The Breakroom > The Water Cooler

New Laptop Purchase Help

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Darren:
I think there is a point to be raised here Nick .... you are comparing your machine with other peoples.

It all depends on what they do with theirs, where they visit on the net, what type of sites and how much they download etc.
Some sites, esp those that are aimed at kids, chuck all sorts of monitoring cookies onto your machine. There could be 1,000's of them and they all take processing power.

Women's shopping sites are another target, they want to know where their shoppers are going and what is being looked at.

I do know this, give our daughter either a laptop or desktop and I can quarentee it needs re-loading  within the month because she's complaining it's so slow she simply stops using it. Music sites seems to be the cause from what I can tell? Though I'm no expert it happens regularly enough to show a pattern.

But even so, even I find my own machine needs re-loading about every 4-6mths to keep the speed up.

I use imaging software for re-loading, it doesn't take very long to have a fresh install that way. 20min at most depending on size and it's mostly automatic with no need for inputting settings or all the programs individually.

Mind you, years ago Ghost only took about 4 min to do the same thing when all the programs were smaller, even with the older slower machines !!
And you could keep the back-up on a CD, now you need a spare HD.

Darren:
Here's a trick for you ...

Firefox has a "privacy" mode under the tools link at the top left.

No doubt meant for browsing where you shouldn't be, or maybe for public computers etc.

The thing is, while in privacy mode nothing is saved to your computer when you exit back to "normal" mode ... and it really seems to be nothing at all.

So no cookies and any other nasties as they are ripped out by Firefox with no input from the user.


Thinking about it, maybe that would be a good way to let the daughter carry on using the music sites she seems to love so much  :coffee:

spuddevans:

--- Quote from: John Rudd on January 11, 2010, 06:48:09 AM ---Its not necessarily limited to the cheap end of the market, my son's Asus laptop that he purchased from Laptopsdirect was £1200 when new....The hinges on that have failed and it is out of guarantee....An expensive repair is looming... :(

--- End quote ---

( puts on voice from Dad's Army ) " We're all Doooooooooooomed "

It's not looking to good for choosing a laptop  :scratch:

If you do catch the hinges before they totally break you can attempt a repair ( of a fashion ). On the two that I have repaired, both of them started with just one hinge suffering fatigue. The other hinge then has to take the strain of both hinges and so fails pretty quick after that. If you catch it with only one hinge gone you can try to reduce the additional pressure on the remaining hinge.

When you get to actually see the hinge assembly you see that the hinge is not designed to be a free pivoting hinge, rather the laptop hinge has not only to hinge the LCD open and shut, it also has to have enough stiffness to hold the LCD in the open position, this means that the hinge really grips the pin that is attached to the laptop base.

The "fix" that I found to be useful was, seperate the failing hinge assembly and mount the "pin" part in the lathe and ever-so-slightly reduce it's diameter with a piece of 300 W&D and then polish it with some 600 W&D. ( I didnt measure how much I took off, but I just kept checking it in the rest of the hinge until it could just turn in the hinge under finger power. )

I also applied some graphite to both hinges ( rubbed it with a pencil ) and re-assembled and got a couple of months more out of it before the other hinge started to fail, and then I had to do the same to it.

It was only a temporary fix, I eventually had to put a backing piece covering the whole back of the LCD, attached with some little bolts through the hinge assembly (that was broken off from the original LCD mount) and through the top of the plastic LCD cover, and the laptop is still in use to this day, just doesnt look to pretty.


Tim

spuddevans:
For a safer surfing experience, install VMware( free version ) and then download one of the linux virtual machine distributions, or there are tutorials for making your own XP Virtual Machine.

Using a virtual machine is really easy, it looks and acts just like using the real thing, it is sort of like running another operating system from within your present operating system. But the real advantage is that when using the virtual machine, nothing you do can affect or infect, your real operating system.

Another advantage is that the virtual machine is completely stored in just one file, that makes having a backup copy very easy.

Tim

NickG:
Good point Darren, I remember once going through and uninstalling everything on my mums that she'd thought looked useful so simply clicked ok to on screen messages. Probably a load of spyware and adware. It gets on my nerves a bit when I see 100 extra tool bars at the top of the internet explorer page!

 :offtopic: Got a good virus the other day, it wouldn't let me open or do anything other than a web page asking me to upgrade my antivirus software for $60! I had to catch it on boot up and randomly end a load of fishy looking processes (luckily it must have been one of those) and then did a system restore. A few days later my wife's friend had the same one, the same worked for hers. Couldn't remember how to start in safe mode but that may have done the trick too.

I just use AVG but used to run scans with adaware and spyware doctor at one point, had some really bad stuff that used a lot of processing power at one point.

That's a cool idea Tim, will have to look into that.

On the hinges, I took an old one to bits once and was shocked how stiff they had to be, couldn't move them with the screen bolted off!

Nick

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