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04/24/2009 08:18:54 PM · #26 |
Originally posted by Adamsw216:
Originally posted by AmeedEl-Ghoul:
Originally posted by MAK:
The laptop brands we see least of though are TOSHIBA, they seem to be pretty good. |
This will be my future purchase. |
For the record, my oldest laptop is a Toshiba. |
Well when I bout my XPS, it was the only laptop at that time that had 512MB Display adabter, other wise I would've went with Toshiba for sure.
Cheers, |
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04/24/2009 08:35:29 PM · #27 |
My first computer was a Dell Dimension 4100 (desktop), I bought it in 2001 and just upgraded to my current computer a year ago. Some of the components had to be replaced over the years (video card and CD burner had to be replaced) but the computer is still functional (and on the original harddrive, fans and other internals). That said it is dog slow. My replacement cycle (knock on wood) will likely continue to be around 5-8 years. One thing I would recommend though is to max out the specs on a new computer at the time of purchase - this is one of the reasons I was able to use my old one for so long.
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04/24/2009 09:07:33 PM · #28 |
I built my own PC, and its running strong after 6 years. I never replaced the RAM and it's still kicking. THe key is maintenance, just like a car or any other machine. Keep scanning it and remove all the spyware and RAM killers asap. Most viruses attack your RAM, which impair your computer's memory.
I recommend that you build your computer or have it built after buying each spare part separately. Don't worry about warranty because each part has it's own manufacter's warranty. My motherboard is an Asus and it has a lifetime warranty. My RAM also has a lifetime warranty. I can replace it anytime I want for free, just send your old RAM sticks to Kingston and they will replace them, as long as you send the original boxes in the mail. The computer case is cheap, 40 bucks for mine, a case is a case. The only thing to worry about is the processor, but those things never go just like the CD ROM. As for video cards, they are very reliable and if you scan your computer constantly with a Norton or AVG, then you don't have to worry about your Hard disc crashing.
For $800.00 I have over a Gig or RAM, with room to add another Gig. I have room for 2 video cards, currently having a midgrade Nvidia, and a 2.8 Ghz AMD64 processor. Included was a logitech wireless mouse and keyboard. But that was 6 years ago, today you could get a computer with these specs for under $500 if you buy each part separate.
Message edited by author 2009-04-24 21:13:31. |
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04/24/2009 09:11:10 PM · #29 |
| I've always built my own computer from components. The last one (An Athlon 2000 that I built in '03) went 5 years before I felt I had to upgrade. It's still in use and is the one I mentioned I may put Linux onto. It had some ram upgrades in that time (256Mb--> 512Mb --> 1.25Gb) and had a larger second hard drive added. I've always tended to stay 18-24 months behind the bleeding edge. It seems to be the most bang for the buck point. This time around I still stayed a year or so behind the power curve, but I got higher end, better name components. It was the easiest build I have ever done and I have a nice custom system for about $650 |
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04/24/2009 09:18:18 PM · #30 |
Originally posted by RulerZigzag:
The computer case is cheap, 40 bucks for mine, a case is a case. |
True. I spend $79 on my Antec case, but it came with a power supply as well. I like the front mounted USB and SATA ports on mine and the hard drive racks are sideways which made installation a breeze. You can get a decent name brand case for under $50. Don't cheap out on a power supply, however. My old Athlon had a noname case/PSU combo that cost $34. Ran for over 5 years. Power supply smoked the day before I went out of town. I walked into the middle bedroom and smelled burned wiring. It was the el-cheapo P/S that had burned up with the computer off. Good thing I discovered it before I left town. |
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04/24/2009 09:46:11 PM · #31 |
I believe our oldest operating computer at work is a Power Computing Macintosh clone, running System 7.5.3 ...
The computer I'm on right now has a 1GHz/Pentium III processor/W2000 ...
