speed.  And on top of that she has to be gorgeous and glossy like Jessica Rabbit, with a nicely spaced keyboard and high-res screen, preferably somewhere around the 14" region.

The sad fact right now is that she doesn't seem to exist.  Highly specced machines are all basically modelled on Velma, with huge screens and clonking great bodies encased in tedious grey chassis.  Lower specced ones appear to be little more than glorified netbooks modelled on Miley Cyrus, with hot pink casings or hideous textured finishes, clearly aimed at teenage girls.

So I have admitted temporary defeat and G is going to take my beautiful, glossy, blood-red WIllow (back from the days when VAiOs were sexy) to a local repair shop and see if they can fix her up for another 6mths or so...  in the hope that the tech bods will invent something better in the meantime.   Which means that right now I am making do with my Kylie-esque little netbook until further notice.  (Cute but very much lacking in punch - Pah!)


Alright - for those of you who are wondering what I have done with the lady who talks about kittens and knitting - normal service will be resumed imminently.

Comments

[kissmeforlonger.livejournal.com]

I did lots of research on which netbook I wanted, compared prices all over the place, and then got the one that was purple, from Amazon.

Seems OK so far ;-)

Everything is a bit dull and silver at the moment isn't it. Netbooks are a lot more fun, but not what you're looking for.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Yeah I hate this sudden return to yawnsome silver/grey casings. It's either that or retro textures all over the place - faux-industrial, swirly or 70s wood veneer. A whole genre of laptops designed by the hipstamatic generation... presumably in reaction against last year's fashion for fingerprint-inducing glossiness.

Pretty netbooks knock spots off laptops when it comes to gorgeousness. I do love mine - especially now that she is acting as a crimson life-saver... but sadly she isn't the right gadge for when I want to do anything more challenging than surf the webz or type in Word.

[lazy-hoor.livejournal.com]

Have you tried running something like Puppy Linux on Willow? I use Linux Mint myself but Puppy' meant to be good for old computers. Might tide you over til you get a sexy new one.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I would have thought a full featured linux would run just fine on a machine that's only three or four years old (I assume that's what Willow is). I've utterly no problems with the latest Ubuntu on my work machine which is 4 years old.

[lazy-hoor.livejournal.com]

Sure, but if the machine's having probs then a lightweight distro might be useful.

[steer.livejournal.com]

This is true.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Actually the OS and performance ofWillow are still fine... She's only 2 years old and was top of the range at the time I bought her. Unfortunately it's the screen that's buggered - it died slowly and now has become a snowstorm. (G thinks the kittens have knocked her on the floor one too many times)

[lazy-hoor.livejournal.com]

Ah if it's the screen that's buggered... Can be expensive to replace!

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

I am fearful of the cost... :-(

[steer.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean. In our research group notebooks are either boring functional devices to run linux or the same old macbook -- ooh mine is 0.25 cm thinner than yours (the split is about 70% mac 30% linux).

As Kriss says netbooks are quirkier and more interesting but notebooks have converged to a rather dull situation.

Is it the aesthetic you're looking for or just the raw processing power? If it's processing power, it's just a question of crunching the numbers I guess.

I know you don't do PC gaming -- but alienware (branded dell) do notebooks these days if you want to treat yourself. Then again I guess the current range is getting on a bit. Look pretty though. However, you wouldn't want to travel with them -- bulky and no battery life.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

I am probably being hard to please... But basically I want good performance and sleek sexiness rolled into one, rather than either/or.

In fairness I don't need it to be as high spec as a gaming machine or HPC for academic number crunching (I'd go for a desktop hulk if I needed that). I just want an upper end laptop that's got the latest processor & decent memory & so on without also being a tedious, giant grey lump of dullz.

And I want a pony too! :-)

I would consider a mac, for a change, but the word on the street is that it is the wrong time to buy a MacBook right now, cos they're well overdue a hardware upgrade.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Hold on, what do you want the latest processor FOR? If it's not gaming or number crunching then your performance bottleneck is perhaps memory or disk access rather than CPU. So perhaps you're looking to optimise the wrong thing. If the issue is that you just want to open lots of applications and big pictures then memory and fast disk is what you need -- in which case perhaps get something with SSD disk and lots of memory and drop the "latest CPU" requirement?

I think the alienware machine is pretty good looking but it's not sleek -- a real high-end performance machine will never be lightweight because it's got to be crammed with the massive graphics card and more cooling components.

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

You may be right re: mem & space being more important for me than processor. My min issue is quantity of things runningat once, rather than number crunching. I tend to take the view that whatever I buy will be considered "older technology" within 6 months of purchase, so I aim for the latest hardware in order to get a good 2 - 3 years use out of it.

Willow is pretty good, and the processor is probably only I3, but she struggles when I have (for example) a lot of high res images open at once. Photoshop can be a killer at times.

G and I looked at a lot of machines online to see which ones could be customised with a solid state drive. The best I could find right now was a customised S model VAIO, but the physical machine is SO drastically unsexy in the flesh that I decided not to bother. (I'm clinging to the vague hope that if I wait 6 months there will be suddently a lot of better options on the market.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. Lots of images at once is likely memory issues. In the end, to keep all those images in program they must be in memory or swapped temporarily to disk. So unless the slowness is when you are doing processing (eg some transform on an image) then likely memory is the issue. Open 100 20MB images and that's 2GB gone just on data. Keep a few levels of undo and it all builds up. A lot of high quality photos are even larger. Nothing you can do but throw memory at the problem or open fewer images.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Oh, one more thing. If it's really an appearance thing perhaps just buying a slim laptop with the specs you want and then get a custom skin? (I don't know how good the skins ever look and I don't know which models you can get them for -- but I guess if you find a laptop which has the CPU/memory/form factor you require but it's a boring grey slab then it might be the solution).

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

That might be a good option to keep up my sleeve.

[steer.livejournal.com]

By the way, can't remember if I already sent you this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAfpq6EPKck

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

That's just made me snort! :-)

[whiteshadow.livejournal.com]

I think that I am right in saying that Mac have a number of upgrade options that may be worth checking out.

I used to love Sony laptops but recent models have been pretty poor.

D

[the-meanest-cat.livejournal.com]

Yeah - Sony used to be smoking, but they do seem to have gone off the boil lately...