PC Tech Thread

Thanks very much, both of you.

Do any sites do full customisation still?

I'd like:

15 inch (not up for carrying 17 inches of heavyweight machine around with me)
256 or moar ssd
1.5gb or moar dedicated video (nvidia by preference but not that fussy)
at least 8 or ideally 16gb ram
and a reliable processor

Actually - that novatech range is nice! and the 15 inch version of your link, spence, is not far off ideal!

Can you get 1.5gb video cards in laptops? That would be a beast!!

2gb! I am excite. Though I was told by a friend earlier to avoid Novatech which tend to be cheaper build quality :S Never had played with one myself so I'll be sure to search thoroughly for reviews before committing.

Options, after today, in no particular order, and yes, I'm aware most are not THAT gamey:

14" Alienware M14x
3.5Ghz Quad-core Intel Core i7
16gb 1600mhz
512gb ssd
2gb nvidia GT650m

Pros - Designed with gaming in mind, not bad value Cons - Fuck ugly. Srsly.

N.B If I didn't care about size or the fact that it was an Alienware machine, their 18 inch model can support dual 2gb nvidia card...insane.

15" MacBook Pro (sorry)
2.5GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
8gb ram (1333mhz) (apple, y u no 16gb??)
512gb ssd
1gb radeon 6770M

Pros - solid build quality, pretty Cons - fucking expensive, hardly designed with gaming in mind, would require fucking around with Parallels/bootcamp again which I promised myself I wouldn't do.

15.6" Novatech Elite Ultimate 2760 v2
2.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
16gb(1333mhz)
500gb ssd (not technically an SSD but a hybrid & not sure how reliable they are)
1.5gb Nvidia GTX 670m

Pros - relatively cheap, doesn't look hideous Cons - allegedly not the greatest build quality.

**
Sony (I know, right?) Vaio F24C5E **
2.4GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
8gb ram (1333mhz) (Sony, y u no 16gb??)
512gb ssd
2gb nvidia GT 540m

Pros - about a grand cheaper than the MBP, looks OK ** Cons** - Sony

They all have good connectivity in terms of ports with HDMI, VGA, USB 3 (at least 2 on all of them with 1 USB 2) Firewire (very important for me) SD Card slots etc.

Battery lives are variable but I'll have it plugged in as a work-station replacement for the most part. But you can't beat that gaming-in-bed feeling.

The search continues.

I was talking to my boss today and he rates novatech.

do ibm lenovo have any offerings? they tend to be build like tanks

After nvidia issues I would avoid them like the plague.

Never ever had a system with a radeon card.

But that said, I frequently have nvidia trouble - particularly when updating.

Shall check out lenovo, ta J

What is the issue with Sony?

I've had one of their laptops before and really rated the build quality

Hm, I bought a fairly high end (for its time) Vaio in 2007, by 2008 it was falling apart. Plasticky tat which overheated running Word.

In fairness, the one linked above looks more solid than that. There's another in their range which looks solid as a brick but only comes with an integrated gfx card which is rather annoying (The same intel card on the 13inch macbooks)

Is there any reason why the Lenovo Thinkpad W50 can't be configured to house an SSD larger than 160GB? Surely, if they're the same size it could house a bigger one? Unless it's something to do with mobo capability?

i can see no reason why you couldn't

Or look at one of the top ones at novatech - even more so if you want to play games, some of their top end laptops are great;

YUM!

I bought a novatech gaming laptop and I couldn't be more pleased with it. Runs fallout nv or bioshock 2 with everything turned up to the max, decent speakers for a laptop, good screen. The touchpad could be better (it's not a synaptics but some other make) but I use a mouse with it anyway.

I like Novatech stuff, hence me buying all my parts from them for this computer.
Avoid Alienware, it's just Dell in a bendy case.

An ugly bendy case :)

Ta for all the input/novatech support. I'll have a chat with the person paying for it next week and see if he has any suggestions.

Soon...

Does anyone wanna buy an Nvidia 2000 card? Cheaps, going spare - I upgraded to a 4000

I was talking to my boss today and he rates novatech.

do ibm lenovo have any offerings? they tend to be build like tanks

My Lenovo had a disk error last week (even though it has a SSD in it).

It's under a £30 warranty for next-day on-site support, and whilst it took a week for them to come out (they sent a new SSD on day 1, day 2 I tested it and on day 3 a new mainboard arrived, weekend passed, day 6 engineer arrives).

What I was stunned at, was that it was likely my fault (I was running a larger and more power demanding SSD than the one they supplied, but yet they:
1) Gave me a new SSD
2) Replaced the mainboard
3) Replaced the whole case of the laptop

#2 was "just in case", and #3 was because the engineer wasn't happy the power socket had 2mm of give to it when he plugged the power in.

All of this, on-site (in my tower block), and constantly in touch with them.

I think this Lenovo is the best laptop I've ever had (an X220 with 8GB RAM), but a warranty that without too much fuss is willing to fix the laptop on-site is stunning.

I seriously rate Lenovo, love the industrial design... but add the IBM support to it and it rocks.

Thanks to this thread reminding me how cheap memory is right now, I maxxed out my music production PC.

Therefore I have 3x2GB sticks of Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 ram going spare. Anyone want for £15?

Any one got a 600w plus power supply going for cheap. Case/sockets can be damaged as I'm gutting it for the internals for the g5 mac.

My PC is too fast.

Since I made a SSD the main drive my virtual machines hang on start-up when I trigger them via vagrant.

On HDD this doesn't happen at all.

It's the weirdest thing. I suspect I'm going to have to build pauses into my virtual machines to slow them down.

Too fast?

Fail.

Try again.

Anything here?
https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/455

Yeah, I've trawled through those tickets. Nothing that could help.

The 2 second pre-up delay on dhclient was the most successful so far, but it's not entirely consistent. I could try upping the delay, but then we're getting into a silly cargo culting exercise.

Strangely, I found CentOS suffers from this more than Ubuntu does.

I've no idea why.

If anyone's after a new laptop this is the steal of the century;

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280878660911

Literally?