Which laptop is better?

Trillionaire

OK what about this as opposed to No. 1 in my original post?

Fujitsu LIFEBOOK AH532 15.6-inch Laptop (Intel Core i5-3210M 2.5GHz Processor, 6GB RAM, 500GB HDD, DVDRW, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) £439.99

Fujitsu LIFEBOOK AH532 15.6-inch Laptop (Intel Core i3-2370M 2.4GHz Processor, 8GB RAM, 750GB HDD, DVDRW, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit) £399

I'm reluctant / just don't think I want a Windows 8 laptop. I remember when Vista came out and everyone seemed to be ditching XP and, from what I've read, most Vista purchasers went on to regret it. It just seems to me that Windows8 is for tablets not pc(s) or laptops. This is just my opinion.

Lum

Ooh, I didn't notice the difference in HD size. That is a very good point.

As for Vista vs 7 vs 8 it's all a bit overblown as far as I'm concerned.

Vista was slagged off when new because it was unstable and had poor support for a lot of hardware. This is because Microsoft made a lot of changes to how hardware support works in Vista. Despite having years to prepare, hardware manufacturers wern't ready, and were shipping crappy unstable drivers for quite some time. It also wasn't helped by a number of significant bugs in the OS itself. The old adage of waiting for the service pack rang loud and true when Vista came out. For most people Vista is written off as a failure because of this.

In the enthusiast community Vista was problematic for a different reason. All those self built and overclocked PCs that ran mostly fine under XP started crashing regularly with Vista. This is because Vista makes much greater use of RAM that XP would leave empty, it does this to improve application startup time and performance by attempting to pre-load your apps into RAM before you even know you are going to start them. This is great unless your RAM is a bit dodgy at which point your app loads and crashes, and sometimes takes down the OS with it.

A few years go by, the hardware issues are sorted out, and the enthusiasts are now used to the RAM thing, Service Pack 2 for Vista has fixed all the stuff Microsoft screwed up. But the press and the general feeling is that Vista is an unusable failure. What is Microsoft to do?

They spruced up the start menu a bit, added a couple of other new features, slapped them on top of Vista and called it Windows 7. You could have called it Vista Service Pack 3 but then no-one would install it.

Windows 8 largely continues on this trend. There is more under the hood work. They have stripped out a lot of crud that is no longer needed, removed support for ancient hardware that nobody uses any more, and slapped on yet another new start menu, called Metro, but it's still basically the same as Vista. You can install drivers written for Vista and 99% of them work without modification.

Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the Metro UI. It's why I keep recommending a $3 app called StartIsBack when the topic of Windows 8 comes up, but I'm still glad I bought Windows 8, glad enough I bought a second copy for my other machine. That machine is over 4 years old, started life running XP, and I've had no problems with Win8.

Trillionaire

They spruced up the start menu a bit, added a couple of other new features, slapped them on top of Vista and called it Windows 7. You could have called it Vista Service Pack 3 but then no-one would install it.

Lum that made me laugh. I wouldn't call it Vista Service pack 3 either:rotfl:.

katty1166

post budget will get more choice:)

Trillionaire

In the end I purchased Samsung 550P5C 15.6 inch Laptop - Black (Intel Core i5 3210M 2.5GHz, 6GB RAM, 1TB HDD, DVD SuperMulti DL, LAN, WLAN, BT, Webcam, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit)

from ebay for £400 ('new .. other' - customer return I think). It was one that was in my Amazon wishlist for ages. The cheapest that Amazon (not an external seller) sold it for at one point was £504.

It takes ages to start up. From pushing the 'on' button to seeing the home screen/desktop is 1 min 15 secs. Something needs sorting! I've only downloaded Firefox and Microsoft security (I removed Norton), nothing else, and the only icon I have on the desktop is 'recycle bin'. I'll start a new thread later to get help in sorting out the start up issue.

Anyway, for all intents and purposes that's this thread done with.

Lum

That's a bit slow, but not too bad for Win7 on a mechanical hard drive.

Since you've only just got it, it might be an idea to do a format and reinstall now, before you've got it all set up, should remove any remaining traces of Norton as well as any traces of any other junk or malware the previous owner may have had.

Trillionaire

Lum wrote: »

That's a bit slow, but not too bad for Win7 on a mechanical hard drive.

Since you've only just got it, it might be an idea to do a format and reinstall now, before you've got it all set up, should remove any remaining traces of Norton as well as any traces of any other junk or malware the previous owner may have had.

Format and reinstall:rotfl:do you know how long it took me just to sort out my Firefox bookmark toolbar?????? Ages - that's what.

I'll do a hijack log when I start a new thread (later) about the slow start up.

The older I get the more afraid of technology I become. Format and reinstall sounds simple enough, but I haven't got a clue how to do it - and what if something goes wrong or , God forbid, it doesn't work (sigh). Laters...

Lum

It may be worth having a look at http://pcdecrapifier.com/ it's not intended for removing malware, it's intended for removing all the shovelware that PC manufacturers get paid to include on their new machines.

Beyond that, not much I can do to help. I'm of the school of immediately wiping new machines and installing vanilla Windows, and when I do deal with malware, e.g. on user machines in work I take the same approach, everything is (or should be) backed up so the machine gets wiped and reinstalled.

Fortunately there's plenty of people on this forum who do know how to do it and posting a hijackthis log is a good start.


The reason I say that time isn't too bad though, here are the times for my own laptop:

BIOS time: 6.11s
Boot to login screen: 29.6s (total: 35.71)
Entering password: 4.82s (total: 40.54)
Desktop appears: 12.49 (total: 53.03)
Firefox* loads and responds to user input: 21.97 (total: 1:15.0)

This was on a freshly installed copy of Windows 7 and the machine is a Clevo W170HR with a 2.3 GHz Core i5, 4GB RAM and a 260GB mechanical hard drive. In terms of spec it's not too different to yours, at least not for the things that matter for boot time.

For comparison, here is the same test on the same hardware only with Windows 8

Windows 8 boot:
BIOS time: 5.67s
Boot to login screen: 26.11s (total: 31.79)
Entering password: 6.43 (total: 38.22)
Desktop appears: 7.01 (total: 45.24)
Firefox* loads and responds to user input: 6.36 (total:51.6)


The half second difference in BIOS time is likely due to timing inaccuracies. The extra 2 seconds to enter the password are because Win8 requires you to click the mouse first and sit through a very brief fading animation.



I have since replaced that hard drive with a 240GB Intel 330 SSD at a cost of £140 which has brought it down to less than 24 seconds, but if you're not comfortable with reinstalling Windows I wouldn't recommend this option.


* I don't actually use Firefox, I use an unofficial 64bit version called Waterfox as it has better performance

bluesnake

if like me you rarely use the dvd/cd drive, get a conversion caddy and put your existing hdd in the caddy and an new ssd in your old disk slot.

Lum

I think that is somewhat beyond what the OP will be willing to do. They don't want to reinstall windows at all, so they wont be fitting an SSD.

Might try that on my own laptop though. It only has a DVD drive and I mostly use it with an external blu-ray drive anyway. I guess we'll see when the SSD starts to fill