looking for a laptop - also flat screen monitor

woodstock

woodstock

Final Approach
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HARD DRIVE DEADER THAN A DOORNAIL (was, laptops)

anyone have a reco on a good laptop? I need a lotta space (7 MP digicam - a lot to store), must be FAST, light weight, and I have long fingers so a relatively normal sized keyboard would be key. built in wireless, CD-rom and CD burner/writer, the works. (if I am missing anything vital let me know). a big monitor would be nice.

I am not a gamer (video games bore the crap out of me) but I do a lot of photo stuff (minor so far but with a good piece of equipment maybe more.)

are laptops still the poor cousins of desktops, or not? this is mostly to move around at home - not sure I'd transport it much, don't like taking superfluous things on trips.

I'd also like to get a skinny little monitor for my desktop - the one I have is either 17 or 19 inch and takes up too much space (front to back)

thanks...
 
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I bought an inexpensive HP dv1010 at the beginning of the year. It works fine. Includes wireless, 100BaseT, modem, DVD writer, wide screen, and reads some camera memory cards (except it doesn't read the Compact Flash card my Canon camera uses.).

It's a little slower than the desktop, but I was on a budget. Past experience with HP support has been good.
 
Get an iBook or PowerBook. You'll save up to 20% with your educational discount and now they're throwing in a free iPod Mini or giving you the $179 credit. You can also get $100 rebate on a printer bought at the same time.
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/routingpage.html

If you need more space you can easily add an external FireWire (better) and/or USB hard drive. LaCie and OWC are great sources. BTW, you'll want 1GB of RAM in your book, but don't buy at Apple's high price. Get 512MB with your Apple and buy another 512MB RAM SIMM from OWC.
 
I've had great luck with TOSHIBAs. My current has a 17" wide screen, 512MEG, Wireless,wired,modem, and an 80GIG harddrive.
Yes. It is true the laptops/notebooks are still lagging behind desktops but if you add a network, keep your desktop as a fileserver/printserver. That way, the smaller HD won't matter as much.
 
mikea said:
Get an iBook or PowerBook. You'll save up to 20% with your educational discount and now they're throwing in a free iPod Mini or giving you the $179 credit. You can also get $100 rebate on a printer bought at the same time.
http://store.apple.com/Catalog/US/Images/routingpage.html

If you need more space you can easily add an external FireWire (better) and/or USB hard drive. LaCie and OWC are great sources. BTW, you'll want 1GB of RAM in your book, but don't buy at Apple's high price. Get 512MB with your Apple and buy another 512MB RAM SIMM from OWC.
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what educational discount? can I say I am a student pilot? :D

I've never used an Apple before but I do hear they are a lot better for pictures and all.
 
silver-eagle said:
I've had great luck with TOSHIBAs. My current has a 17" wide screen, 512MEG, Wireless,wired,modem, and an 80GIG harddrive.
Yes. It is true the laptops/notebooks are still lagging behind desktops but if you add a network, keep your desktop as a fileserver/printserver. That way, the smaller HD won't matter as much.
Click to expand...


thanks. should I maybe then just think about a regular ol' laptop for emails and whatnot, and leave the big desktop for my pictures and all? and maybe just put pictures on the laptop that I really really want to save? (every time my STUPID desktop goes down I fear losing all those pictures!!)

yes, my desktop hard drive is doing the grind again. switching the power on and off because it freezes all the time no doubt didn't help either.

brand new HD by the way...
 
thanks Bill and Steve. I am not going to do this this weekend, but sometime soon b/c I can't rely on my desktop all the time anymore. grrrrrrrrrrrr
 
woodstock said:
what educational discount? can I say I am a student pilot? :D

I've never used an Apple before but I do hear they are a lot better for pictures and all.
Click to expand...

Opps. Wrong Elizabeth.

You qualify for the educational discount if you're any kind of student, faculty or staff of a real school. I have a student ID. Bruce is on faculty at a university.
One friend of ours qualified because he is a school board member.

BTW, you only have say you qualify. ;)

It's more than just pictures. Macs include $500 or more worth of really good software for photos, movies, DVDs, music, web, games, .... You can download good open source Office software and your all set. It's not like with the garf packaged with your average commercial PC where you get "this feature only works on the paid version."
 
Elizabeth...there are many different choices for computers...I'm not going to start a battle over pc's over mac's etc. If you have a lot of software for pc's the choice is obvious. If not try the apple and see what they have to offer.

If you want to buy a pc get a dell...they have really good deals 750-800 will buy you a really good laptop and ~300 will buy you a good 19 lcd display. If you are going to buy a dell wait for the 1/2 off laptop deals and the stackable coupons for the displays. Good luck and if you have any more questions just ask.
 
