I've got a desktop PC and not afraid to admit it thread
Discussion
Funk said:
As someone who works in IT for ages and sells enterprise storage (servers, SANs, NAS devices etc) I completely agree with this; there's categorically NO reason not to put SSDs in machines these days . I said earlier in this thread that SSDs are incredibly reliable and their failure is easy to predict; besides which data should NEVER only be in one place so even a failure shouldn't set you back.
Price.Capacity.
Availability.
There's three right there.
Realistically for the average punter, the difference between an SSD and HDD isn't noticeable enough to be of any concern to them. They use their computer for email, web, arsebook, et al. which is slow enough already that an SSD wont make a difference... however fitting their 300 GB of home video on a 128 GB SSD would be an issue for them.
Most people commenting on this thread are enthusiasts. As enthusiasts we tend to place more importance on things like speed than the average person. I've got 3 SSDs and one mechanical drive in my gaming boxen, the single mechanical drive has more than twice the capacity of the three SSD's put together. The requirement for large storage wont go away any time soon and SSD's aren't going to match HDD's for a long time.
There is absolutely no issue with recommending a laptop that has a 5,400 RPM drive, most users wont notice, let alone care.
droopsnoot said:
That's an interesting point - I have wondered about reliability in SSDs, especially for those of us buying down to a price. I used to work in IT, do a little bit of development work now, but have no stomach for messing around having to fix stuff left right and centre.
The mean time between failure is pretty damn high, as in years and years of constant random writes which few applications could hope to produce in the real world within a drives expected life time (and if you're running databases constantly on consumer SSD's surely you've planned for a replacement well before MTBF).SSD's have the same issue with mechanical hard drives, you get bad batches that fail early. No getting around that. However the biggest issue with SSD failure is that they tend to fail without warning, unlike mechanical drives but the failure rate is so small its hardly worth worrying about for either SSD or HDD.
captain_cynic said:
Funk said:
As someone who works in IT for ages and sells enterprise storage (servers, SANs, NAS devices etc) I completely agree with this; there's categorically NO reason not to put SSDs in machines these days . I said earlier in this thread that SSDs are incredibly reliable and their failure is easy to predict; besides which data should NEVER only be in one place so even a failure shouldn't set you back.
Price.Capacity.
Availability.
There's three right there.
Realistically for the average punter, the difference between an SSD and HDD isn't noticeable enough to be of any concern to them. They use their computer for email, web, arsebook, et al. which is slow enough already that an SSD wont make a difference... however fitting their 300 GB of home video on a 128 GB SSD would be an issue for them.
Most people commenting on this thread are enthusiasts. As enthusiasts we tend to place more importance on things like speed than the average person. I've got 3 SSDs and one mechanical drive in my gaming boxen, the single mechanical drive has more than twice the capacity of the three SSD's put together. The requirement for large storage wont go away any time soon and SSD's aren't going to match HDD's for a long time.
There is absolutely no issue with recommending a laptop that has a 5,400 RPM drive, most users wont notice, let alone care.
droopsnoot said:
That's an interesting point - I have wondered about reliability in SSDs, especially for those of us buying down to a price. I used to work in IT, do a little bit of development work now, but have no stomach for messing around having to fix stuff left right and centre.
The mean time between failure is pretty damn high, as in years and years of constant random writes which few applications could hope to produce in the real world within a drives expected life time (and if you're running databases constantly on consumer SSD's surely you've planned for a replacement well before MTBF).SSD's have the same issue with mechanical hard drives, you get bad batches that fail early. No getting around that. However the biggest issue with SSD failure is that they tend to fail without warning, unlike mechanical drives but the failure rate is so small its hardly worth worrying about for either SSD or HDD.
Price - a 500Gb Crucial MX500 SSD is about £80, roughly £20-30 dearer than a Seagate 500Gb 5400rpm disk; hardly a bank-breaker! And prices continue to plummet. Add in the fact they generate minimal heat, no noise, are shock-proof and draw less power then the reasons to use them stack up even more.
Capacity - most users typically won't need more than 500Gb on a laptop or home PC for day-to-day use - and as I've already said in this thread, your data should be backed up in at least one (ideally two) other places which is where a larger capacity, slow spinning disk is fine.
Availability - what?