My Mac G3 laptop just died, but fortunately my local independent computer store has an almost identical replacement on hand pretty cheap. |
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04/24/2009 10:01:45 PM · #32 |
Originally posted by Yo_Spiff:
Originally posted by RulerZigzag:
The computer case is cheap, 40 bucks for mine, a case is a case. |
True. I spend $79 on my Antec case, but it came with a power supply as well. I like the front mounted USB and SATA ports on mine and the hard drive racks are sideways which made installation a breeze. You can get a decent name brand case for under $50. Don't cheap out on a power supply, however. My old Athlon had a noname case/PSU combo that cost $34. Ran for over 5 years. Power supply smoked the day before I went out of town. I walked into the middle bedroom and smelled burned wiring. It was the el-cheapo P/S that had burned up with the computer off. Good thing I discovered it before I left town. |
I forgot about the Power Supply, funny you mention it, mine went down twice and the first one burned out because it was only around 400W or so, and it wasn't powerful enough. The 2nd time it burnt out was because of a power surge and I had nothing underneath the computer but carpet! Thats a no no. |
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04/24/2009 11:50:29 PM · #33 |
Originally posted by JEason:
I'm running a three-year-old dell PC and it's starting to become slower (and crashes almost every third time I use PSP X2) with the newer software I put on it even though my PC meets the recommended specs of the software (the biggest software culprit and the one I'm mainly talking about is Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate). It only crashes when I use PSP but it seems to be sluggish all around.
Three years seems to early to upgrade for me though. I'm not playing games on it but I am editing pictures, as with most of you here, which is why I started this thread. So, how often do you guys, as photographers, upgrade your PC?
Thanks,
Justen |
The key is were you happy with the speed of the system when you got it? If so then simple maintenance should bring it back to that speed.
Do you do any maintenance on it? Disk Clean up, Defrag, Disk Error-Checking (aka scandisk, Chkdisk)? XP or Vista?
I was writing up a how to make it as fast as is was but it was getting a little wordy for the thread. I'll clean it up before posting.
Message edited by author 2009-04-24 23:50:52. |
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04/25/2009 12:27:56 AM · #34 |
Happy this thread has come along.
Have been having problems with my computer since I upgraded to itunes 8.
Since putting this on everything is having problems.
Music is choppy. Everything runs slow. Mouse lags behind. Photoshop is a nightmare.
I want to go back to itunes 7 but I don't want to have to drop and drag all the music back onto itunes to have it back in the library. (when I upgraded to 8 it also lost the whole library and I had to reload all the music back into the library by dropping the folders onto the itunes program).
Does anyone know how to save the library so that it can be uploaded to itunes 7 when we put it back on.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks |
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04/25/2009 12:43:11 AM · #35 |
| If you are running Mac's Time Machine backup software, you are supposed to be able to restore your computer to the state it was in at some specified time. If you're running iTunes on a PC, what did you expect? ;-) |
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04/25/2009 07:41:33 AM · #36 |
Originally posted by AmeedEl-Ghoul:
Originally posted by Adamsw216:
Originally posted by AmeedEl-Ghoul:
Originally posted by MAK:
The laptop brands we see least of though are TOSHIBA, they seem to be pretty good. |
This will be my future purchase. |
For the record, my oldest laptop is a Toshiba. |
Well when I bout my XPS, it was the only laptop at that time that had 512MB Display adabter, other wise I would've went with Toshiba for sure.
Cheers, |
My last two laptops have been Toshibas and have run beautifully for me. My last one lasted 4 years before it fell out of a bag and onto the pavement (stupid broken zipper) :( and the current one is 3 years old and running smoothly & fast. I do, however, max out the ram & processor speed when I get a new machine. I also keep all but my most recent / most used files backed up on mirrored external USB drives.
