RJM62
Touchdown! Greaser!
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2007
- Messages
- 13,157
- Location
- Upstate New York
- Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
I finally broke down and bought a new laptop. The one it's replacing has been a real workhorse, running nearly 24/7/365 for more than four years with nary a complaint. But it's starting to show signs of age, so I'm semi-retiring it to personal use, and have moved all my business use to the new one.
I chose the HP Envy 17j series, with the Intel i5 4200M processor and 6GB of RAM expandable to 16. I think that's probably the best performance / price value for me, and most people who aren't extreme power users. Cost me $799.99 postpaid, plus $9.95 for priority shipping. Total time from submitting the order to receiving it was ~ 48 hours. Pretty decent.
I'm extremely pleased with the laptop itself. It's nicely designed and laid out, has a very nice display, very nice sound by laptop standards, and is very zippy. I also like the fact that it has a second hard drive bay, and I've ordered the caddy and cable (as well as a second drive) so I can make a clone backup, in addition to the other backups I make. (I'm kind of a backup fanatic...)
HP has really backed off on the crapware. Their own proprietary software has also become much better. Their "Support Adviser" or whatever they call it actually caught a few updates and tweaks that I'd missed. And I love the "Simple Pass" fingerprint-activated password filler. It's a real pleasure not to have to enter all those passwords.
All in all, I'm extremely happy with the machine itself. No remorse at all.
As for Windows 8... Grrr....
It took 2 1/2 long days for me to get the very capable laptop into a condition in which it could help me do productive work, and about 10 hours of that was spent making Windows behave like I want it to. The Metro interface in particular is an abomination in every way. The only thing it's good for is generating revenue for Microsoft every time someone buys an "app" from their "store."
If I had to pick the absolute stupidest thing from among the many stupid things about Metro, it would be that it forces "apps" to run in full-screen. That works on a phone. It doesn't work on a 17" laptop. It's just superlatively stupid.
So I downloaded the 8.1 upgrade. It took more than eight hours for a ~ 3GB file -- a staggering time considering the usual download speeds I get. They must throttle the download, and I couldn't find a fullfile version.
The installer also insisted on updating all the other useless "apps" that I hadn't already uninstalled before updating Windows. But it didn't say anything about this. It just did nothing for about an hour. I searched the Interwebz, and someone said to update the other apps and the 8.1 installation would continue. That someone was right.
The 8.1 upgrade reinstalled the useless "apps" that I had uninstalled, mainly live links to MSN / Bing news, weather, sports, finance, etc. pages. I uninstalled them again, of course, with a few cuss words for good measure.
After the 8.1 upgrade completed, I could finally bypass the horrid Metro screen. Then I installed Classic Shell and a few other kludges to make the desktop look and work the way I wanted to, and then spent about a day and a half migrating data and downloading and installing the software I use for work, along with BackBlaze, ESET, etc.
Performance-wise, however, Windows 8 is amazing. Applications like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and so forth open nearly instantly and run much faster than on the machine this one's replacing (which is by no means an underpowered machine in its on right). It actually runs so fast and so well that it was worth the time I spent jailing the horrid Metro interface.
-Rich
I chose the HP Envy 17j series, with the Intel i5 4200M processor and 6GB of RAM expandable to 16. I think that's probably the best performance / price value for me, and most people who aren't extreme power users. Cost me $799.99 postpaid, plus $9.95 for priority shipping. Total time from submitting the order to receiving it was ~ 48 hours. Pretty decent.
I'm extremely pleased with the laptop itself. It's nicely designed and laid out, has a very nice display, very nice sound by laptop standards, and is very zippy. I also like the fact that it has a second hard drive bay, and I've ordered the caddy and cable (as well as a second drive) so I can make a clone backup, in addition to the other backups I make. (I'm kind of a backup fanatic...)
HP has really backed off on the crapware. Their own proprietary software has also become much better. Their "Support Adviser" or whatever they call it actually caught a few updates and tweaks that I'd missed. And I love the "Simple Pass" fingerprint-activated password filler. It's a real pleasure not to have to enter all those passwords.
All in all, I'm extremely happy with the machine itself. No remorse at all.
As for Windows 8... Grrr....
It took 2 1/2 long days for me to get the very capable laptop into a condition in which it could help me do productive work, and about 10 hours of that was spent making Windows behave like I want it to. The Metro interface in particular is an abomination in every way. The only thing it's good for is generating revenue for Microsoft every time someone buys an "app" from their "store."
If I had to pick the absolute stupidest thing from among the many stupid things about Metro, it would be that it forces "apps" to run in full-screen. That works on a phone. It doesn't work on a 17" laptop. It's just superlatively stupid.
So I downloaded the 8.1 upgrade. It took more than eight hours for a ~ 3GB file -- a staggering time considering the usual download speeds I get. They must throttle the download, and I couldn't find a fullfile version.
The installer also insisted on updating all the other useless "apps" that I hadn't already uninstalled before updating Windows. But it didn't say anything about this. It just did nothing for about an hour. I searched the Interwebz, and someone said to update the other apps and the 8.1 installation would continue. That someone was right.
The 8.1 upgrade reinstalled the useless "apps" that I had uninstalled, mainly live links to MSN / Bing news, weather, sports, finance, etc. pages. I uninstalled them again, of course, with a few cuss words for good measure.
After the 8.1 upgrade completed, I could finally bypass the horrid Metro screen. Then I installed Classic Shell and a few other kludges to make the desktop look and work the way I wanted to, and then spent about a day and a half migrating data and downloading and installing the software I use for work, along with BackBlaze, ESET, etc.
Performance-wise, however, Windows 8 is amazing. Applications like Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and so forth open nearly instantly and run much faster than on the machine this one's replacing (which is by no means an underpowered machine in its on right). It actually runs so fast and so well that it was worth the time I spent jailing the horrid Metro interface.
-Rich
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