Elizabeth,cant help with laptop but i have a ViewSonic flat panel, i really like it screen is shape and like you said dont take up much room,Bought it at local Computer Depot, good prices and lots to chioce from Dave
 
Re: looking for a laptop Thread Creep! I'm getting old!

silver-eagle said:
I've had great luck with TOSHIBAs. My current has a 17" wide screen, 512MEG, Wireless,wired,modem, and an 80GIG harddrive.
Yes. It is true the laptops/notebooks are still lagging behind desktops
Click to expand...
Although I know what you say is true, it still leaves me a little breathless that 80 gigs can be considered behind the curve.

My first computer experience was in college with an IBM 1620 that was the size of a large desk, switches on the console and a selectric typewriter for console i/o. It had 8k RAM. It did have a HD but it was an external bundle of platters that were removable by the user and therefore offline storage was infinite. But we lowly students had to use the card reader/punch to get our programs and data out... Then my first PC in the 80s was an 8086 PC with 256k ram and two - count em - 360k floppies. I later stuffed it with the full 640k RAM and a 5meg HD. That was living!

HD drives back then cost $100/meg.

I now have 80g in my desktop and cannot imagine filling them up. Which means that by Christmas I will need more....

-Skip
 
Any time you deal with video or pictures, you'll want a lot of space. I have over 30 MEG of lighthouse pictures alone. Today, I downloaded a single 81 MEG video. So, with technology improving, videos getting bigger, harddrives just get bigger. A 200 MEG harddrive for a desktop is less than $100.

Back in the old days though... My first home PC was a second or thirdhand COMPAQ LUGABLE. I inherited it from my brother. The machine had an AST 6-PACK which brought it up to a 640k system. There was a [5 1/2"] 5 meg HARDDRIVE. It had a 9" green CGA monitor. The total weight of the 'portable' was about 50 pounds.

My first company laptop was a Zenith PC. Twin 3 1/2" floppy boot system was built to solve the field service's access to host based systems.

Today, my company laptop is a 1.7 GIG processor with 1 GIG of memory and an 80 GIG harddrive.

How far we've come in such a short time.
 
mikea said:
Ask Bruce.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/14/dell_answers_forum_critics/
Bruce,

You're a trend setter!

Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster

[url="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html?hp&ex=1121572800&en=178b2edcf06c6a45&ei=5094&partner=homepage"]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy.html?hp&ex=1121572800&en=178b2edcf06c6a45&ei=5094&partner=homepage[/url]
Click to expand...

I believe I've posted about my experience with virus protection and crashed drives. Twice this month I have recovered two computers from trojan infections- by restoring a trojan-free image from an external hard drive (two separate computers).

When this strikes a business computer, I have as in the past, removed the hard drive, physically destroyed it (HIPAA sensitive data) and bought a new one.

But, Never Mind. Dell has been fired.
 
Steve said:
I'm just a lucky SOB I guess.

I've got 4 Dells (2 Inspiron laptops, 1 Latitude laptop & 1 Dimension XPS desktop) in the house and we haven't had any major problems with viruses or trojans. It seems McAfee does a pretty good job of keeping out the crap. The youngest keeps loading up her account with spyware cookies that I have to clean routinely with Ad-Aware, but thats an internet filtering issue, not a hardware problem.
Click to expand...

Cookies aren't really spyware. Finding 1000 cookies makes for a frightened user population who are glad they had the spyware scanner. It is good to throw away cookies from Doubleclick and such, but they'll give you a new one and match it up to you in a very short time. BTW, You can opt-out with Doubleclick specifically.

You can keep out the crap simply by not running Internet Explorer or Outlook.

The last two corporations (major utilities) I consulted for use Dell exclusively. The only chronic problem they have is employees loading unauthorized software that their IT groups routinely have to purge. They prefer Dell because they get immediate response when an equipment issue arises, which is not very frequent considering their computers number in the hundreds.
Click to expand...
There is world is difference between the products and services these companies provide to business vs. consumers. AFAIK, Dell doesn't offshore support for business users. It's the consumer lines which are crap, mainly because they have to shave every $1 they can to sell it at Best Buy for $499 when Microsoft gets $50 of that. If a consumer calls for help, they just lost money on that sale.

If I was buying a Windows laptop, I'd go for an IBM Thinkpad first (YeahIknow, now from China, but it always was.) or a Sony Vaio. HP would be third. IBM (Lenovo) is bringing out a new Thinkpad Tablet PC laptop which looks great.

