Windows 7 Laptops Ridiculously Cheap Right Now

[RObert Budding]

I found that anyone who is a photographer really wants to have a Mac. The screen is like the viewfinder in a Zeiss 35.... Brilliant with no comparison.

Silly statement - and untrue. I'm a photographer, and I don't want a mac. And there are millions of people just like me.

What I dislike about Macs is the limited choice on the desktop. I could buy a mini and suffer from a lack of expandability, and l'd have to live with a case that's really difficult to open. Or I could buy an iMac and live with a glossy monitor that I dislike. But, hey, it's a great solution if you can't figure out where to plug in the cables!

Then there's the Mac Pro - I don't want to buy a server chip to get a case that's easy to open.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

One of my first "real" jobs was managing PDP 11/24 and VAX 11/780 boxes, later a MicroVAX II. The "network" was a BlackBox patch panel for 9,600 baud VT100 and VT220 terminals. The RL02 disk drives were like washing machines... LOL.

Anyone remember the Rainbow 100 "PCs" of the day? Heh. Mainly CP/M boxes, but also ran DOS (barely). I still have stuff on RX50 diskettes that I'd love to retrieve (VAX BASIC and C code).

I had a Xerox 8/16 that ran both CP/M and DOS... latter was barely, had an 8086 plug in board.

I had a Dec VT-180 with 4 floppy drives, later a DEC Pro 350- basically a PDP 11/23 with a horrible OS to make it useless. PDP 11/35, PDP 11/34, VAX 11/750, VAX 11/780. The 11/780 had a Deanza IP8500 Image processor and a Ramtek, Matrix image recorder. Never had the Rainbow 100.

One of the engineers that I worked with applied Fourier analysis to the stock market in the mid 1980s, trying to predict the swings. We talked about "Kondratiev Long Wave Cycles" and such. I never got into it, preferred image processing and "Scientific Visualization".

So what's the point of all of this? A Pentium Pro 200Mhz was about the same speed as a Cray XMP, which cost ~$6M. The ASC had 4MBytes of memory, and required 128,000 ECL memory chips to implement. Not that long ago. So a computer with an Intel I7 core and 8GBytes of memory- well, running Win7 or whatever OS here in the 21st century... not much faster than that Pentium Pro running DOS.

 

[Trius]

Correction: Airs do have a fan, at least mine does. Heard it for the first time tonight, it is pretty quiet.

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I saw one ruggedized computer that used a sealed case and Thermo-electric cooling.

Steve Jobs would have liked TEC's. Quiet.

 

[ampguy]

yup

yup

Used to sell WordPerfect for the Rainbow to DEC.

I worked on the first compilers for the 8088/8086: C, C++ (pre-standards, and ANSI), Fortran, Smalltalk, Objective-C, Prolog, Modula-2, Pascal, various BASIC compilers and interpreters.

Pretty sure that Bill Duvall's (Consulair) C was the first mac/lisa c compiler, which he developed on an Alto. I used to visit him.

From 84-86 I consulted for Xerox PARC, and Apple, and worked on products, some that were never released. I visited Bandly 4 twice a week (now Infinite Loop 4).

Prior to that was DG's. PDP-8s/11s. Pretty sure I'm the oldest fogy here.

The last piece of hardware I designed was equivalent to about 100 Cray's, and it ran in a half rack.

One of my first "real" jobs was managing PDP 11/24 and VAX 11/780 boxes, later a MicroVAX II. The "network" was a BlackBox patch panel for 9,600 baud VT100 and VT220 terminals. The RL02 disk drives were like washing machines... LOL.

Anyone remember the Rainbow 100 "PCs" of the day? Heh. Mainly CP/M boxes, but also ran DOS (barely). I still have stuff on RX50 diskettes that I'd love to retrieve (VAX BASIC and C code).

 

[ka1axy]

SGI Indigo!

SGI Indigo!

I used to drool looking at those SGI Indigo's at the mechanical engineering lab. Then I got an on campus job using one of those at the Vet-Med lab.

Funny you mention the Indigo. I just resurrected one I found being used as a footrest by a co-worker. Thing came right up. I found adapters to use it with PS2 KB and mouse and a VGA display. Even got it on the network with a 10BASET AUI adapter (remember those?).

It's a real neat little Unix box. I don't know what I'll do with it, but it does give a bit of a retro vibe to my office 🙂

Oh, one more thing: it has two PCBs in it; one graphics and one CPU board. They each weigh about 2 lbs and have 1.5" square PGA chips on them! Old tech at its peak.

 

[ampguy]

Brian

Brian

In 2005, I was the product manager for this water cooled one-off for a magazine:

Have also used convection cooled, peltier active cooled, and evaporative (spraycool) technologies for specific projects, as well as production systems.

I saw one ruggedized computer that used a sealed case and Thermo-electric cooling.

