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Desktops v Laptops

Discussion in 'Technology Advice' started by aposhark, Mar 17, 2022.

  1. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    I went into CurrysPCWorld last week to look at desktop PC's
    There were hardly any to look at.
    Laptops were everywhere, seems like there is no demand for larger ones anymore.
  2. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    Its the general trend towards portability. I would never buy a desktop again, unless if it was a business.

    And I wouldn't buy it from CurrysPCWorldDixonsWarehouse or whatever its called. I'd rather walk 400 miles to London.
    • Funny Funny x 1
  3. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    I bought this on eBay almost brand new with nearly 2 years warranty remaining on it, it cost me £260, it's a desktop that is incredibly Tiny a 6 core processor that can run Windows 11 without any fiddling about.

    I upgraded the RAM to 32GB and the drive to a Samsung Evo 870+ 2TB Nvme SSD and this is fast much faster than my best laptop.

    I bought two others that are not quite as good for the kids and I am taking those over with me next time, I got one for £208 and another for £250 all eBay and all of them damn close to being mint condition.

    There is still a place for desktop machines, a laptop that is not plugged in runs a lot slower than it's maximum potential because they save trying to save the battery to give you long battery life, this small machine outclasses all of my laptops and for the moment I am not about to buy another laptop as almost without exception I use them as desktop computers 95% of the time.

    Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M920Q.

    [​IMG]

    These are two of my other laptops at work, Surface book to the left and an old Thinkpad W530 in the middle.
    [​IMG]
  4. Jim
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    Jim Well-Known Member Trusted Member

    I bought a acer AX3950 12 years ago back in blighty, it runs okay on windows 7 but won't run on win 10. Now the power button when I press it won't boot-up at all, just get a black screen but when i listen to the PC it runs the fan. So I have to keep trying to power up the PC after a few times it eventually boots up.
  5. Druk1
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    Druk1 Well-Known Member

    Not a techie at all, though I can strip an AK47 pretty damned quick, but I just got my modem delivered an hour ago,quite pleased :) Screenshot_20220318_110334.jpg
  6. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    Must be a special AK47 if it comes with a modem.o_O
  7. Druk1
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    Druk1 Well-Known Member

    We all have different skills Rob :) I just looked at the modem wishing 'Er indoors was here instead of London so she could set it up :rolleyes:
  8. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    I'm guessing your in Canada? The connectors on that modem look unfamiliar, more like coax terminators we use in the UK for TV aerial cable.

    For a moment, I thought you'd purchased a very small TV called Modem Wifi :eek:
  9. Druk1
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    Druk1 Well-Known Member

    Yes, Canada, but I just found on YouTube how to install that modem, problem solved :like:
  10. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    That Lenovo Thinkcentre Tiny M920Q looks good, Jim.
    I still have a Lenovo Thinkpad T460 (i5) which is very small and the backlit keyboard is useful.
    Is the Lenovo Thinkcentre's better processor and ability to add a large SSD the main benefitS?
    I don't need a lot of processing power.
    I could do with a clean install of Win 10 though, perhaps on a USB Stick.
    ,
  11. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    The whole point of a desktop is better thermals/cooling, expandability/upgradability, and the ability to host more powerful processors because they don't have the heat constraints of laptops, your T460 generation were constantly throttling the processor to keep it cool enough that it doesn't break or burn out.

    Nowadays with USB you don't really need expansion cards on the motherboard because the USB bus is so fast and you also have thunderbolt on a lot of devices now which is a ludicrously fast bus, so desktop machines have gotten smaller.

    The people who want desktop machines these days are gamers, they want the best cooling and fastest processors and huge enormous graphics cards which do need the motherboard expansion slots.

    Your T460 will run best when connected to the mains, it is upgradeable and could take an alternative SSD, if you are still on a spinning disk hard drive in the laptop switching to an SSD is the single biggest change you could make to the performance of the machine in terms of boot times and overall responsiveness.

    The T460 can also have the RAM upgraded and personally these days I don't want a machine with less than 16GB of RAM but being reasonable most people would do fine with 8GB of RAM.

    Another desktop advantage is that it is just there and all plugged in all you have to do is turn it on and you likely have a nice big monitor attached and you are not fiddling with a tiny keyboard and nasty mousepad, it's just there and comes up and works and all you stuff is on it in one place plus it's likely more responsive than your laptop.

    For me these tiny desktops are

    1) Small
    2) Efficient they use very little electricity
    3) Still expandable up to a point (new processor, new RAM, upgradeable disks
    4) Cheap second hand
    5) New 8th generation and later Intel processors allow Windows 11 to run nicely
    6) Portable, I can take these in my hand baggage to the Philippines.
    7) Connectable to large monitors

    This is the Two Terabyte SSD I put in the first one of these Tiny's that I bought for myself, this is 6 times faster than the older style SATA SSD drives, not much larger than a RAM stick.

    [​IMG]

    Top left clockwise, the SSD I removed from the latest Tiny I bought, next an old style SATA SSD I removed from one of these when I replaced it with a better one, and an 8GB DDR4 RAM stick I removed when I upgraded to 32GB
    [​IMG]

    I actually bought another Tiny the other week for a bit more money £360 again eBay, this one was an M920X and I've added another 2TB Samsung Nvme M2 SSD but this time I have 64GB of RAM in the machine, that will let me run multiple virtual servers inside this device, it also has a discrete graphics card in it as well.

