I'm in the market for a laptop, but I'm not sure if I can get away with meeting all my criteria.
- It'll be purely for business, the most demanding thing it will be opening is numerous Chrome tabs.
- It needs to run Windows software, with MS Office.
- I want it to be lightweight and no bigger than an A4 pad.
Is there any chance of me getting this for around £200?
I've been seeing refurbished X series Thinkpads from as little as £100, but maybe this is dodgy?
Hallo again fellas. I bought a swanky new laptop which I'm very happy with.
What should I do with the old X110e? It's basically unusable and dead weight to me now, but being a thrifty person I don't just want to throw it away. Any useful spares I can salvage from it? Should I perform a factory reset and just give it away?
>>26903 If you don't mind lots of fucking about you can buy yourself an enclosure for about £16 and turn the hard-drive into big ol' memory stick. I'm fucking knackered right now so in brief before you take the hard-drive out be sure to right click on [whatever drive] -> Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> add in an 'everyone' with all permissions and check boxes ticked. Saves you spending a night doing it via usb.
You can take out the RAM easy enough but really even the hard-drive will just end up collecting dust somewhere.
I have a stack of annoyingly small hard drives that I can't quite bring myself to chuck out - probably seven or eight drives of between 160GB and 500GB.
500GB still seems like a useful amount of storage, but then I remember that there's a 4TB mirrored pair in my main machine and a 400GB MicroSD card in my phone.
I used to hoard the hell out of audiowarez and stopped in 2004. The programs, sample sets and tutorial videos on those websites are often 2-4GB apiece now and you can download several of each every day. In my day the programs were about 4mb and sample CDs maxed out at 700mb.
Anything media-related involves massive amounts of storage.
Sample libraries for music production are fucking massive. Komplete 12 Ultimate requires 490GB of drive space. VSL Symphonic Cube is 375GB; that goes up to 1TB if you opt for the full Super Package. Omnisphere, Trillian and Stylus are another 150GB. Those libraries the bare minimum needed for a serious composer's workstation. Add in the major packages from Spitfire Audio, Sonokinetic and Orchestral Tools and you could easily be looking at the thick end of 4TB. If you're working on large projects, it really needs to all be on SSD in RAID 1. Compared to the cost of the library licenses, a thousand quid's worth of SSDs is practically pocket change.
4K raw video footage is between 500GB and 1TB per hour; a post-production facility working on feature films might need 1PB of storage per project, plus local backups, plus off-site backups.
>>26974 Modern sample libraries really are yuuuuuge. I know someone working for a company in that space, and I'm told that these days they record each note around a dozen times, pick the best three and employ some shifting trickery so that repeated notes sound different enough to feel organic, but that still means a shitload of actual recordings in high enough quality to use in an actual production.
>>26974>>26975 > Sample libraries for music production are fucking massive
Say, if I pester search engines long enough, will they tell me what all this jiggabyte-sized stuff is for? I can guess - I have a vague idea what samples are for but hundreds of GBs? Colour me astonished.
>>26976 Every single bloody note of a piano or what have you, with and without sustain etc, in some high quality lossless format, soon adds up I suppose.
Most instruments have a lot of subtle variations in tone; you need a lot of different samples to capture that variation in a realistic manner.
A piano is probably the simplest case. A piano doesn't just get louder when you hit the keys harder, the quality of the note also changes. A modern piano sample library will include a minimum of eight recordings of each key, from very soft to very loud. That adds up to at least 704 stereo WAV files. Those recordings at different levels are blended together to give a realistic response to the player's touch.
You'll also usually get at least five different microphone positions, from close microphones right under the piano lid to a broad stereo pair capturing the ambience of the room. A single piano can therefore add up to several thousand samples, taking up a few gigabytes.
A violin is probably the most complex case. There are a huge variety of ways to play a violin. You can pluck the strings (pizzicato), you can play with the bow close to the bridge or close to the fingerboard, you can play with the back side of the bow or with a mute on the strings, you can blur the notes together smoothly (legato) or play crisply separated notes (détaché).
For each of these possible playing styles (articulations), you need separate samples of each note at multiple volume levels. The sample playback software (Kontakt) allows you to switch articulations using the keys on the left of the keyboard, playing the notes with the right hand. Again, you'll usually want a variety of microphone positions to give you control over the room ambiance. My preferred solo violin library has 38 different articulations, adding up to over 24,000 unique samples.
