Yeah watches are ridiculous these days. Do they make watches which just look like watches but are empty inside? I mean, it would be cheaper, more eco-friendly, less hassle with making sure they work and would serve the same purpose .. fashion.

dunno, I wear a watch that actually tells me the time it is, would be lost without it.

I can guess time without watch with 10-30min accuracy most of the time. You dont always have a phone with you? In which case yeah its not ridiculous.

well, I have my fixed phone telling me the time too when I'm at my computer (silly me, the computer tells me the time also)... but when I'm not at my desk, I often don't have a phone at hand, because my mobile is not screwed to my person, also, it's not convenient to consult the clock on that phone.

It's ridiculous then but whatever.

well, I prefer to have a dedicated time teller than to bother with consulting my phone, with all the manoeuverings attendent to that (take out of pocket, go to menu, choose the clock and consult) when I can do the same with just an arm gesture... to boot, I often don't have the phone with me because I tend to forget it when I've put it away from my vest such as when it needs a recharge.

Yes need vs want, I understand this, say no more.

My turn to start looking around for a new laptop. My current one has become grindingly slow despite periodic cleanups. It's a bottom of the barrel 2012 vintage Toshiba satellite sporting 4G of RAM, some i3 Intel chip and a 1T HDD. Originally delivered with Win 8, which i hated with a passion (who didn't?), I took advantage of the offer to upgrade to Win 10 free of charge. That of course slowed the thing down considerably. The breaking point came yesterday when I installed an Android emulator. It warned me that my hardware was going to struggle big time. Sure enough, just booting the program took about four minutes.

So now I'm looking for a rig that can handle Win 10 at a reasonable clip and do some video editing. I guess 8G of RAM would be the absolute minimum. I'd like to see an SSD in it, as well as a conventional 1T HDD. I'll migrate my hybrid (digital/analogue) USB TV dongle across to it and buy an external CD/DVD burner. They are cheap as chips now.

Being a pensioner, price is a bit of an issue. I'll try to keep the purchase to around AU$1500 or under. Right now 1AU$ is worth US$0.71. Additionally, for reasons unknown to me, whatever hardware or software is sold in Australia gets an automatic 10-20% markup from whatever it is sold for in Europe or the US, so whatever I finish up buying for around AU$1500 would have cost me maybe a third less outside Australia.

Advice appreciated, and wish me luck, thank you.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

laklak wrote:Who the fuck has almost 2Gs for a fucking cell phone?

I do but it is for me just a phone. I dont do social media. I have public transport timetables and a walking app.

You don’t do social media? Since when?

tuco wrote:I can guess time without watch with 10-30min accuracy most of the time. You dont always have a phone with you? In which case yeah its not ridiculous.

Not good for diffusing bombs.

Hermit wrote:My turn to start looking around for a new laptop. My current one has become grindingly slow despite periodic cleanups. It's a bottom of the barrel 2012 vintage Toshiba satellite sporting 4G of RAM, some i3 Intel chip and a 1T HDD. Originally delivered with Win 8, which i hated with a passion (who didn't?), I took advantage of the offer to upgrade to Win 10 free of charge. That of course slowed the thing down considerably. The breaking point came yesterday when I installed an Android emulator. It warned me that my hardware was going to struggle big time. Sure enough, just booting the program took about four minutes.

So now I'm looking for a rig that can handle Win 10 at a reasonable clip and do some video editing. I guess 8G of RAM would be the absolute minimum. I'd like to see an SSD in it, as well as a conventional 1T HDD. I'll migrate my hybrid (digital/analogue) USB TV dongle across to it and buy an external CD/DVD burner. They are cheap as chips now.

Being a pensioner, price is a bit of an issue. I'll try to keep the purchase to around AU$1500 or under. Right now 1AU$ is worth US$0.71. Additionally, for reasons unknown to me, whatever hardware or software is sold in Australia gets an automatic 10-20% markup from whatever it is sold for in Europe or the US, so whatever I finish up buying for around AU$1500 would have cost me maybe a third less outside Australia.

Advice appreciated, and wish me luck, thank you.

I’ve seen some good deals here on refurbed i5 and i7 Thinkpads.

Hermit wrote:My turn to start looking around for a new laptop. My current one has become grindingly slow despite periodic cleanups. It's a bottom of the barrel 2012 vintage Toshiba satellite sporting 4G of RAM, some i3 Intel chip and a 1T HDD. Originally delivered with Win 8, which i hated with a passion (who didn't?), I took advantage of the offer to upgrade to Win 10 free of charge. That of course slowed the thing down considerably. The breaking point came yesterday when I installed an Android emulator. It warned me that my hardware was going to struggle big time. Sure enough, just booting the program took about four minutes.

So now I'm looking for a rig that can handle Win 10 at a reasonable clip and do some video editing. I guess 8G of RAM would be the absolute minimum. I'd like to see an SSD in it, as well as a conventional 1T HDD. I'll migrate my hybrid (digital/analogue) USB TV dongle across to it and buy an external CD/DVD burner. They are cheap as chips now.