With lottery money I'd get a custom screamer from an outfit like Alienware. As I said, I'd actually get an Apple Powerbook first.
 
hi all,

thanks for the information. update: the hard drive on the PC is deader than a doornail. dead dead dead and my friend isn't even sure he can recover the stuff lost. any recos? it's barely a year's worth of stuff as I have backups from before and it would be mostly some pictures (many of which I also have on my work PC and ofoto) and some music from CDs I put on it before getting rid of them. and of course emails. frustrating but ultimately trivial. (it's just stuff, and virtual stuff at that).

my friend Mark is a computer whiz and he's going to put in yet another new hard drive for me and he was trying to figure out if he could either fix this or recover stuff, here is what he said:

" XP Pro says its unreadable, Win 2K won't even recognize it, the system BIOS says it's corrupt, and I put it in an external housing and tried to hook it up via USB, and the system wouldn't recognize it."

any ideas at all? or just forget about it and start fresh?

sigh.
 
woodstock said:
hi all,

" XP Pro says its unreadable, Win 2K won't even recognize it, the system BIOS says it's corrupt, and I put it in an external housing and tried to hook it up via USB, and the system wouldn't recognize it."

any ideas at all? or just forget about it and start fresh?

sigh.
Click to expand...

What kind of hard drive is it? The reason I ask is some hard drives have had problems and stop working long before they should. You should defiantly start fresh with a new hard drive and try to to get the information off your old drive as data only...do not try to copy the info directly to the new drive. You might have picked up a bad virus that deletes the first sector of information on your hard drive making the entire drive a paper weight.

Even though many people do not believe in this theory I have had success in the past with freezing my hard drive, putting the drive in a external usb case and downloading all the important files you can...repeat as necessary. If you have the hard drive company try to pull off info it will be ~$500.

Good luck

By the way ask your computer man to put in an extra drive (like $30-40 for an 80 gig) or partition your new drive into two sections. Place all important data on the second hard drive/partition and install windows/app on the main drive. This way when you have to reinstall windows you will not lose many important files like pictures, word doc, etc

Good luck!
 
Iceman said:
By the way ask your computer man to put in an extra drive (like $30-40 for an 80 gig) or partition your new drive into two sections. Place all important data on the second hard drive/partition and install windows/app on the main drive. This way when you have to reinstall windows you will not lose many important files like pictures, word doc, etc.
Click to expand...
This is a good idea. If you go this route, have your computer guy write a simple routine to keep a mirror copy of all data on the "programs" hard drive, too. As long as you have room for the mirror copy, it is just one more redundancy.

-Skip
 
Iceman said:
What kind of hard drive is it? The reason I ask is some hard drives have had problems and stop working long before they should. You should defiantly start fresh with a new hard drive and try to to get the information off your old drive as data only...do not try to copy the info directly to the new drive. You might have picked up a bad virus that deletes the first sector of information on your hard drive making the entire drive a paper weight.

Even though many people do not believe in this theory I have had success in the past with freezing my hard drive, putting the drive in a external usb case and downloading all the important files you can...repeat as necessary. If you have the hard drive company try to pull off info it will be ~$500.

Good luck

By the way ask your computer man to put in an extra drive (like $30-40 for an 80 gig) or partition your new drive into two sections. Place all important data on the second hard drive/partition and install windows/app on the main drive. This way when you have to reinstall windows you will not lose many important files like pictures, word doc, etc

Good luck!
Click to expand...


Hi!

it is a western digital.

he DID partition the drives - I had a C drive and a D drive. supposedly this was to make sure the D drive was always safe, and thus all my photos were on it. I never put any photos on my C drive. could a power surge have done this?

yes, Ontrack is asking about 700 bucks. it's just some photos and music. I can buy new CDs for less than that and luckily many photos are on my work PC as well as online. my recent trip I had not deleted off my camera yet THANK GOD.

it's not a huge deal, but a pain. had I not had some backups and also photos at work/ofoto, I'd be ****ED. but, it's still just stuff.
 
Skip Miller said:
This is a good idea. If you go this route, have your computer guy write a simple routine to keep a mirror copy of all data on the "programs" hard drive, too. As long as you have room for the mirror copy, it is just one more redundancy.

-Skip
Click to expand...


he did - partitioned hard drive. still didn't help. sigh.
 
Get a separate hard drive for your photos, music, whatever. Buy an external hard drive with a USB 2.0 connection. You can move it between computers. Just plug it in and it shows up as a new hard drive on any XP or (with the correct drivers) Win2K system.

Burn photos to CD/DVD whenever you've downloaded them. If you don't have a burner, get one. Cheap insurance.