Multiply that across all the instruments of an orchestra and you've got a shitload of samples. The VSL Symphonic Cube orchestral library includes 764,000 samples, hence the 375GB installed file size. Most composers have multiple sample libraries covering an entire orchestra, each of which has a different sound based on how the instruments are played and how they are recorded. VSL is very traditional and is ideal for orchestral works. Spitfire Albion is quirky and modern for Hans Zimmer style atmospheric cinematic arrangements. The EWQL Hollywood Orchestra does exactly what you'd expect, giving you that epic John Williams sound.
We don't just want an orchestra of course, we want modern instruments like guitar and bass, world instruments, historical instruments and so on. We also want a variety of each - I currently have 94 different drum kit libraries installed, from a vintage 1930s jazz kit to a modern heavy metal kit.
This meticulous approach to sampling gives us an astonishing degree of realism. You probably don't realise it, but the overwhelming majority of music you hear on film, TV and video games is produced on a computer using sample libraries. Some productions have the budget and the timescale to go out to Eastern Europe and record with a real orchestra, but most of the time it's just one bloke in a home studio with a ton of software.
>Some productions have the budget and the timescale to go out to Eastern Europe and record with a real orchestra, but most of the time it's just one bloke in a home studio with a ton of software.
To add to this, there's not even any guarantee I could record the Czech Philharmonic any better or more appropriately than the lads who did the orchestral library I have anyway.
We've come a long way from MIDI synth'd instruments and the leap in technology that's allowed it is simply exponentially increased digital storage space. The first digital musical device I owned had it's entire sample library on a 128mb compactflash.
Most sample libraries nowadays come with a nice powerful sample player UI, and lots of metadata so you can quickly find stuff and it's all nicely organised, like Kontakt here. The big players are very good at this, to the point where I could browse a category like "brass, alien, sci fi, fx" and find something specific to all of those.
Even without all that the standard practice for a sample pack is to put everything in very specific nested folders, so even looking at the raw files you could easily find your single short C sharp trumpet note by going Sample Pack>Orchestral>Brass>Trumpet>C#staccatotrumpet.wav, though that's really not neccesary these days since most sample makers will include indexing files for all the common sample player software.
Hey lads, I'm in a similar position to OP but have procrastinated on a decision for about a year now. It's just so bloody difficult to make a choice on what you want when it comes to a new best friend. I was looking at a V-series the other-day but upon closer inspection I suspect the build-quality is absolute toffee:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Lenovo-81V50004UK-V155-15API-Laptop-Windows/dp/B07HVZFSXB/ref=sr_1_1
My criteria has shifted around but generally:
>Budget is £500-£1000 depending on what it can do
>Weight isn't a problem, this is going to be an effective desktop/tv due to lack of space in the flat
>Something sturdy that will last me years and years if anything
>My benchmark was finally getting to play GTA V but a laptop able to play it in decent quality appears still out of reach
I really should make a choice now as my current laptop is starting to BSD more and more.
>My benchmark was finally getting to play GTA V but a laptop able to play it in decent quality appears still out of reach
Not any more. At the low end of your budget, a machine with a Ryzen 5 2500U will run GTA V on medium settings at 720p at about 50fps, while still being reasonably portable. At the high end of your price range, you could have something with an i5 and a GTX 1650, which will give you decent frame rates at 1080p on very high settings.
>>27265 Your budget will definitely stretch to something GTAV-capable, my laptop runs that and it's only worth ~£500. I picked an Inspiron 15 7577, which doesn't look like the usual "gamer laptop" with rainbow LED and go-faster plastic tacky embarrassment. By all accounts it has a quiet cooling system by gaming laptop standards, but it's still too loud for me when it gets going. When a game like GTAV is running you'd better have headphones or some way of moving the thing into an adjacent room.
Can you really not squeeze in a decent desktop? And then grab a second-hand chromebook or something dirt cheap for when you're out and about? Gaming laptops are inherently a significant compromise, don't go there unless you really have to.
If anyone is after a refurb laptop, there are loads at 20% off on eBay right now. You can have an X250 with 8GB of RAM and a 180GB SSD for a mere £127.99.
Talking SSDs as the singlemost effective modern upgrade - how do you install an operating system on one? I've done it before but it put a really sour taste in my mouth. The actual install is fine - it pretty much does itself - it's all the faffing about with USBs, CDkeys and calling Microsoft that really gets me.
Do they not sell them on disc, anymore? How do i buy directly from windows, or find a legitimate retailer?
sage for not really /g/ and barely relevant to the thread.
If the PC has previously had a license for Windows 10, the license will be automatically recognised, even if it's a clean install.
