[quote=AN]Flu, nice take over :-). I agree with your statement, which is why I suggest a SSD upgrade and a new reinstall OS. That’s sufficient for most people. A 4 years old computer is more than sufficient for most people. Since he have a $500 budget, I think SSD and OS will get him the best bang for his bucks IMHO.
I’ve done many upgrades on every components in a computer for many years and I’ve never noticed as big of a performance improvement as adding a SSD. This is on a 4+ year old laptop too. So, for $200 ($100 for SSD and $100 for Windows 7), I’m pretty sure his computer will probably blow away anything he can get off the shelf for $500 today for most if not all of his use cases.
sdr, if you want, I can teach/show you how to do it. It’s quite easy.[/quote]
AN, I’m not sure if he needs an SSD. and they are still pretty pricey. I which they would drop in price because what I love about them in laptops are
1) they significantly extend the battery life.
2) much more durable. Drop your laptop, your normal hard drive might be toast…SSD has no moving parts, so it’s great.
However, I am not convinced as far as their reliability so far in the long term….Not saying it’s not reliable…Just that there hasn’t been enough on the market long enough to tell if data you store now will still be good 5 years later+…Given that most people backup their data in some format (cloud or otherwise), it’s less of an issue these days than before…But still….
Slightly not the same technology but for instance on my Galaxy Tablet, the internal storage craps out every few months or such….After the first time, I’ve been a proponent of regular backups…. I don’t have as much concerns on a traditional computer, because frankly I’ve never had a normal hard drive have a complete failure from which I couldn’t recover from (even if it meant physically taking out the platter and moving onto another similar drive just to recover the data).
In my opinion, if you have a desktop…Use an SSD to give you extreme performance, but have a regular harddrive to backup your data..For instance, I would install the O/S apps and games on the SSD, and have a hard drive to store all the data. That way if your SSD craps out, you can always just reinstall. If you’re working with large pictures like in photoshop or something, I would put all the working copies on the SSD so that read/write access is fast. BUT i would do a regular scheduled backup EVERY day to a USB normal harddrive or clouddrive, just in case….
For most users 2GB of ram is sufficient… I was able to survive with 1GB most of my life.
I don’t think sdr needs an SSD. My philosophy is that if he was running fine before, and all else hasn’t changed that much, he probably will run just fine right now. His machine is probably all messed up because of some virus or some install/reinstall or running out of disk space or just because…well he’s using windows for some times and at a few times in his life, it wouldn’t shutdown, so he just unplugged it, it rebooted, and then the registry or some other crap is all messed up… I have never ever had a windows machine that ran as good after 1-2 years as it did right after a brand new install. I don’t know why…. So usually I keep using the windows box until it crashes or gets stolen or something, and then I reinstall…
That’s why I love linux. Too bad software for it sucks. But I do run virtualBox on it and get windows inside Ubuntu… Performance is actually pretty good with a core i7 quad core, 8 GB ram, and dual SSD…
AN, our goal is we should save sdr from spending uncessarily on a new computer…So that he can take the same amount of money and put it to a much better waste of of resources that would probably put a much bigger smile on his face…. A Dinan chip for his 335.
