£1000 for a lew laptop but which one?

[Strapps]

I switched from a large desktop setup to an Acer 7736G nearly two years ago for reasons of space and it's been a great laptop, never had a problem with it. I'd say the only downside to any laptop is the amount of nonsense utility software manufacturers bundle with the machines. Takes an age to get rid of that but at least it's a one-off job.

 

[Mike1980]

yup. crap-ware's a pain.

@OP. A trusted (private) seller from a computing forum I use has "Acer Aspire 8943G Boxed with all Manuals etc, comes with the usual partitioned hard disk with the OS installation/Recovery and software stored."

Am I allowed to post his email address here? Not too sure if it's allowed.

 

[neil_g]

Agreed but the OP said that they wouldn't travel with it.

Just my two pence worth.

not travelling just carrying it around the house.. its a monster.

 

[Duncan.F]

yup. crap-ware's a pain.

@OP. A trusted (private) seller from a computing forum I use has "Acer Aspire 8943G Boxed with all Manuals etc, comes with the usual partitioned hard disk with the OS installation/Recovery and software stored."

Am I allowed to post his email address here? Not too sure if it's allowed.

I don't think there is a problem with recommending people but I think you have to disguise the email address to deter spammers.... Or PM me it sounds like its worth a look!!

Cheers,

Dunc

 

[neil_g]

in fact the acer is..

Weight 4600 g

 

[Duncan.F]

in fact the acer is..

Wow thats heavy......!

 

[technics100]

What about an imac or else dell all in one machine, that way you can move it about the house with only one wire..

 

[Mike1980]

I don't think there is a problem with recommending people but I think you have to disguise the email address to deter spammers.... Or PM me it sounds like its worth a look!!

Cheers,

Dunc

Mhill2029 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com

 

[arad85]

Better screen; no. No simply quality but 1366x768 (720p) vs 1920x1080 full HD. 220cd/m2 brightness. No contest!

I was referring to the full HD Dell XPS screen. It gets very, very good reviews. And if you want to go on brightness specs, the Full HD runs in at 300 cd/m2

Disk; not worth considering IMO as external HDDs are so cheap.

But if you need a portable disk to run the machine, it isn't a laptop...

GPU; lower power consumption / heat output / DX11 / bandwidth etc make the 5650 a great GPU.

But you'll probably use less power (and hence longer battery life) with an Nvidia GPU + 2nd gen ix as Nvidia have Optimus technology which intelligently switches off the GPU when it's not in use and uses the onboard GPU on the ix chip.

More memory; yes, but unneccessary. Heavy (Photoshop, After Effects, encoding/rendering and 1-3 VMs) multi-tasking on my desktop rarely (if ever) uses more than 6Gb. 4 Gb for a lappy is more than enough.

Windows uses any spare memory as a disk cache. The more memory you have, the faster your system will appear to be as the more memory Windows has available to cache disk accesses. Take a look at the resource monitor in Win 7. There's a "Standby" section which is the amount of memory Windows is using as a disk cache.... I regularly "use" all 16G on my home machine, despite it only looking like I'm using a small amount of physical memory.

 

[Mike1980]

I was referring to the full HD Dell XPS screen. It gets very, very good reviews. And if you want to go on brightness specs, the Full HD runs in at 300 cd/m2

Ah.

But if you need a portable disk to run the machine, it isn't a laptop...

It's still got 650Gb HDD. More than enough for most people.

But you'll probably use less power (and hence longer battery life) with an Nvidia GPU + 2nd gen ix as Nvidia have Optimus technology which intelligently switches off the GPU when it's not in use and uses the onboard GPU on the ix chip.

But 'portability' (batterylife) isn't as important here. The OP will use it in their living room! I wasn't aware of Optimus. I think it would be a big benefit to someone who has a big powerful laptop who travels with it. Interesting explanation of it here

Windows uses any spare memory as a disk cache. The more memory you have, the faster your system will appear to be as the more memory Windows has available to cache disk accesses. Take a look at the resource monitor in Win 7. There's a "Standby" section which is the amount of memory Windows is using as a disk cache.... I regularly "use" all 16G on my home machine, despite it only looking like I'm using a small amount of physical memory.


proof? Screenshots? I agree with what you're saying, but "regularly 'use' 16Gb"?

 

[arad85]

proof? Screenshots? I agree with what you're saying, but "regularly 'use' 16Gb"?

I "use" between 4G and 8G on a day-to-day basis. The other 12-8G is used by Windows as a disk cache and appears free to me, but caches the filesystem so I have quick read/write without having to wait for the disk to respond. I.e. just because you're not using extra memory with a program, doesn't mean it isn't speeding up your system.

As to Optimus, I have it on my Dell XPS. Yes, it's great. An i7-2630QM with 525M graphics card and I can get 3-4 hours browsing - even more if I turn the screen brightness down, yet I still have plenty of processing power in reserve when I'm processing images....

 

[Mike1980]

I "use" between 4G and 8G on a day-to-day basis. The other 12-8G is used by Windows as a disk cache and appears free to me, but caches the filesystem so I have quick read/write without having to wait for the disk to respond. I.e. just because you're not using extra memory with a program, doesn't mean it isn't speeding up your system.

As to Optimus, I have it on my Dell XPS. Yes, it's great. An i7-2630QM with 525M graphics card and I can get 3-4 hours browsing - even more if I turn the screen brightness down, yet I still have plenty of processing power in reserve when I'm processing images....

I'm more of a desktop man (or small under powered netbooks), but Optimus could really push ATI out of the mobile market, IMO.

Still waiting for the screenshots of RAM used to the extent you mention?

I agree that Win 7 makes terrific use of free RAM; perhaps 2-3 Gb on a system with 8Gb available.

 

[neil_g]

i just made my system peak at over 7Gb usage using CS3. its pretty easy really. lucky ive got another 9 in reserve

if you have the memory available and your apps set to use that memory (and why wouldnt you) then they will.

 

[arad85]

Still waiting for the screenshots of RAM used to the extent you mention?

My desktop is switched off and is 6000 miles away at the moment Do you not run Win 7? Just open up the task manager->resource meter->RAM and see the Standby RAM usage. My laptop currently says (I've not done any processing recently)
H/W reserved: 86Mb
In use: 3768Mb
Modified: 265Mb
Standby: 1955Mb
Free: 2119Mb

The key thing is the Modified and Standby. Looking at the resource monitor, it says 46% Physical Memory Used (which is the In Use figure) but there's over 2Gbytes of memory cached. With a machine undergiong constant use, this can grow to fill the complete available memory.

 

[arad85]

Just imported 112 images into Lightroom. I now have:

H/W reserved: 86Mb
In use: 3040Mb
Modified: 247Mb
Standby: 4937Mb
Free: 204Mb

Basically Windows is using all 8G even though I "see" that I am using just over 3G.

 

[arad85]

Still waiting for the screenshots of RAM used to the extent you mention?

OK. I'm home

You'll see that 20% of the available memory is "in use" (actually the sum of "In Use" + "Modified") but actually only 4989M (of 16G) is truly "Free". The interesting figure is "Standby". I have almost 8G of memory used to hold data the OS thinks might be useful in the future. This is a PC that has been on for ~18 hours and not had Lightroom/PS run on it since boot....