As far as laptops/desktops manufacturers, I'm not going to get into that fight. Macs have their place. Maybe it's on your desk. Only YOU can be the judge of it. Go to the Apple store/CompUSA/whatever and try it out. Preferably more than five minutes.

My personal laptop is a Sager from Powernotebooks.com. Good product, at the time it was one of two available laptops with a Gigabit Ethernet port built-in (which I needed for network analysis). Two years later, it's still going strong. The company replaced the fan after one of the three fans started getting stuck (typical DC fan wobble). They also replaced the top case that I had cracked, without me asking for it. All under warranty.

I've got about 12 Dell laptops and 20 Dell workstations in my network at the moment. Aside from a BIOS error on 10 workstations purchased at the same time (causing my imaging system not to work correctly and fixed within 5 days), I haven't had any issues with them.

Hardware failures excepted, most PC problems nowadays are user-related. Spyware, viruses, trojans, etc., don't mysteriously get installed without some help from the user. That help may be intentional (downloading of Kazaa and not reading the EULA which specifically says they're installing GAIN (Gator) on your system) or ignorance (opening an e-mail with an attached virus and not running an up-to-date antivirus on the system).

In the year plus that I've been running this network, I have yet to have a virus outbreak, trojan, etc.. I have had some spyware issues but promptly put them down using some off-the-shelf software that is now permanently installed. My spam firewall is blocking over 87% of the inbound e-mail as spam. All in all, I've got a fairly clean network.

Bruce, as I've noted a number of times, your network is not designed correctly to meet your needs. Buying off-the-shelf Dells/HPs/Toshibas/whatever is not going to work for any network requiring above average security. I buy Dells with XP Home Edition (the cheapest option since I can't get one without the OS) and wipe it as soon as I get it. I reinstall with a custom install of XP Pro, locked down where I need it. One installation covers all of the newer PC's since I install once, take an image "snapshot" of the PC, then distribute the image to the other PC's, all at the same time. Ten PC's, all applications installed, with security set up correctly, talking to my servers, in less than four hours. No, it wasn't cheap but boy is it easy now. ;)
 
woodstock said:
he did - partitioned hard drive. still didn't help. sigh.
Click to expand...
Partitioning a hard drive doesn't protect against hardware failures. It only covers you if there is some sort of corruption on the C: drive.

Get a separate external drive. They're not that expensive.
 
woodstock said:
" XP Pro says its unreadable, Win 2K won't even recognize it, the system BIOS says it's corrupt, and I put it in an external housing and tried to hook it up via USB, and the system wouldn't recognize it."

any ideas at all? or just forget about it and start fresh?

sigh.
Click to expand...

What I would do...

If you get a new drive of the same size or larger.
Put them both in the PC with the new one as master.
Boot the PC into Knoppix .
Root shell.

Note that hda (master) is the new drive, and hdb (slave) is the old drive the way I'm describing it.

Code: 
dd if=/dev/hdb of=/dev/hda bs=8192
Wait a while. If you don't get any messages, that's GOOD.
What this does is clone the old drive to new one block by block at the block level, which is between the hardware and any OS.

When it completes you'll something like:

89nnnn blocks in.
89nnnn block out.

While you're in Knoppix, you could look at one or both drives to see what it can see.

Code: 
mkdir /mnt/oldwinc
mount -t vfat /dev/hdb1 /mnt/oldwinc
mkdir /mnt/newwinc 
mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /mnt/newwinc
cd /mnt/oldwinc
ls
cd doc*              [i][ take you to Documents and Settings][/i]
...

Good luck.

Since you are nearby I could give you hand, but if you boot into Knoppix and IT can't see your old drive, it truly is toast hardware wise and I couldn 't fix that. I could talk you through checking out what Linux can see on the phone. Since you can't burn a CD I could mail you one.

There are drive recovery outfits that can get your stuff but you're talking $1000 or more.
 
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wow, thanks everyone. yeah, ultimately this comes down to stupidity/complacency. I do have a few backup disks burned but it's been a while. at the end of the day MOST of this stuff I wouldn't really look at again (much, anyway, I might have eventually sorted it out but in most cases the really interesting stuff I already put online) I'm serene about this, really. (had I not had this stuff elsewhere... not so serene.

external hard drive sounds like a great idea too.

Mike, I'll relay that info to my IT guy (all of it actually, thanks everyone).
 
I agree with BA on the use of a second hard drive. That's what I've done. Partitioning the drive runs the risk of trouble if the partition information gets mucked up.

I also back up regularly with a USB hard drive.

There's another program - don't recall the name - that allows you to do a sector by sector recovery. I'll see if I can dig up the name.
 
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