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Windows 10 laptop recommendations

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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby 9fingers » 07 Sep 2019, 20:58

Just to report back.
I'm very pleased with the new lappy. Bargain at £150. A few small dents in the lid but I can't see them when I'm using it :lol:
Excellent screen, perfect keyboard and battery seems to hold up well. With a bit of private guidance from Robert of this parish, I'm finding my way round Win 10. Very very different from what I'm used to but the search bar is quite powerful I have have to learn to ask there rather than try and find stuff by browsing. Annoyingly a few changes of names of of key functions from XP for no apparent reason.
Best of all I found a cheap 64 bit version of my familiar 2-D drawing package Visio on ebay so that and the preloaded open office will do most of what I want.
Managed to bring 8 years worth of mail over from the previous lappy without tears.
It's not often I need to look back through mail but when I do its useful to keep it all after filtering out the dross.
It is a Dell Latitude E7240 12" 8gb ram 240GB SSD fresh clean install of Win10 and COA, Open Office, Edge, Chrome Acrobate reader all ready loaded.
Well pleased.

Bob
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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby kirkpoore1 » 15 Sep 2019, 19:26

Bob:

I'm glad you like the laptop. After a week of use, I hope it's working out. If I'd seen the thread sooner, I would have added my opinion about one thing:

Memory.

Windows 10 is a pig when it comes to memory. Yes, you can get machines with 4 GB of RAM, and they'll run.

For now.

Two years from now, when W10 is bloated up even more? I don't know. The one thing that will make the laptop run a long time is a lot of RAM. Get as much as you can cram into the machine. 8 GB at a minimum, 16 GB if you can. Even if you just do browsing and maybe some light word processing, the behind-the-scenes programs they put in hog memory and you have no idea which ones you can shut off. And they will continue getting bigger, so what is safe today won't be in a few years.

Kirk
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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby 9fingers » 15 Sep 2019, 22:21

kirkpoore1 wrote:Bob:

I'm glad you like the laptop. After a week of use, I hope it's working out. If I'd seen the thread sooner, I would have added my opinion about one thing:

Memory.

Windows 10 is a pig when it comes to memory. Yes, you can get machines with 4 GB of RAM, and they'll run.

For now.

Two years from now, when W10 is bloated up even more? I don't know. The one thing that will make the laptop run a long time is a lot of RAM. Get as much as you can cram into the machine. 8 GB at a minimum, 16 GB if you can. Even if you just do browsing and maybe some light word processing, the behind-the-scenes programs they put in hog memory and you have no idea which ones you can shut off. And they will continue getting bigger, so what is safe today won't be in a few years.

Kirk



Hi Kirk, I read about memory greed somewhere else too and opted for 8GB ram. I'm not sure If I can just add more or if I have to buy larger modules.
Currently the machine is not working hard at anything much with just a few windows open and it is using 3.9GB FFS!

The first computer I played with was about the second microprocessor intel produced the 8008 around 1975. It had 256bytes of RAM for both program and data and you soon learned to be economical with it. We managed to get hold of a magnetic core module about the size of thick paperback that gave us 1kbyte without having to reload from papertape every time we restarted the machine. Sheer luxury!
Early Macs had no internal hard disc and ran with the sytem on 1 800k floppy and a second one for data. Then they bought out a 20mb external HDD. That was near infinite capacity! :lol:

Bob
Information on induction motors here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dBTVXx ... sp=sharing
Email:motors@minchin.org.uk
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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby kirkpoore1 » 16 Sep 2019, 04:28

Oh yes, I was around almost that far back. I bought an Apple II with 48k RAM and no floppy back in June of ‘79. It’s still down in my basement. Hand written serial number 17 thousand and something. :)

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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby Robert » 20 Sep 2019, 12:21

Just back from a nice break in Greece so catching up.

Think I have to disagree with Kirks post about windows 10 and memory usage. I've found 10 to be installable and even work well on very low memory size systems.

If you have been around computers as long at it seems most here have you remember ramdrive on old systems as a volatile place to store stuff- but store it fast compared to writing to a drive. Windows 10 just uses up a lump of memory for something similar but built in. It might seem it is hogging memory but it is just a cache amount that the system can free up if needed by an app.....at least that is how I understand it.

More memory is never bad but for most uses 4Gb plus should be fine for 10.
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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby RogerS » 20 Sep 2019, 12:44

kirkpoore1 wrote:Oh yes, I was around almost that far back. I bought an Apple II with 48k RAM and no floppy back in June of ‘79. It’s still down in my basement. Hand written serial number 17 thousand and something. :)

Kirk


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Re: Windows 10 laptop recommendations

Postby RogerS » 20 Sep 2019, 12:45

Robert wrote:.... Windows 10 just uses up a lump of memory for something similar but built in. It might seem it is hogging memory but it is just a cache amount that the system can free up if needed by an app.....at least that is how I understand it.

.....


Ah, so at last, Microsoft have caught up with Apple :eusa-whistle:
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