BTW: The other small thing I love about my Toshiba laptop that has proven invaluable has been having a complete number pad next to the normal keyboard. Not many laptops have this available and it's amazingly useful for the work I do (and I don't want to carry a usb num pad all the time). |
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04/25/2009 08:02:53 AM · #37 |
I've built my own PCs since the '90s, and none of them have died before being decommissioned, usually around the 6-year point. We just shut down our last XP machine, and that was 7 years old and had never had any major hardware replaced.
We do keep our hardware protected by UPS systems, and they do run 24-7. |
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04/25/2009 09:16:10 AM · #38 |
Wow! Thanks for all the replies!
Originally posted by awpollard:
Do you do any maintenance on it? Disk Clean up, Defrag, Disk Error-Checking (aka scandisk, Chkdisk)? XP or Vista?
I was writing up a how to make it as fast as is was but it was getting a little wordy for the thread. I'll clean it up before posting. |
I'm running XP and I do a defrag about every other month, an ad-aware scan every month. That's about it, I hardly ever do disk clean up or disk error checking. The thing is I have an external hard drive with all my pictures and music. My internal hard drive has 20GB of free space. I have 1Gb of RAM. I'll run all the scans and stuff and see what happens.
The biggest problem is using Paint Shop Pro, it's driving me nuts. Maybe it's the same problem  Yo_Spiff had with PSP X2. Have you experienced a lack of stability with X2 Ultimate, Yo_Spiff?
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04/25/2009 10:00:50 AM · #39 |
Originally posted by JEason:
Have you experienced a lack of stability with X2 Ultimate, Yo_Spiff? |
I think 12 Ultimate has locked up on me once, perhaps twice at the most. I've had it on this computer for I think 2-3 months now. The original version locked up so much that when I used it I made a habit of saving my work about every 10 minutes. I mostly stuck with V11, however. 12 Ultimate seems to run well on Vista.
The only other problem I have had with PSP on the new computer is this odd problem with the cursor going wonky sometimes when I do a curves adjustment layer. It happens with all versions of PSP. I don't totally blame PSP, however, I think the video drivers are part of it.
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04/25/2009 10:07:31 AM · #40 |
Originally posted by snaffles:
Lifespan of my computers
Mac Classic - 17 yrs old, still works perfectly;
Mac iBook - 9 yrs old, still works perfectly;
Mac iMac - 5 yrs old, works perfectly;
Refurbished HP PC - barely lasted 16 months and had to replace the hard drive. Next time, it goes out the window! |
Kaypro II CP/M 26 years, still runs fine.
Sanyo 555 MS-Dos 25 years still runs fine
Radio Shack Model 100 26 years still runs fine
Amiga 1000 24 years, still runs fine
Homemade PC Clone Pentium 100 15 years, still runs fine.
HP M8430F 1 year, runs OK
Wife who is tired of my computer collection, runs good but has frequent system upsets, pretty much related to how much time and money I spend on the computers.
ETA: I have PSP X2 ultimate under Vista 64. No crashes, but reverts to basic display mode when run, and that makes Chrome unhappy. Does not seem to like any plug-ins, but other than that works as it should.
Message edited by author 2009-04-25 10:09:21.
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04/25/2009 10:18:26 AM · #41 |
Originally posted by ambaker:
ETA: I have PSP X2 ultimate under Vista 64. No crashes, but reverts to basic display mode when run, and that makes Chrome unhappy. Does not seem to like any plug-ins, but other than that works as it should. |
Odd. I have had no trouble at all with plugins on 12 Ultimate. Perhaps it is because you are running the 64 bit Vista, while I am using 32? I have 64 bit Windows 7 Beta installed. I can try it out on that and see if I have any plgin problems.
Message edited by author 2009-04-25 10:18:48. |
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04/25/2009 11:01:00 AM · #42 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
If you are running Mac's Time Machine backup software, you are supposed to be able to restore your computer to the state it was in at some specified time. If you're running iTunes on a PC, what did you expect? ;-) |
Dude.....that was just HARSH!!! LOL!!