Being a pensioner, price is a bit of an issue. I'll try to keep the purchase to around AU$1500 or under. Right now 1AU$ is worth US$0.71. Additionally, for reasons unknown to me, whatever hardware or software is sold in Australia gets an automatic 10-20% markup from whatever it is sold for in Europe or the US, so whatever I finish up buying for around AU$1500 would have cost me maybe a third less outside Australia.

Advice appreciated, and wish me luck, thank you.

They might be out of your price range, but take a look at the Asus and MSI gaming laptops. There's a huge electronics mall here in Kuala Lumpur and they had some pretty impressive looking machines at a fairly reasonable price. Assuming that portability isn't a major factor.

But for the record "do a bit of video editing" is a pretty broad area, so it's possible that powerful game laptops could be anything from overkill to underpowered depending on exactly what you want to do.

felltoearth wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

laklak wrote:Who the fuck has almost 2Gs for a fucking cell phone?

I do but it is for me just a phone. I dont do social media. I have public transport timetables and a walking app.

You don’t do social media? Since when?

Never have.

I use a MSI machine for the last year and a half. Performance is great but they do have keyboard problems. Certain sections stop working. I have trouble with 'x' and 'z' keys. I never paid the full price anyway.

Scot Dutchy wrote:I use a MSI machine for the last year and a half. Performance is great but they do have keyboard problems. Certain sections stop working. I have trouble with 'x' and 'z' keys. I never paid the full price anyway.

Yeah I had one and it had a keyboard issue. Which was annoying because the reviews claimed the keyboard as one of the best features of the computer. I just figured it was mine. They use Steel Series, which are supposed to be a decent brand.

I have a 2014 MSI GS60 Ghost. I play Minecraft on it and use various Adobe products (After Effects, Premiere, Illustrator, Photoshop, etc.). It's quick and has a good assortment of ports. No problems with the keyboard thus far. You can impress your mates with the RGB back-lighting! There's a bit of fan noise. Battery life isn't great, but mine's plugged in most of the time anyway.

I'm With Stupid wrote:"do a bit of video editing" is a pretty broad area, so it's possible that powerful game laptops could be anything from overkill to underpowered depending on exactly what you want to do.

Oh yeah, I should have detailed what I want to do. Nothing special, really. Just the sort of thing Peter Jackson did with old films.



Naw, that'll never happen. All I want to do is to digitise some video tapes and do a bit of splicing.

I already have a suitable tape machine with line TBC correction circuitry and an external time base correction device that works on the frame level. My current laptop is torturously slow for even fairly basic filters. Deshaking this 12 second long clip took about four minutes



and then the process left me with an avi file almost one gigabyte in size. I don't remember how long it took me to squeeze it into an mp4 container, but the 2012 vintage Intel i3-3110m CPU ticking over at 2.40ghz obviously doesn't cut the mustard. The trick, I suppose, is to get the most powerful CPU and as much RAM as possible I can lay my hands on without blowing (much) more than AU$1500 for the entire rig.

Now that I think of it, I might get a better bang for my bucks if I bought another desktop. I'd save on the cost of monitors to start with.

Scot Dutchy wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

laklak wrote:Who the fuck has almost 2Gs for a fucking cell phone?

I do but it is for me just a phone. I dont do social media. I have public transport timetables and a walking app.

You don’t do social media? Since when?

Never have.

No kidding?

I'm With Stupid wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:I use a MSI machine for the last year and a half. Performance is great but they do have keyboard problems. Certain sections stop working. I have trouble with 'x' and 'z' keys. I never paid the full price anyway.

Yeah I had one and it had a keyboard issue. Which was annoying because the reviews claimed the keyboard as one of the best features of the computer. I just figured it was mine. They use Steel Series, which are supposed to be a decent brand.

I was really surprised. Dont try and take a key top off. I did and buggered a key. Google MSI keyboards problems. Plenty of them. I never use Steel though; all those damn colours. For the rest a great machine. Every game I have played has always been at max parameters. They are on the side of exotic which makes their prices negotiable. I got mine for half price and the shop seemed glad to get rid of it. It attracted at lot of viewers. So dont buy it on-line. I dont consider it a mobile laptop. It weighs 6 kgs.

My model is the 4172S Dominator Pro 6.

felltoearth wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

felltoearth wrote:

Scot Dutchy wrote:

I do but it is for me just a phone. I dont do social media. I have public transport timetables and a walking app.

You don’t do social media? Since when?

Never have.

No kidding?

No honestly. Never had an account anywhere. Looked at FB when it first appeared but was not impressed. This forum is the closest I get. My wife has a FB account because of her various social clubs. I hate it when you are forced to join a FB group. I just refuse.

My phone has no Google account. It works fine without one.