General computer talk/advice

Elli has the best battery. 25 minutes to charge, 50 minutes to discharge under light use. And I like the 14" 4:3 form factor...

 

You could do that with a 13" screen if it where the same resolution, screen size doesn't really matter, it's the resolution.

 

Good news:
After my parents got a new laptop, I got my old one back at no cost.
Bad news:
I want to install linux on it, but only Ubuntu and mint are allowed, so no antergos for me
And no, the bios is locked so I can't change it.

 

2 screens, thats purely determined by resolution not physical size. A 14" laptop is available in over 1080p resolutions, there are still 15" 768p resolutions. Screen size is therefore not a determining factor in how comfortable having 2 windows open.

In your situation I'd be going for a 1080p 14" unit.



I'm trying to work out a way to budget for an XPS15 myself. Same physical dimensions as my current 14" laptop, and can reach all my other requirements too.

 

I meant that I find it more comfortable working with a bigger screen.

 

To back up what @SixSixSevenSeven said, let me say this:
My laptop is 15.6" and 1366x768p.

 

My Dell D600 has a 1024*768 screen and I am comfortable with having windows as described, even on 4:3.

 

Hmm imagine what you could fit on a phone screen, like a 4K panel with something like 500ppi, if you think about it that could be loads, but the text would have to be incredibly small and you probably couldn't actually use it.

 

well everything is scaled well on phone operating systems, they are designed to do this since there are

yeah, talking of desk space i take some big risks buy putting tea or other hot drinks on the palm rests of my macbook!, haven't spilled anything yet
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if I'm honest, Laptops need to get higher resolution soon, 1366x768 is becoming un-acceptable in the age where £300-£400 tablets have 2048x1536 resolutions
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it still bugs me how most operating systems could easily extend battery life, like during a youtube video i am pretty sure you don't need VP9, so fall back to H.264 and Hardware accelerate it, then clock the CPU to the lowest and leave 1 core active, it doesn't happen this way though, with CPUs still at max clock speed due to VP9. MAC OS X Safari uses H.264 only on youtube video, but it would be nice to have a switch
H.264-Lower Video Quality/Better Battery Life/Quiet fan
VP9-Higher Video Quality/Lower Battery Life/Noisy fans

Also the GPU doesn't need to be clocked up high to display 1440x900 @30fps.

Also the iGPU (if there is one) should be used more, and Intel should add support for VP9
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Another gripe with my macbook is that even when on A/C power the CPU and GPU do clock way down on the desktop, this means that the fancy MAC OS X gestures lag a lot (displayed at like 15fps) and sometimes can hang, then when it finally realises that you need the extra GPU performance it ignores the fact that the GPU heats up and throttles back down
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let alone the fact that under heavy cpu/gpu load the GPU throttles, and to what i can see the 320M has these modes

115mhz
200ishmhz
450mhz
and imo there needs to be a 300mhz mode,
also the GPU throttles since when the CPU isn't getting worked that hard about 80c the fan is at about 3000-4000rpm, but the GPU is onwards to 88c.
Apple really messed this up, but hey, apple users don't care since its a macbook, and its slim and you can put it in a letter

 

I'm very curious to see how Kaby-Lake's iGPU will run BeamNG, but I cannot find any videos on it.

 

Not many GPUs until recent years hardware decoded h264 either to be fair

 

let alone the fact that under heavy cpu/gpu load the GPU throttles, and to what i can see the 320M has these modes

115mhz
200ishmhz
450mhz
and imo there needs to be a 300mhz mode,
also the GPU throttles since when the CPU isn't getting worked that hard about 80c the fan is at about 3000-4000rpm, but the GPU is onwards to 88c.

really? i think most mobile graphics solutions do, except for SIS Mirage 3+, thats just a bloody VGA port its so bad.

 

turns out that the GTX 960 has the best Hardware Acceleration features of modern GPUs, it can fully hardware decode VP9/H.264/H.265
fully- not just half doing it and aiding the CPU

 

That's nvenc which came with Kepler I think

 

i think H265 is a new addition though, Maxwell and onwards, but it seems that only the 960 is fully hardware accelerated, the others just aid the CPU (Pascal should have full support)

 

well darn, my siblings laptop's hard drive may have given up, it's being very slow today (took at least 10 minutes just to get to the desktop from cold boot, and before it would even go to the desktop it insisted i let it run hard drive sector reallocations, which took multiple hours and still may not be done) and crystal disk info is giving a "Caution" for the disk health status, and says that it has a high amount of pending sector counts (whatever that means, although it's the only thing in the yellow, all the other S.M.A.R.T stats are all within normal numbers according to crystal disk info)

 

yeah those are symptoms of a dying hard drive, Did it die just randomly or did it get dropped, cause that might cause a head crash and destroy the disk.

Well i can only hope you have a backup, or a 3 day long recovery process reading from the disk
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Just a question but are there any thick non ultrabook laptops made new these days that aren't marketed as gaming, since its hard finding a laptop that isn't an ultrabook and isn't a gaming one, all i need is a laptop with good battery and a decent dedicated GPU, (GT940M maybe) that can switch between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics, its just a shame that most manufacturers put that hardware in ultrabooks, and save the better ones for gaming, but neither have excellent battery life.

 

The ASUS X550VX-MH71. I almost bought one myself. It looks like a standard laptop, it's marketed as a standard laptop, but has an i7-6700HQ, a GTX 950M, 8 gigs of ram, and a 1tb hard drive.

 

I don't think I will ever be able to buy a phone without an amoled screen. It's awesome.

 

Just a question but are there any thick non ultrabook laptops made new these days that aren't marketed as gaming, since its hard finding a laptop that isn't an ultrabook and isn't a gaming one, all i need is a laptop with good battery and a decent dedicated GPU, (GT940M maybe) that can switch between integrated graphics and dedicated graphics, its just a shame that most manufacturers put that hardware in ultrabooks, and save the better ones

wow! from my favourite manafacturer too! there are so many X series laptops and most have Integrated graphics but this is awesome, ill recommend to my sister who will probably keep the system for ~10 years. My technology is for the long haul lol, My HP Compaq NC8430 from 2006 still goes like stink, when the hard drive is not being sucked up for windows updates.. (HDD is a Fujitsu 100gb on its last legs)