Windows 7 Laptops Ridiculously Cheap Right Now

Status
Not open for further replies.
axiom said:
That means you restrict yourself to only those functions that the qt/gtk coders allow you to click on?
Click to expand...

I surf the internet, look at photos, and that is about it. Soo yeah, why would I give a rat's ass about geeking out with stuff I don't care about? Everyone that uses any other OS does what the coders allow you to click on. There are those of us that just want to use the machine, instead of exercising all of its capabilities because we can.

If I am utterly forced to use terminal I will. However the latest Ubuntu editions have basically entirely circumvented the need. It is a benefit though, being able to fix your computer with a wealth of knowledge not particularly available for MacOS. With Windows you just have to format, there is no fix, most of the time.
 
Double Negative said:
I wouldn't pay $50 for one. ;)
Click to expand...

Arrogant attitudes like this are the biggest thing I see wrong with too many MAC owners. It gives me the impression they need to justify the extra $ they spent on Apple products by knocking Windows to in order to feel secure about their purchase.

maybe I should mention I own two top of the line MacBook Pros plus an Imac, along with Windows machines. My $600 Sony has a MUCH better keyboard than my $3500 MacBook Pro. On top of that, the Sony play Blu Ray DVDs while the Mac does not even offer Blu Ray, not to mention more USB ports on the Sony.

Stephen
 
I bought my wife a superb Acer at Walmart recently for a bit over $400 - runs Windows 7 and is now the fastest computer in my house - light too. It also has an HDMI video output port so I'm hoping to plug it into my flatscreen TV sometime when she's not home and try it with Youtube and the like!
 
Actually I think they did a lot of things right in windows 7.

Btw. How much memory came with your new win 7 setup. Outside of CPU and graphics card performance get as much memory as u can afford. On Mac I know somewhere between 8 to 16 seems to be sweet spot. Not sure where it is on win 7.

I think that iPad like devices killed the low end pc market, but an i5 is a different animal.

Gary
 
CameraQuest said:
Arrogant attitudes like this are the biggest thing I see wrong with too many MAC owners. It gives me the impression they need to justify the extra $ they spent on Apple products by knocking Windows to in order to feel secure about their purchase....
Click to expand...

I hate to suggest this, but it does seem that way.

I've used Macs at work for 15 yrs, doing photo-editing for the employer, and would come home at the end of the day and do my personal photo editing on a PC.

Since leaving that job, I've rarely used Macs, and but have never had a compelling reason to purchase one. The iPad is interesting, but my experience with playing with friends iPads and other tablets, tells me I'm not getting a tablet.

I'm presently considering a new laptop, and it will be a PC, w/ Windoze whatever.
 
:) I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro running Windows 7 via Bootcamp. Havn't booted into OSX for months.

Before you upgrade to a new computer/laptop - think hard about getting an SSD for your existing setup - it made a massive difference to my old 2Ghz core2duo laptop which I still use for my Lightroom (and can't imagine upgrading until it breaks horrifically).
 
Uncle Bill said:
+1000

I love my Macbook Pro.
Click to expand...
Honestly I'm tempted to buy a MacBook (probably an Air) for my next laptop, simply because it's the only range where choosing a model isn't just one long exercise in confusion and frustration. The older I get, the more attractive Apple's limited-but-focussed offerings become.
 
ruby.monkey said:
Honestly I'm tempted to buy a MacBook (probably an Air) for my next laptop, simply because it's the only range where choosing a model isn't just one long exercise in confusion and frustration. The older I get, the more attractive Apple's limited-but-focussed offerings become.
Click to expand...

I'd consider them if they had non-glossy screens on more models, and if they had a more reasonable international warranty policy that doesn't make me fly to Moscow to have my computer serviced. IBM got that one right back in the day.
 
The perpetual argument between Mac and PC users.

My wife would walk into a store, click three keystrokes on a Mac II, and then whisper to me "we have to leave now, they need to unplug their computers."

I have never used a Mac, and never will. Professionally, I use DOS or nothing at all. DOS gets out of my way and lets me program the hardware directly. Win98se, booted into real mode. Disable Interrupts while running, execute reserved instructions, and undocumented instructions. Phar Lap extended DOS when I need a lot of memory, wrote all of my own low-level support routines for interrupt handling and bypassing their "Shadow-Interrupt vector table". It was too slow. As far as finding hardware to run on- custom made.
 
So, I'll looking for a computer to hook up to my Nikon Coolscan 9000 and Epson 4900.

Will both work with Windows 7 and Mac?

Do I need separate computers?

Texsport
 
There are lots of really cheap cameras out there, too.

And Brian Sweeney gets the "totally hardcore" award for the day!
 
Since prev. year I ran Mepis6 on 512MB RAM which were twice-thrice as it needed. Some Linux distros are well thought, efficient and not resource hungry - I wouldn't pay for Windows or Apple if job wouldn't provide licences.

But those catching viruses on Windows - install good free antivirus (Avira I like), stop visiting XXX un cRaCkZ sites and enjoy life :)

MacOS? I like to be able to throw in interface card (I know, MacOS has some aboard), swap HDD for bigger/faster/quiter or cooler (and no, I don't really like external HDD's) so Apple machines are not appealing to me. I know, Apple guys do upgrades, they swap whole unit like people sell 12mpix DSLR to buy 16mpix DSLR.
 