    Buying a new laptop or desktop in a high street retailer like Curry's you will pay a premium for something that is not much better than your T460, do you know what kind of Hard drive is in the T460 Mike?
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  12. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    I've had a T460, bought from eBay back in 2014, i7 processor. As soon as I got it, out went the HDD and in with a new Samsung EVO SSD. Also added RAM. This is what I love about the old TP's, they were so easy to fiddle around with. Sadly, that T460 started to fail - first the CD drive, then a USB port and finally the display gave up. I had gotten 5 years use out of it, and I did use it for a lot of audio processing, so it did really well.

    Because the 460 served me well, I took the plunge and bought a brand new TP - the E14. Here are the specs:

    Processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz 2.80 GHz
    Installed RAM 16.0 GB (15.7 GB usable)
    512GB SSD.

    Cost me £900 from laptops direct, its an absolute beast. Start up time from cold 3 seconds. All apps snap open, and it has all the TP features - the funny red button, the backlit keyboard, the back to front CTRL/FN buttons. It is pricey, but worth it in the long run. I expect this laptop to last for many years.
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  13. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Was that a recent purchase Rob, it's a really good spec and that's a recent i7 processor and fast, sounds like a good machine, I buy the older ones because it basically cuts the cost.

    And sometimes the second hand ThinkPads do suffer problems as they get old, I've had failures with the ones I bought my kids, Janna's X230 failed and it was a really nice laptop, James's X230 had the screen fail and go white for several months but I got them docking stations long ago and the laptop still worked as the dock was connected to the main monitor so the computer still worked.

    On that that X230 laptop of James's, amazingly it started working again the screen decided it could talk to the processor graphics again and that was about a year ago and it is still working, but Janna's I brought back to the UK, couldn't fix it, I had to switch Janna back to the earlier spare X220 that I had bought for her mother, so Janna is running a 10 or 11 year old laptop for school but it works and it is fast as I upgraded the internals to SSD and 8GB RAM and it has done its job but I am terrified that the computer will fail this school semester before I can get back as we have no more spares in the Philippines, I have all the new machines here in the UK waiting to take out to them but essentially I want them to have these Tiny desktops but I also want them to have laptops so that I have redundancy, one machine can fail but they have spares.

    These are their new machines :) in this picture at the top in the background, at the top of my loudspeaker is another one my latest Tiny PCs, the blurry red line is the Tiny my Tiny :D that one is a brute with tons of RAM and disk :D it also plugs into the tele which acts as a second monitor, I can also use it as a media PC using Kodi to play back my DVDs that I ripped to disk 15 years ago.

    [​IMG]
    Last edited: Mar 19, 2022
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  14. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    Yes Jim, it is a 240GB SSD.
    I have the docking station also but I haven't uesd it since the last house move.
  15. Anon220806
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    Anon220806 Well-Known Member

    Horses for courses, I use both and also use my iPad equally as much. The one device I dont use in the same way is my smart phone as it’s too small. Why do I use all three? It depends on where I am and what I am doing and when. With my desktop I have an additional screen / dual screen linked to it and this gives me the ability to “multitask” / run several windows concurrently (can see each concurrently) which I typically need to do for work. I often have my ipad running alongside the desktop at the same time.

    On the trend towards portability, I agree totally and find an iPad a whole lot more portable than a laptop.

    It works well for me but it might not suit you.
    Last edited: Mar 19, 2022
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  16. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    With the docking station you effectively have a desktop is it a USB docking station or is it a proper unit that you actually physically dock the laptop in, I prefer the latter.

    You won't get much better from any desktop for normal use, but having multiple computers is always a good thing particularly when you have growing kids who start to need their own computers.
  17. walesrob
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    walesrob Administrator Staff Member

    May last year. If there was 1 con with this unit is lack of USB ports, just the two, but having got a USB hub, problem solved. Happy days.
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  18. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    I have this one, Jim
    upload_2022-3-19_17-0-46.png
    I used to use it in the last house on the desk of a IKEA loft bed
    https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/svaerta-loft-bed-frame-with-desk-top-silver-colour-s59151271/

    Attached Files:

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  19. oss
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    oss Somewhere Staff Member

    Last edited: Mar 19, 2022
  20. aposhark
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    aposhark Well-Known Member Lifetime Member

    The kids have a Lenovo desktop (which I bought from Curry's about five or six years ago) but it is really crawling now. I was curious to see other ones but I opted to get a ACER Spin 311 11.6” 2 in 1 Chromebook for my daughter - Intel® Celeron®, 64 GB eMMC for £249 which included a stylus -
    https://www.currys.co.uk/products/acer-spin-311-11.6”-2-in-1-chromebook-intel-celeron-64-gb-emmc-silver-10203802.html as she loves drawing a lot.
    I really need to reinstall Windows 10 on the Lenovo desktop again but it didn't come with a CD or DVD to be able to reinstall the O.S. etc, hence the question about doing it from a USB stick.
    Sorry if I didn't explain things better earlier.

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