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04/25/2009 01:05:35 PM · #43 |
Originally posted by Anti-Martyr:
In an age where people are more or less forced to use computers, it amazes me that so few people have any level of "geektitude." People complain about Vista being a poor operating system: Well, maybe a bit of research would've showed you that an Athlon X2 3500+ system with 1gb of RAM wasn't gonna cut it. People complain about getting viruses: Well, listening to the Google threat indicator is generally a good idea, as is using an email server with competent spam filtering. People complain about their PCs getting bogged: Well a certain amount of care has to go into maintaining a clean PC (or Mac, for that matter, it's a universal problem). Everything I know about PCs is more or less a mixture of self education and common sense. If a stupid teenager can do it, why not everyone else? |
I think you've missed out on the fact that most people view computers as tools and simply want the machine to get on with the task in hand. To draw a sort of parallel, I don't want to have to learn how to refine petrol when I buy a car, nor do I want to knit my own tyres or slaughter cattle and tan the hides to make the seats. I just want to get in and drive it.
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04/26/2009 09:20:34 PM · #44 |
Originally posted by Mr_Pants:
Originally posted by Anti-Martyr:
In an age where people are more or less forced to use computers, it amazes me that so few people have any level of "geektitude." People complain about Vista being a poor operating system: Well, maybe a bit of research would've showed you that an Athlon X2 3500+ system with 1gb of RAM wasn't gonna cut it. People complain about getting viruses: Well, listening to the Google threat indicator is generally a good idea, as is using an email server with competent spam filtering. People complain about their PCs getting bogged: Well a certain amount of care has to go into maintaining a clean PC (or Mac, for that matter, it's a universal problem). Everything I know about PCs is more or less a mixture of self education and common sense. If a stupid teenager can do it, why not everyone else? |
I think you've missed out on the fact that most people view computers as tools and simply want the machine to get on with the task in hand. To draw a sort of parallel, I don't want to have to learn how to refine petrol when I buy a car, nor do I want to knit my own tyres or slaughter cattle and tan the hides to make the seats. I just want to get in and drive it. |
The more proper analogy is this: When you get into your car to drive, you need to know that at some point it's going to need an oil change. The tires will need to be aligned, rotated, perhaps replaced. Every once in a while, you should bring it in for a checkup to make sure everything is working properly.
If you don't do those things with your car, it'll be no surprise when it burns out. Same for a PC. Less so for Macs because they don't have enough market penetration for anyone to care about writing malware and viruses for them. But give it time. I'd put money on the fact that in, oh... 3 years? Maybe? When Apple has a larger marketshare that people will be complaining about the same things they do with PCs now. |
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04/26/2009 09:46:20 PM · #45 |
Originally posted by Anti-Martyr:
In an age where people are more or less forced to use computers, it amazes me that so few people have any level of "geektitude." People complain about Vista being a poor operating system: Well, maybe a bit of research would've showed you that an Athlon X2 3500+ system with 1gb of RAM wasn't gonna cut it. People complain about getting viruses: Well, listening to the Google threat indicator is generally a good idea, as is using an email server with competent spam filtering. People complain about their PCs getting bogged: Well a certain amount of care has to go into maintaining a clean PC (or Mac, for that matter, it's a universal problem). Everything I know about PCs is more or less a mixture of self education and common sense. If a stupid teenager can do it, why not everyone else? |
Originally posted by Mr_Pants:
I think you've missed out on the fact that most people view computers as tools and simply want the machine to get on with the task in hand. To draw a sort of parallel, I don't want to have to learn how to refine petrol when I buy a car, nor do I want to knit my own tyres or slaughter cattle and tan the hides to make the seats. I just want to get in and drive it. |
Not a valid parallel......
I'm certainly not remotely a geek, but I know enough not to ignore or neglect my computers because if I expect them to operate the way they were intended, I understand I have an obligation to know enough to care for them properly.