You can buy a boxed retail copy of Windows 10, but it's over £100. Given that Windows still works even if the license isn't validated, I'd rather take my chances with a cheap key off eBay.
>>27289 >>27288 eBay has quality buyer protection so if you get dicked over with a bum key you should be covered. Unless you're worried about malicious software or something.
>>27290 Download Windows 7, activate it, then claim a free upgrade as a user of assistive technology. I mean, who hasn't tried getting the narrator to say silly things?
> If the PC has previously had a license for Windows 10, the license will be automatically recognised, even if it's a clean install.
How does that work, exactly? Is the product key stored in UEFI or even the TPM? I did notice when work shipped me a new Thinkpad with Windows 10 on it there was no printed product key, either on the laptop itself or in any of the paperwork that came with it.
I'm going to have a serious grumble to myself if there's some unique device ID that's sent to some remote service in Redmond that verifies that your device previously ran Win 10 and is eligible for continued service.
> A unique number called a globally unique identifier, which is assigned to your computer
Good grief. *grumble*
This begs the question, however, of how they deal with virtualization. Presumably I could spin up a thousand cloned VMs and have them all activate on a single license. Additionally it's probably going to cause all kinds of problems (as MS Office has for years) when you want to test and debug a system image locally then upload it to a production server - as soon as it detects a different CPUID then you'll have a different GUID and everything will break.
They don't really care about individual users - Windows 10 will work indefinitely even if you don't bother to activate it. I think they realised that a) people who build their own computers will just pirate Windows anyway and b) the risk of pushing people towards Linux outweighs the paltry sums they might earn through retail Windows sales. The real money comes from volume licenses for OEMs and enterprise users.
There's an entirely separate (and dizzyingly complex) licensing system for corporate customers who are likely to be using automated deployment. If you buy a shitload of licenses, Microsoft will automatically authenticate any machine on your network.
>>27296 Microsoft have cottoned on to the 90/9/1 distribution of their income, knowing they get the majority of their income from enterprise customers using enterprise products, a smaller slice from business customers buying Windows and Office, and a tiny slice from home users.
>>27298 Office Commercial revenue is six times higher than Office Consumer revenue. That leads me to believe your supposed distribution is seriously made up.
>Windows 10 will work indefinitely even if you don't bother to activate it
True of any computer that retains its 'globally unique identifier', as mentioned - but any and all hardware upgrades or replacements might trigger an unverification and a 'you need to ring us to sort this out' type message. I think it basically gives you three or four changes behind the scenes before it freaks out, but you never know.
It's still infinitely more friendly than previous systems, and I do indeed have a few legit copies of windows from dodgy win7 cracks and so on.
While we're on the subject of licences, how much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
I'm planning to drop the cash for a new CPU/motherboard combo soon, considering I've had this venerable old 3570K for well over 6 years. If I just throw my current hard drive in, will I see issues, or have computers come past that these days?
I really can't be arsed fannying about reinstalling everything.
>how much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
There's no definitive answer, but your license isn't void when it happens, you just have to sort it out with Microsoft. It's a bit of a hassle but not too bad, though I've heard if you do it too much you run out of activiations, but 'too much' is constant hardware changes on a test bench sort of thing.
How well does an installation tolerate changes in hardware then? I remember last time I upgraded back in about 2013 I just had to boot up in safe mode and swap some drivers.
The answer is 'pretty well', it seems. Here's a decent video on it that goes over the basics, but also demonstrates that even though Linus is actively trying to get the authentication to trip up, it doesn't always work. It also seems like if your Win10 licence is tied to a Windows Live account it's even easier to sort out anyway.
I should add that in my experience, I've swapped out graphics cards, CPU and motherboard, and Windows 10 either didn't notice, or immediately adapted to the new hardware behind the scenes. I've also put my SSD from one Thinkpad into a different model and that worked fine too. I wouldn't worry.
>>27306 > How much of my PC can I upgrade before Windows 10 shits itself?
I'll eventually find this out myself as I migrate various VMs around work/customer/enterprise boxes but I do have a shit ton of experience of Office 2013's "Windows Genuine Advantage" which basically threw its toys out of the pram if your CPU changed.
If Win10 is anything like WGA you can change your hdd/ssd, your ram, and any peripherals like video cards / gpus and the like - but the moment you change out the CPU it'll throw a wobbly.
Essentially it all comes down to what data MSFT uses to create their "globally unique identified" (my money's on CPU model and serial number and probably BIOS/UEFI serial number if it's available).