From a performance perspective I could not disagree with you more - the average user categorically WILL notice the difference between a laptop with a 7200rpm HDD and an SSD. Even my mum could tell the difference in use:
That Crucial disk I mentioned just now will do sequential reads up to 560MB/s and writes up to 510Mb/s. A 5400rpm disk will do 100MB/s at best. That Crucial is good for 180TBW and that's the manufacturer's stated figure. If you work on the basis you run that laptop for 5 years before upgrading it would mean you could write 100Gb per day, every day for the whole 5 years before it reached the limit of what Crucial say it will do. Note that's just writes - read operations don't degrade the silicon, it's writes which matter with SSDs.
Even then in reality most SSDs happily run way past their rated TBW or DWPD duty cycles without issue so I'd also disagree with your comments about failure rates. Windows has also gotten better with managing SSDs, automatically turning off defrag and performing wear-levelling automatically when it identifies it's an SSD.
SSDs also typically have a AFR of tenths of one percent whereas even enterprise-grade HDDs can be 1-3%. The only difference with an SSD vs. HDD failure is that with an SSD it is usually terminal - there's no recovering the data. With a HDD the data is still sat on the platters and could (usually at huge expense) be recovered. Your comments about MTBF are also incorrect - that Crucial drive has a 5 year warranty with an MTBF of up to 1.8 million hours, and that's just a cheap consumer-grade SSD. To put things in context, a MTBF of 1,000,000 hours would equate to 3 failures a year across 1000 drives being used 8 hours a day - you'd have just 0.3% chance of having a drive write operation failure within the drive's warranty.
Enterprise-grade disks are even better - as an example I've pulled up the specs of the last HPE SSDs I supplied to a customer:
872392-B21 - HPE 1.92TB SAS 12G Read-Intensive SFF (2.5in) SC 3yr Wty Digitally Signed Firmware SSD
Lifetime writes: 3,504Tb
Endurance (DWPD): 1.0 (will handle 1.92Tb of writes per day, every day for 3 years)
Max Seq. Reads/Write Throughput: 1,070MB/s and 1,025Mb/s
Random Read (4KiB block size): 125,000 IOPS
Random Write (4KiB): 34,000 IOPS
Even vs. 10k or 15k SAS SSDs have huge value benefits in an enterprise environment:
The myth that SSDs are 'unreliable' is out-dated and just that - a myth - even when it comes to consumer SSDs. Life's too short to sit and wait for a 5400rpm disk, especially when the cost gap is only £30 on a 500Gb drive.
Edited by Funk on Wednesday 19th September 12:46
Funk said:
captain_cynic said:
Funk said:
As someone who works in IT for ages and sells enterprise storage (servers, SANs, NAS devices etc) I completely agree with this; there's categorically NO reason not to put SSDs in machines these days . I said earlier in this thread that SSDs are incredibly reliable and their failure is easy to predict; besides which data should NEVER only be in one place so even a failure shouldn't set you back.
Price.Capacity.
Availability.
There's three right there.
Realistically for the average punter, the difference between an SSD and HDD isn't noticeable enough to be of any concern to them. They use their computer for email, web, arsebook, et al. which is slow enough already that an SSD wont make a difference... however fitting their 300 GB of home video on a 128 GB SSD would be an issue for them.
Most people commenting on this thread are enthusiasts. As enthusiasts we tend to place more importance on things like speed than the average person. I've got 3 SSDs and one mechanical drive in my gaming boxen, the single mechanical drive has more than twice the capacity of the three SSD's put together. The requirement for large storage wont go away any time soon and SSD's aren't going to match HDD's for a long time.
There is absolutely no issue with recommending a laptop that has a 5,400 RPM drive, most users wont notice, let alone care.
droopsnoot said:
That's an interesting point - I have wondered about reliability in SSDs, especially for those of us buying down to a price. I used to work in IT, do a little bit of development work now, but have no stomach for messing around having to fix stuff left right and centre.
The mean time between failure is pretty damn high, as in years and years of constant random writes which few applications could hope to produce in the real world within a drives expected life time (and if you're running databases constantly on consumer SSD's surely you've planned for a replacement well before MTBF).SSD's have the same issue with mechanical hard drives, you get bad batches that fail early. No getting around that. However the biggest issue with SSD failure is that they tend to fail without warning, unlike mechanical drives but the failure rate is so small its hardly worth worrying about for either SSD or HDD.
Price, for the same price as that Cruical SSD, you can get a HDD with twice the capacity and laptop manufacturers will be buying these units in the thousands... if not hundreds of thousands, That's where the availability comes into it. That extra £30 is 10% of the price of a new laptop.
a 1TB SSD is about £180... a 4TB HDD is £90
So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
Fortunately you've hidden your post, so most people can ignore it.
captain_cynic said:
I've highlighted the most salient point I made, which you failed to debunk in your inaccurate rant.