Steve Jobs would have liked TEC's. Quiet.

 

[willie_901]

.... Put an antivirus program on your PC or Mac, that's what they're for.

if you own a Mac, whatever you do don't ever put an ant-virus program on it. They always do more harm than good in OS X.

 

[willie_901]

Apple will be history by then.

You're on to something. Apple only has $80 Billion dollars of cash on hand. They'll be bankrupt in 5 years for sure.

 

[plummerl]

You're on to something. Apple only has $80 Billion dollars of cash on hand. They'll be bankrupt in 5 years for sure.

... and that would be 80 billion, donated by Mac owners?????

 

[willie_901]

... and that would be 80 billion, donated by Mac owners?????

Actually millions of PC/Windows owners bought and continue to buy iPhones, iPods and iPads. So the money came from both camps.

But it doesn't mater where the money came from. What matters is how does a company with $80 Billion in cash go out of business in 60 months?

 

[gavinlg]

This is eye opening...

http://thingsappleisworthmorethan.tumblr.com/

 

[rxmd]

But it doesn't mater where the money came from. What matters is how does a company with $80 Billion in cash go out of business in 60 months?

Ask Apple, they know. Between 1991 and 1997, they went from being a company that people believed infallible, to being a third-rater that was deep in the red figures and had to be bailed out with $150 million, incidentally by Microsoft. For people who invested in Apple stock in 1990 or so it took well over a decade to break even again.

All thanks to a few misguided product decisions, an unfocused R&D strategy and corporate hybris that nothing could go wrong and that the future was only up, up, up.

Nothing is easier than haemorrhaging lots of money fast. A $380B market capitalization is not worth much when the next dotcom bubble is already going on. At least Apple makes something; you can't say that about some other companies that are on paper "worth" more than some countries. It's 1999 all over again.

 

[willie_901]

Funny, I never mentioned Apple's market cap.

Do you really believe it is possible (let alone probable) for Apple to flush up 80 billion dollars down the loo in 60 months?

 

[Trius]

Yeah, it's possible. But they won't.

 

[Trius]

Unless the Cardinals win the series this year. LOL

 

[rxmd]

Funny, I never mentioned Apple's market cap.

Gavin did.

Do you really believe it is possible (let alone probable) for Apple to flush up 80 billion dollars down the loo in 60 months?

Of course - money is easily lost. A large-scale acquisition or two gone wrong, misguided large-scale R&D like they did in the 90s before Jobs came back and axed it all, losing a few software patent lawsuits, shareholders demanding that Apple start paying out dividends from those $80B, shareholders forcing Apple to support their own stock price with large-scale buybacks in a hypothetical collapsing tech market - the sky's the limit, or rather the ground in this case.

Apple is conservative about what they do with their cash, and that's a good thing, but the reason why they're conservative is because a cash crunch was exactly what happened to them in the mid-90s. Let's hope for them that they have a good institutional memory.

 

[Pablito]

If you have not noticed

Windows 7 Laptops are out of fashion and Ridiculously cheap right now.

For example, I just bought a 17" Sony Vaio with the i5 processor and a Blu Ray drive for $600. About a year ago it was about $1200 if memory serves.

Prices seem to be low due to

1) Windows 8 is coming out, so it costs less to discount Windows 7 laptops than call them back and install Windows 8

2) ipads and tablets are so popular laptop sales are going down, with manufacturers reducing stock

3) some makers like HP getting out of PCs - at least if Meg does not reverse that decision

tablets may be smaller, but laptops sure do a lot more !

All I need is an Apple Logo to tell people I am the proud owner of the new, larger, improved, ipad 3.

Stephen

Only one problem: it's a Windows 7 laptop!

 

[splitimageview]

Do you really believe it is possible (let alone probable) for Apple to flush up 80 billion dollars down the loo in 60 months?

Only governments can waste that kind of money, and they can do it a lot faster. 🙂

 

[Rico]

My preference would have been a BeBox.

I still have a copy of BeOS R4 lying around. Now that was an operating system. The demo where you would drag three video files on the surfaces of a rotating cube (and the OS would display all three at once at 25fps) always left people with their mouths open.

Multi-threaded user space is fun, although programming requires some discipline. 🙂 BeBox had two CPUs, so real-time interaction between threads was possible, and mistakes could be a bitch to debug. I worked for Be, and the best hardware to enter the office was a special prototype of the DayStar Genesis MP. This one had eight CPUs of the PowerPC 604 flavor! A kernel was hacked out for this beast, and then the demos and benchmarks were launched. It was way cool to see the CPU usage meter with eight bars. My demo was a Mandelbrot generator that pegged every CPU. My regular development setup was less spiffy: vanilla BeBox, Power Computing clone, PC, a two external drives, all hooked together on a shared SCSI cable.