For 1k, I bought a laptop with:
Dell E1405, Intel Core T2300E (2MB/1.66GHz/667MHz)
14.1 Inch TrueLife Wide-screenWXGA+, for Inspiron 640M/E1405
1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM 533MHZ,2 DIMM for Inspiron 640M/E1405
Intel Integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 950 GM, for Inspiron 640M/E1405
Dell 725 Printer Driver
120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive for Inspiron 640M/E1405
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, English without Media, for Inspiron
8X DVD+/-RW Drive for Inspiron640M/E1405
Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 802.11a/g Mini Card (54Mbps) for Inspiron
3 year warentee with At Home Service, 24x7 Technical Support, 2 Years
Next day shipping
And a bunch of other crap
It was a complete inpulse buy the day after my desktop died. I had always built the computers myself so the most I ever spent on a computer before was $500. I looooove my laptop. I can run everything I need without a problem. I’ve got a LOT of stuff on my hardrives, so I use an external case to connect my old harddrive to this computer and the transfer rate between them is amazingly fast.
I’m looking to buy a desktop prebuilt now. Some of my geek friends are going into convulsions at the idea of buying it prebuilt but Dell allows you to customize and I don’t have time to game anymore so I won’t need to run anything more powerful than photoshop. I went to Best Buy and was drooling over some of the machines there. I want to buy a gaming computer even though I know I don’t need it and probably won’t be able to use it for another 3 years ><
Under most circumstances you won’t see an issue aside from a very slight hesitation in response times, but the thing that stood out most was that it seems to be way to small and too slow considering the power of your video card. The video card implies that you want to do video intensive things and a very large, very fast HD is typically a must there.
An analogy I’d make is buying a Porsche 911 but opting for the undersized, cheap brakes.
You don’t want to be working on a video editing project that resides on an external drive; doesn’t matter how fast the drive is, Hi-Speed USB2.0, whilst it might seem to have the necessary bandwidth on paper (and is, all things considered, a good standard, despite most criticisms), it will create a bottleneck, or at least this has been my experience with external USB hard drives; they’re great for storing projects that you’ve set aside, or are finished with, but if you want to render your video project, copy the whole thing to the internal drive and run it all from there; it makes a big difference.
With all due respect, Final Cut Pro makes it extremely clear that you are not to store media on the same hard drive as the one where the software resides. This is not a YMMV vary thing, this is a clear warning from the sofware writers.
However, other video editing softwares and Avid HD Express may not have that problem, I’ve never used them.
I do agree 100 % with your statement that an external USB II hard drive is not good enough. You must use a FireWire Drive, and it must spin at 7200. I forgot this, and when I install my FCP on my new machine, I tried using my cute little Smartdisk Firelite external FireWire drive. I didn’t realize it spun at 5400 rpm. The media could not be imported into it by FCP.
USB II external drives- especially the little ones like the Smartdisk Firelite, which comes in both USBII and Firewire configurations are a dream. Small, and easy to carry. One could easily back up one’s entire laptop and take up only the room of a pack of 100 size cigarettes. Actually, I am looking at mine now, and it’s thinner than a pack of cigarettes.
They are perfect for storing gargantuan still media such as those evilly huge 8 and 10 megapixel-camera photographs. But moving media? No way. ( By moving I mean video. They can store a bazillion music files with no problem. )
I had to look this thread up because I finally replaced this laptop. It had a good run. I upgraded the memory to 4GB, got a 250GB 7300ROM HDD, and replaced the backlight once. Battery stopped working sometime around 2008 and I never bothered to buy a new one. Other than that, this machine served me well for 8 years. Not bad.
Here is what I just replaced it with. Let me know how I did.
Alienware 17"
Windows 7 Ultimate
4th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-4710MQ processor (Quad Core, 6MB Cache, up to 3.5GHz w/ Turbo Boost
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 880M graphics with 8GB total GDDR5
16GB DDR3L at 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)
1TB 5400RPM SATA 6Gb/s + 80GB mSATA SSD Caching
It came with a free 16GB Dell 7 Venue tablet (Student Coupon), and 10% off the entire order (Military Coupon). Total cost with shipping was $2463. I will add the latest Microsoft Office for $5 under the MS Home Use Program.
Should this computer last just as long as the last one? Has advancements in computer technology been slowing down or speeding up? Should I have gotten Windows 8? One of the reasons I started looking at Alienware was that I could still order them with Windows 7. My wife’s computer has Windows 8 and I hate it.
The truth? You could have gotten a Sager with the exact same specs (actually, a 4810MQ and I selected Win7 Pro) for $2100 shipped. However, you got a tablet too, so it’s probably about even.
Impulse buy? Yeah,I went to the Library Book Sale,bought $5.85 worth of books. On my income that’s a big chunk. $3,000.00!? That’s about 4/5 months income for me. Don’t ever get old/sick,it messes up all your plans
Got a bit squiffy last night and bought these Korg synthesizer things for DH and me to play with. I’m hoping I’ve got all the right cables and such. Only now, I’ve got to start looking for yet another desk or something so we can set those up with the mixer and speakers, and some other synth gear we’ve collected. Umm, and a place to put it.
Did I mention we have pretty much no idea what to do with this stuff? The little ones like dancing to our off-beats though. It’s gonna be all up ons soon…dooump dooump dooump dooump…
I also got him a pretty rad doumbek drum for his birthday coming up. And some finger cymbals for the little ones. I’m going to start bellydancing again, so thought that would be fun for all…
Hope the rest of you enjoy your new technologies.
ETA: Just noticed this was kind of a zombie thread…oh well.
More descriptively, technological advancements keep on improving as usual. But most games these days (which are the primary use of top edge tech for most people) are designed around console specifications so the requirements for games have been fairly stagnant. There’s been a jump with the PS4/Xbox One out now where having a beefier computer is helpful but it’s not like the old days where stuff was legitimately obsolete for gaming a year after you bought it. A capable system now should be capable for years to come.
That should be pretty future proof, an 880M is quite nice and any i7 will last for a couple of years, and 16GB(GiB if you’re an IEC idiot, JEDEC FOREVER!) of memory is more than enough for now.
Computer technology isn’t really advancing faster or slower, by Moore’s law CPUs double in speed roughly ever 18 months, but there is a hard limit on transistor size, so at some point Moore’s law will stop working. Although I’ve heard they’ve made some progress with other CPU designs which could extend the law.
Windows 8 is terrible(It gave me the final push to Linux), and Windows 9 is coming out soon, so don’t bother and stick with 7. Microsoft gets 1 in 2 releases right, so 9 should be good and worth the upgrade.
My largest by dollar value single item purchase ever was a 386 when 486s where just moving down into the fast but not cutting edge territory. I did splurge for a color monitor though.
True; however, TRS-80’s started at about $600, which could definitely be labelled “entry level.” The Apple II was the Cadillac of home computers in 1977.
The little ones like dancing to our off-beats though. It’s gonna be 