Price, for the same price as that Cruical SSD, you can get a HDD with twice the capacity and laptop manufacturers will be buying these units in the thousands... if not hundreds of thousands, That's where the availability comes into it. That extra £30 is 10% of the price of a new laptop.
a 1TB SSD is about £180... a 4TB HDD is £90
So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
Fortunately you've hidden your post, so most people can ignore it.
It was hardly a 'rant' Price, for the same price as that Cruical SSD, you can get a HDD with twice the capacity and laptop manufacturers will be buying these units in the thousands... if not hundreds of thousands, That's where the availability comes into it. That extra £30 is 10% of the price of a new laptop.
a 1TB SSD is about £180... a 4TB HDD is £90
So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
Fortunately you've hidden your post, so most people can ignore it.
.Users DO notice. The difference between a boot time to usable desktop of 10 seconds vs. 60+ seconds is enormous. Ditto opening apps, updates installing, suspending/resuming etc. Users are also used to phones and tablets with solid-state storage which respond instantly.
My point about capacity was that for the vast majority of users - especially those on laptops - they don't typically need Tb+ capacities and the other advantages besides speed are huge (eg. your battery will last longer an SSD can mean an extra 30 mins of run time over a hard drive, it runs cooler and a drop won't typically risk trashing the data on the disk). I'm also still not seeing where your concerns about drive 'availability' come from either.
Spinning disk still has its place for high capacity & backup purposes but in pretty much every other use scenario, SSD wins out.
captain_cynic said:
Fortunately you've hidden your post, so most people can ignore it.
My post was hardly a 'rant'. I politely disagreed with you and provided evidence as to why, unlike your (incorrect) assertions that SSDs are unreliable for example.Your reply just came across as rude so I think we'll just have to agree to disagree and leave it there.
captain_cynic said:
I've highlighted the most salient point I made, which you failed to debunk in your inaccurate rant.
Sorry but I still disagree - I would wager that if you took a user with an aging laptop and replaced the HDD with an SSD, they would notice the difference. The difference in OS boot times alone are noticeable!You've still not explained your strange availability assertion...
captain_cynic said:
a 1TB SSD is about £180... a 4TB HDD is £90
So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
You have completely missed the point. In a desktop you just fit two discs, an SSD for the OS (500GB is more than enough, even a 128 will do it. Or a 250GB if you install office, browsers etc on it). Then you can buy a nice big HDD for your data.So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
My desktop boots in a few seconds, and it wakes up quicker then my monitors do.
snuffy said:
captain_cynic said:
a 1TB SSD is about £180... a 4TB HDD is £90
So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
You have completely missed the point. In a desktop you just fit two discs, an SSD for the OS (500GB is more than enough, even a 128 will do it. Or a 250GB if you install office, browsers etc on it). Then you can buy a nice big HDD for your data.So price, capacity and availability are all very good reasons to use a mechanical HDD.
My desktop boots in a few seconds, and it wakes up quicker then my monitors do.
snuffy said:
In a desktop you just fit two discs
Quite, and even bigger, slower storage at the other end of a network cable.I wouldn't go without RAM just because CPU registers are quicker, or sacrifice CPU registers because RAM is cheaper. There's usually a balance to consider even if you're skewed to one end of it.
RE SSD v HDD for "average punters".
As someone who supplies Desktop and Laptop PCs for the SME market, both Public Sector and Private, from entry level call centre monkeys to the MD of smaller PLCs I think I know a thing or two about what "average punters" want.
Processor (Intel or AMD, number of cores, speed, generation etc), RAM, shiny keyboard, 720p screen, 1080 screen 4k screen. size of laptop, size of desktop, amount of storage, number of USB ports, USB 3 ports, HDMI, Battery life - end users rarely give a monkey's.
I ask,"do you want one that starts from stone cold to actually usable in 10 seconds, or one with loads of storage that takes a few mins" and they'll say "well s
tfire, give me the quick one".
Our old 'General Purpose' PC was a current Gen i5, 4GB of RAM and 500GB HHD, because that how 90% of PCs from the channel came. Most end users didn't need a quad-core i5 desktop, but we found after 15 years (as a company) of doing this sort of thing, if you spent a bit more on the processor, you'd get 5 years out of it before Software bloat finally made it crap and for FDs that's important.
However it doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to open Task Manager and see that see that whenever you're trying to do anything with it over and above Web browsing Disc always tops out first.