Texsport said:
So, I'll looking for a computer to hook up to my Nikon Coolscan 9000 and Epson 4900.

Will both work with Windows 7 and Mac?

Do I need separate computers?

Texsport
Click to expand...

I don't know about the Epson but I can tell you that a new Mac with OSX Lion will not run Nikon Scan. You can download Vuescan to run your scanner, though.

I'm happy with my MacBook Pro and even though it's a bit of a POS, I'm also fairly happy with my Win 7 desktop machine I got a few years ago for $500. However, if Win laptops get any cheaper I'll seriously consider getting one as a dedicated scanner station.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
I have never used a Mac, and never will. Professionally, I use DOS or nothing at all. DOS gets out of my way and lets me program the hardware directly. Win98se, booted into real mode. Disable Interrupts while running, execute reserved instructions, and undocumented instructions. Phar Lap extended DOS when I need a lot of memory, wrote all of my own low-level support routines for interrupt handling and bypassing their "Shadow-Interrupt vector table". It was too slow. As far as finding hardware to run on- custom made.
Click to expand...

Once in school in CS class I wrote a demo that had to do fast graphics output for sprites, so I needed a figure out a fast way to write sprite data to video memory. The fastest way to write stuff into memory was using PUSH instructions with fixed data values, with which I could in two clock cycles write 32 bits or four pixels to the stack. This was on a 386 and there was no acceleration from the graphics card.

So I wrote a routine that read in all sprites and transformed them into assembler code that consisted only of PUSH instructions (and stack pointer increases for line breaks and for sprites with holes in them). This worked well, and PUSH is also a really compact instruction - the 32bit prefix, the opcode (0x68), and the four data bytes. So on average for a sprite containing N pixels with no holes, the assembled sprite routine for this pixel would be 1.5 N bytes in length. Sprites with holes were smaller.

Whenever I wanted to draw a sprite, I'd put the stack pointer on the video memory segment at 0xA000 and called the respective sprite routine, which wrote the whole sprite to the stack. After the sprite was written, I'd put the stack pointer back where it belonged (which required a bit of a hack, too, because obviously I couldn't save the old stack pointer location to the stack or else there would be no way to get it back). Anyway, this method allowed me to write four pixels in two clock cycles, and a hole in a sprite was another clock cycle increasing the stack pointer for the length of the hole (as opposed to the traditional method which uses a comparison for every pixel). Two pixels per clock cycle on average. There is no faster way to write stuff to the screen, the limit is the bandwidth to the VGA card. Of course there was no way to do page-flipping etc., because all memory access I had was the single 64k segment at 0xA000.

This worked really nicely, except when there was a timer interrupt. This usually happens 18.2 times per second in plain DOS and there was no predicting it. Whenever there was a timer interrupt when a sprite was being written, the interrupt routine would write some junk to the stack, which ended up in video memory as randomly-coloured pixels and all the subsequent rows of my sprite would be off. You can set it faster than 18.2 times per second, but not slower. So what I had to do was to disable RAM refresh while a sprite was being written, because on our hardware that would disable the timer interrupt, too. Except that one shouldn't leave it disabled for too long, because one would end up with memory errors. But for one sprite at a time it was fine. Of course this was utterly incompatible with EMM386, Windows, or DOS extenders, because the virtual 8086 mode didn't allow putting the stack in random locations where it didn't belong.

It was a big hack, but when it worked, the graphics were really, really fast :)
 
Way Cool!

"DI" and "EI".

The last code I wrote required that the Timer Interrupt be disabled during the entire run, 30 minutes at a time. Last thing the software does is to reload the interrupt driven DOS clock with the battery-backed realtime clock. The 18.2/s interrupt was killing the realtime portion of the code. Humorous note: I reused some routines for the battery backed clock written in 1990. The realtime clock required a bit to be "OR'd" in to set a base of 1980. Left mysef a note in 1990 that this would no longer be required in the year 2000. I am a big believer in code re-use, thinking ahead 21 years... Other humourous note- Battery-backed clock, BCD. DOS clock- Binary.
 
Last edited:
I am happy to be out of management.

Now- a decent day is 100 lines of code, great day is 300 lines.

Hit 500 lines in one day, take the rest of the day off.
 
Brian Sweeney said:
I am happy to be out of management.

Now- a decent day is 100 lines of code, great day is 300 lines.

Hit 500 lines in one day, take the rest of the day off.
Click to expand...

+10000000

I have been an embedded SW developer my whole career. That pretty well sums it up. :)

Assembler and c coding I my world... Mainly unix based tool sets and cross compilers for real target. Lately with popularity of Linux, we are seeing vendor create cross compilers for Linux as well.

Gary

Ps if assembler quotes, Brian u got me beat by a long shot.
 
a Windows laptop to me is = a Linux laptop.
I always dual-boot, leaving the originally setup Windows 7 alone to run Lightroom, and everything else (coding, web-browsing, writing) on the Linux side (in a pinch, I can use darktable and gimp to edit photos).

Having said that, I love Windows 7. It's the most stable and make sense version of Windows since Windows 2000.

And about good deal on laptops, I think used Thinkpad W500 or W700 are some of the best bargains out there currently. The screen is high in resolution, very stable, and is often good enough for photo-editing.

For CPU selection, this website is very useful: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom