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Buying an external hard drive

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  • meer53
    meer53 Posts: 10,217 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    that wrote: »
    Those HP Pavilions x2 are crud in my opinion. 32Gb of flash memory and an atom cpu, limited and slow. A netbook more than a laptop.

    Yes they are light weight, but you cant expand them, limited use and cost under £300 new.


    Depending what your daughter studies, she most probably will not be able to install any applications, and you will end up buying her another computer.


    Dont buy a disk, buy a computer, or wait till she goes to uni, especially if she does thing like architecture, or graphics.


    OneDrive is great until there is no wifi connection. Just buy a 128Gb usb stick for under £30

    The HP has been fine so far, no problems for the last 2 and a half years so we've had our moneys worth. I explained earlier that she's doing a teaching degree so there's no need for any fancy graphics stuff, she's always going to have wifi so i'm not worried about that either. If she needs a new laptop at a later stage then so be it but right now, i need the cheapest option which seems to be the flash drive.
  • One drive works ok if you are away from WiFi if you have the files you need. Hence the difference between having all files synced and only some and on impact hard disk space.
  • Tom99
    Tom99 Posts: 5,371 Forumite
    1,000 Posts Second Anniversary
    [FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]You could buy two of the 64gb £16.50 sticks, keep one in the laptop with the data on then use the other to do a backup once a week or even once at day.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]If you use 'mirror' to backup which will only copy over the changes you have made it can be really quick to backup, only a minute or two at most.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]That of course assumes you have 2 USB ports.[/FONT]
    [FONT=Verdana, sans-serif]Once you have removed the data to the memory stick you could use CCleaner to delete the unwanted stuff from the hard drive rather than pay someone to do it.[/FONT]
  • esuhl
    esuhl Posts: 9,409 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 1,000 Posts Name Dropper
    Can you not upgrade the internal drive (or flash memory) for a much bigger one...?
  • that
    that Posts: 1,532 Forumite
    Esuhl, apparently not. https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Windows/ssd-memory-upgrade-for-hp-x2-detachable/td-p/5872196

    I personally feel that devices like this rip people off... imitates a computer, but more like a kindle ;) Though glad they have worked for the ops daughter.

    For some people they work, and often they have a long battery life, would i buy one.... well a gps enabled one would make an awesome satnav and have just about enough flash for maps too.
  • meer53
    meer53 Posts: 10,217 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    that wrote: »
    Esuhl, apparently not. https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Windows/ssd-memory-upgrade-for-hp-x2-detachable/td-p/5872196

    I personally feel that devices like this rip people off... imitates a computer, but more like a kindle ;) Though glad they have worked for the ops daughter.

    For some people they work, and often they have a long battery life, would i buy one.... well a gps enabled one would make an awesome satnav and have just about enough flash for maps too.

    I admit i wouldnt have bought one, her dad (my ex) bought this for her when she was starting college. It's been great so far, she only really uses it for college work and listening to music as, like most 17 year old girls, everything else is done on her iphone ! I'll review it once she's at Uni and see if it would be better to buy a new laptop, need to get all the other Uni expenses out of the way first !

    I'll be back for advice on that :rotfl:
  • The reason I would not go SD card is that a lot of them are designed to slide into the laptop and then press again to eject. This can have the unfortunate effect of been pressed when working on the laptop especially if on your lap. This can then screw your data up... :(

    If this is a similar sort of spec then it's a microSD slot
    https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-x2-10-p000-Notebook-PC/12499232/model/13443304/document/c05272293/

    - have never used one in a laptop, but have one in my tablet, and I'd have thought there was a pretty negligible chance of accidentally pressing it and ejecting it. It's hard enough to remove it when you're trying to.

    Could stick some tape over the slot to further reduce the chances of ejecting it ?
  • ChuckMountain
    ChuckMountain Posts: 194 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 100 Posts Combo Breaker
    edited 18 April 2018 at 11:11AM
    If this is a similar sort of spec then it's a microSD slot
    https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/HP-x2-10-p000-Notebook-PC/12499232/model/13443304/document/c05272293/

    - have never used one in a laptop, but have one in my tablet, and I'd have thought there was a pretty negligible chance of accidentally pressing it and ejecting it. It's hard enough to remove it when you're trying to.

    Could stick some tape over the slot to further reduce the chances of ejecting it ?

    The difference in some of the ones I have used vs say a tablet is whether they stick out or not. Tablet (like a phone) usually are fairly well integrated.

    According to the manual it is a push in to eject one, so still a bit of a risk and also tape in this situation would not help as you would be trying to eject it by applying pressure from the tape.

    Also a couple of reported issues with incompatibility of MicroSD cards to be aware of

    https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Windows/What-size-and-class-SD-card-you-can-use-on-Pavilion-X2-12/td-p/5503453
  • meer53 wrote: »
    I admit i wouldnt have bought one, her dad (my ex) bought this for her when she was starting college. It's been great so far, she only really uses it for college work and listening to music as, like most 17 year old girls, everything else is done on her iphone ! I'll review it once she's at Uni and see if it would be better to buy a new laptop, need to get all the other Uni expenses out of the way first !

    I'll be back for advice on that :rotfl:

    There is nothing inherently wrong with it, it is built to a price point as most laptops\devices are. Yes you can get her a better one but does the current one do what she wants apart from the space issue.

    If I am looking at the same model then it looks quite nice and has some nice features. Limited by disk space and processor power but at the end of the day she doesn't need it to be really powerful.

    I have used some laptops that are ridiculously slow and they become counter productive, waiting 5 minutes for something to boot is not good etc.
  • meer53
    meer53 Posts: 10,217 Forumite
    Tenth Anniversary 10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    There is nothing inherently wrong with it, it is built to a price point as most laptops\devices are. Yes you can get her a better one but does the current one do what she wants apart from the space issue.

    If I am looking at the same model then it looks quite nice and has some nice features. Limited by disk space and processor power but at the end of the day she doesn't need it to be really powerful.

    I have used some laptops that are ridiculously slow and they become counter productive, waiting 5 minutes for something to boot is not good etc.

    We dropped it off this morning at a local PC repairers, they're going to clean it up and then let me know what the best way forward is. I think it will be fine as it is once this is done plus some extra storage.
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