When SSD became more mainstream (as in coming as standard issue on mainstream stuff) I took the decision to change our General Purpose spec to i3, 8GB RAM, SSD as it far better suited our end users needs. A few thousand "average punters" later and I know they would take an SSD every time. After a while we lowered it to 4GB RAM because most users didn't need 8GB and end users still thought they were "a hundred times better" then their old i5s.
I try to stay away from the 120GB models, I'm pretty annoyed that HP, Dell et al, fit them in so many of their machines when the cost of 240 over 120 is pretty negligible, but I guess they'll change.
Even with 120, end users are left with about 40-50GB of usable space after the OS, Office suite and other essentials. Which is fine if you're not trying to torrent Warner Brothers entire back catalogue. Few complain.
As for price, well a 512GB Gigabyte SSD is £76 on Scan, if storage is your yardstick then a decent Seagate HDD is about £35, but I don't know anyone who really cares about storage capacity but thinks 500 is enough. If performance is your yardstick well, you're stuck, because even the best SAS HDDs can't get close to what a cheap SSD will do.
As someone who supplies Desktop and Laptop PCs for the SME market, both Public Sector and Private, from entry level call centre monkeys to the MD of smaller PLCs I think I know a thing or two about what "average punters" want.
Processor (Intel or AMD, number of cores, speed, generation etc), RAM, shiny keyboard, 720p screen, 1080 screen 4k screen. size of laptop, size of desktop, amount of storage, number of USB ports, USB 3 ports, HDMI, Battery life - end users rarely give a monkey's.
I ask,"do you want one that starts from stone cold to actually usable in 10 seconds, or one with loads of storage that takes a few mins" and they'll say "well s
tfire, give me the quick one". Our old 'General Purpose' PC was a current Gen i5, 4GB of RAM and 500GB HHD, because that how 90% of PCs from the channel came. Most end users didn't need a quad-core i5 desktop, but we found after 15 years (as a company) of doing this sort of thing, if you spent a bit more on the processor, you'd get 5 years out of it before Software bloat finally made it crap and for FDs that's important.
However it doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to open Task Manager and see that see that whenever you're trying to do anything with it over and above Web browsing Disc always tops out first.
When SSD became more mainstream (as in coming as standard issue on mainstream stuff) I took the decision to change our General Purpose spec to i3, 8GB RAM, SSD as it far better suited our end users needs. A few thousand "average punters" later and I know they would take an SSD every time. After a while we lowered it to 4GB RAM because most users didn't need 8GB and end users still thought they were "a hundred times better" then their old i5s.
I try to stay away from the 120GB models, I'm pretty annoyed that HP, Dell et al, fit them in so many of their machines when the cost of 240 over 120 is pretty negligible, but I guess they'll change.
Even with 120, end users are left with about 40-50GB of usable space after the OS, Office suite and other essentials. Which is fine if you're not trying to torrent Warner Brothers entire back catalogue. Few complain.
As for price, well a 512GB Gigabyte SSD is £76 on Scan, if storage is your yardstick then a decent Seagate HDD is about £35, but I don't know anyone who really cares about storage capacity but thinks 500 is enough. If performance is your yardstick well, you're stuck, because even the best SAS HDDs can't get close to what a cheap SSD will do.
Edited by P-Jay on Thursday 20th September 14:27
"I try to stay away from the 120GB models, I'm pretty annoyed that HP, Dell et al, fit them in so many of their machines when the cost of 240 over 120 is pretty negligible, but I guess they'll change. "
I think Dell must be 'using up' their stocks of 1TB spinners, my new £300 'Dent & Scratch' i5 desktop came with a 7200 rpm 1TB mech. drive. They sell the same model with a 120GB SSD for a bit more.
I'm happy with the mech. drive as I don't need fast boots on a reprographics PC, whereas both laptops have SSD's.
Backblaze, currently with 100,000 hard drives in use, have some interesting views on the future of large-scale storage, here:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-o...
I think Dell must be 'using up' their stocks of 1TB spinners, my new £300 'Dent & Scratch' i5 desktop came with a 7200 rpm 1TB mech. drive. They sell the same model with a 120GB SSD for a bit more.
I'm happy with the mech. drive as I don't need fast boots on a reprographics PC, whereas both laptops have SSD's.
Backblaze, currently with 100,000 hard drives in use, have some interesting views on the future of large-scale storage, here:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/ssd-vs-hdd-future-o...
Edited by Slushbox on Friday 21st September 08:05
P-Jay said:
RE SSD v HDD for "average punters".
As someone who supplies Desktop and Laptop PCs for the SME market, both Public Sector and Private, from entry level call centre monkeys to the MD of smaller PLCs I think I know a thing or two about what "average punters" want.
