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  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
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    GunJack wrote: »
    YOU SHOULD NOT TREAT A THINKPAD LIKE THAT!!!!!!!! :mad:


    Lol apologies GunJack - I couldnt find any stock photos of an eee being used as a dart board :D
  • jamesd
    jamesd Posts: 26,103 Forumite
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    edited 17 May 2017 at 2:35PM
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    Ah well, adding the i3 and i5 options - I'll use the same vendor as for the i7 - will have to wait for later.

    TrishaM if your budget allows it do go for at least the i3 or i5 when I add those. The faster CPU, 8GB of RAM and very fast SSD drive that I'll be picking will be much faster if you have the budget. The i7 is more of a luxury choice. Nice but way more CPU power than most people really need.

    I mentioned electricity. I've measured the i7 CPU I mentioned in a fancy laptop using only about 10W of electricity when doing web browsing. About the same as a 75W equivalent LED light bulb. Went up to 80W when doing CPU-intensive file compression with 7-Zip. My full power desktop model uses more like 150W for lowish CPU load tasks. 10W is about £4.50 a year in electricity if used every day for eight hours with electricity costing about 15p per kWh but your monitor will probably use several times that much. Your current computers are probably using something like £50-£100 worth each plus whatever the monitor uses.
  • psychic_teabag
    psychic_teabag Posts: 2,865 Forumite
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    re: eee-pc
    AndyPix wrote: »
    Yes, thats exactly the system i was thinking about !!!
    God they are horrible beyond words ..


    What do you use it for ?
    IME - browsing alone with no software installed whatsoever was absolutely garbage.
    I think i even threw 2 of those in the skip a few years back they were that bad !!


    Edit : I got a horrible little shudder down my back when i remembered those things lol

    I got it (from work) initially to do some x86 android work. But now it's running linux and we use it for surfing the web and checking email. Or sometimes I might use it to ssh to headless raspberry pi if it's misbehaving or anything. Sometimes we watch recorded TV programs on it. Just a go-to laptop for general purpose.

    Until a few weeks ago, OH was using it (professionally) as thin client / X server for a shared machine we use for development. (Plugged into a proper monitor and keyboard, obviously.)

    It was running some sort of gnome desktop until recently, which was okay. But we foolishly did an upgrade, and that became something bloated and sluggish, so we stepped down to using a simpler window manager rather than a "desktop". (Which is how I use my desktop machine anyway. Which is even older than the eee-pc, come to think of it.)
  • psychic_teabag
    psychic_teabag Posts: 2,865 Forumite
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    GunJack wrote: »
    maybe ok when running android, but certainly not good for Windows....

    Perhaps you should challenge your assumptions... why is it okay that android can manage on particular hardware, but windows isn't expected to ?
  • jamesd
    jamesd Posts: 26,103 Forumite
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    DavidP24 wrote: »
    Do you mean you added the quicklaunch yourself (I did myself) I am interested to know if there is a way to make Windows Explorer behave like it did in Win7, It truly is awful in Win10
    It has settings that can make it look and work pretty much the same, but still keeping nice things like the file copy progress box improvements. Also some nice add-on options to do things like get a Windows XP style of start menu if you prefer that.

    If you can't find the setting to change something that's annoying you, you might try saying more specifically what it is and someone may be able to tell you.
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
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    psychic_teabag wrote: »
    Perhaps you should challenge your assumptions... why is it okay that android can manage on particular hardware, but windows isn't expected to ?


    Because Android was designed from the ground up as a mobile operating system designed to run on lightweight hardware.
    Whereas windows not so much.
    Windows expects a lot of resources and includes the ability to interface with many many diffeferent devices in different configurations.


    Whole diffrent ballgame
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
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    jamesd wrote: »
    I've spent a few thousand hours using one,.


    Just a few more hours and you MAY finish that email you were trying to write :rotfl:
  • psychic_teabag
    psychic_teabag Posts: 2,865 Forumite
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    edited 18 May 2017 at 9:44AM
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    AndyPix wrote: »
    Because Android was designed from the ground up as a mobile operating system designed to run on lightweight hardware.
    Whereas windows not so much.
    Windows expects a lot of resources and includes the ability to interface with many many diffeferent devices in different configurations.


    Whole diffrent ballgame

    The different devices come with device drivers which are loaded dynamically. So it only needs to load support for devices actually present. So that's no excuse. (Though I do of course accept that the driver support libraries need to be a bit richer to be able to support a wider range of categories of device.)

    The ability to exploit lots of resources need not be the same as "expects a lot of resources", and that in turn does not necessarily translate to *requiring* lots of resources. If there are lots of resources available, the OS is there to make them available to the programs the user wants to run, not to consume them all for itself.

    EDIT: Doh! Missed opportunity to point out that android just takes standard linux kernel as its basis. They added some support for sleeping/waking and for some custom IPC stuff, but they didn't design the kernel from the ground up for small devices. That was all already there.
  • AndyPix
    AndyPix Posts: 4,847 Forumite
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    psychic_teabag wrote: »
    The ability to exploit lots of resources need not be the same as "expects a lot of resources", .


    Need not - but unfortunately is
  • jamesd
    jamesd Posts: 26,103 Forumite
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    edited 19 May 2017 at 1:38AM
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    So the people I deal with have linux systems with say 360 gigabytes of RAM and terabytes of solid state storage. That's way beyond what the typical Windows user has and more than Windows Home versions support so Windows must be efficient compared to Linux, is your claim?

    There is a bit of merit to that claim because the common Linux memory allocators in particular can be quite wasteful of both RAM (not freeing it very well and not doing very good garbage collection) and CPU (particularly slow at allocating RAM if you use the typical default allocators and often have more than around six to eight threads running). Fortunately considerably more efficient allocators are available and can be used with serious systems.
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