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04/26/2009 09:49:18 PM · #46 |
Originally posted by Anti-Martyr:
In an age where people are more or less forced to use computers, it amazes me that so few people have any level of "geektitude." People complain about Vista being a poor operating system: Well, maybe a bit of research would've showed you that an Athlon X2 3500+ system with 1gb of RAM wasn't gonna cut it. People complain about getting viruses: Well, listening to the Google threat indicator is generally a good idea, as is using an email server with competent spam filtering. People complain about their PCs getting bogged: Well a certain amount of care has to go into maintaining a clean PC (or Mac, for that matter, it's a universal problem). Everything I know about PCs is more or less a mixture of self education and common sense. If a stupid teenager can do it, why not everyone else? |
Originally posted by Mr_Pants:
I think you've missed out on the fact that most people view computers as tools and simply want the machine to get on with the task in hand. To draw a sort of parallel, I don't want to have to learn how to refine petrol when I buy a car, nor do I want to knit my own tyres or slaughter cattle and tan the hides to make the seats. I just want to get in and drive it. |
Originally posted by Anti-Martyr:
The more proper analogy is this: When you get into your car to drive, you need to know that at some point it's going to need an oil change. The tires will need to be aligned, rotated, perhaps replaced. Every once in a while, you should bring it in for a checkup to make sure everything is working properly.
If you don't do those things with your car, it'll be no surprise when it burns out. Same for a PC. Less so for Macs because they don't have enough market penetration for anyone to care about writing malware and viruses for them. But give it time. I'd put money on the fact that in, oh... 3 years? Maybe? When Apple has a larger marketshare that people will be complaining about the same things they do with PCs now. |
I wish I was this sharp and thought in such a linear manner when I was 19.....
Methinks we should keep an eye on this young man.....I do believe he's going places!
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04/26/2009 10:54:19 PM · #47 |
Originally posted by RamblinR:
Does anyone know how to save the library so that it can be uploaded to itunes 7 when we put it back on. Any help would be greatly appreciated. |
I used Copy Muppy (freeware) to copy iTunes to an external hard drive before reloading XP. Copy Muppy allows backing up a few files or whole HD copy.
Originally posted by GeneralE:
If you're running iTunes on a PC, what did you expect? ;-) |
I've run iTunes on PC's for 5 years with little problem. |
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04/26/2009 11:03:46 PM · #48 |
Originally posted by fldave:
Originally posted by GeneralE:
If you're running iTunes on a PC, what did you expect? ;-) |
I've run iTunes on PC's for 5 years with little problem. |
Sorry, as noted I was just being snotty. I have a bit of a negative attitude because after I installed Windows2000 Professional on my PC which came originally with WindowsMe, I no longer have a functioning sound card at all, and have never found the driver/configuration combination to get it to work again, so I don't bother with iTunes at all. |
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04/26/2009 11:06:11 PM · #49 |
Originally posted by GeneralE:
after I installed Windows2000 Professional on my PC which came originally with WindowsMe, I no longer have a functioning sound card at all, and have never found the driver/configuration combination to get it to work again |
I had a PC that for a long time I could not get the sound working. Device manager reported the device drivers were installed and functioning properly. Finally turned out the audio service was not running. I went into the admin controls and turned on the service, and the audio came to life.
My opinion on Itunes is that it is bloatware. (An opinion I know is not shared by most.) I buy my music from Amazon, use Audiograbber to rip my existing CD's and either VLC media player or Songbird to play the music. Transfer to my non-Ipod is via simple drag and drop of the files.
Message edited by author 2009-04-26 23:10:24. |
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04/27/2009 12:40:26 AM · #50 |
Originally posted by NikonJeb:
I wish I was this sharp and thought in such a linear manner when I was 19.....
Methinks we should keep an eye on this young man.....I do believe he's going places! |
I can't tell if that's supposed to be sarcastic or not, but either way I'm going to take it as a compliment :P |
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