Processor (Intel or AMD, number of cores, speed, generation etc), RAM, shiny keyboard, 720p screen, 1080 screen 4k screen. size of laptop, size of desktop, amount of storage, number of USB ports, USB 3 ports, HDMI, Battery life - end users rarely give a monkey's.
I ask,"do you want one that starts from stone cold to actually usable in 10 seconds, or one with loads of storage that takes a few mins" and they'll say "well stfire, give me the quick one".
Our old 'General Purpose' PC was a current Gen i5, 4GB of RAM and 500GB HHD, because that how 90% of PCs from the channel came. Most end users didn't need a quad-core i5 desktop, but we found after 15 years (as a company) of doing this sort of thing, if you spent a bit more on the processor, you'd get 5 years out of it before Software bloat finally made it crap and for FDs that's important.
However it doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to open Task Manager and see that see that whenever you're trying to do anything with it over and above Web browsing Disc always tops out first.
When SSD became more mainstream (as in coming as standard issue on mainstream stuff) I took the decision to change our General Purpose spec to i3, 8GB RAM, SSD as it far better suited our end users needs. A few thousand "average punters" later and I know they would take an SSD every time. After a while we lowered it to 4GB RAM because most users didn't need 8GB and end users still thought they were "a hundred times better" then their old i5s.
I try to stay away from the 120GB models, I'm pretty annoyed that HP, Dell et al, fit them in so many of their machines when the cost of 240 over 120 is pretty negligible, but I guess they'll change.
Even with 120, end users are left with about 40-50GB of usable space after the OS, Office suite and other essentials. Which is fine if you're not trying to torrent Warner Brothers entire back catalogue. Few complain.
As for price, well a 512GB Gigabyte SSD is £76 on Scan, if storage is your yardstick then a decent Seagate HDD is about £35, but I don't know anyone who really cares about storage capacity but thinks 500 is enough. If performance is your yardstick well, you're stuck, because even the best SAS HDDs can't get close to what a cheap SSD will do.
Good post, though I'd be inclined to argue the CPU stopped being the bottleneck for most general office tasks some time ago. At my last job, we used to shift loads of refurbished HP SFF desktops. At one point we were buying C2D E8400 (3.0Ghz), 4GB RAM and 80GB HD PCs for something like £70 to £80 each. We had the PFY pull the HD, stick a 120 or 240GB SSD and re-image Windows. As someone who supplies Desktop and Laptop PCs for the SME market, both Public Sector and Private, from entry level call centre monkeys to the MD of smaller PLCs I think I know a thing or two about what "average punters" want.
Processor (Intel or AMD, number of cores, speed, generation etc), RAM, shiny keyboard, 720p screen, 1080 screen 4k screen. size of laptop, size of desktop, amount of storage, number of USB ports, USB 3 ports, HDMI, Battery life - end users rarely give a monkey's.
I ask,"do you want one that starts from stone cold to actually usable in 10 seconds, or one with loads of storage that takes a few mins" and they'll say "well s
tfire, give me the quick one". Our old 'General Purpose' PC was a current Gen i5, 4GB of RAM and 500GB HHD, because that how 90% of PCs from the channel came. Most end users didn't need a quad-core i5 desktop, but we found after 15 years (as a company) of doing this sort of thing, if you spent a bit more on the processor, you'd get 5 years out of it before Software bloat finally made it crap and for FDs that's important.
However it doesn't take a Rocket Surgeon to open Task Manager and see that see that whenever you're trying to do anything with it over and above Web browsing Disc always tops out first.
When SSD became more mainstream (as in coming as standard issue on mainstream stuff) I took the decision to change our General Purpose spec to i3, 8GB RAM, SSD as it far better suited our end users needs. A few thousand "average punters" later and I know they would take an SSD every time. After a while we lowered it to 4GB RAM because most users didn't need 8GB and end users still thought they were "a hundred times better" then their old i5s.
I try to stay away from the 120GB models, I'm pretty annoyed that HP, Dell et al, fit them in so many of their machines when the cost of 240 over 120 is pretty negligible, but I guess they'll change.
Even with 120, end users are left with about 40-50GB of usable space after the OS, Office suite and other essentials. Which is fine if you're not trying to torrent Warner Brothers entire back catalogue. Few complain.
As for price, well a 512GB Gigabyte SSD is £76 on Scan, if storage is your yardstick then a decent Seagate HDD is about £35, but I don't know anyone who really cares about storage capacity but thinks 500 is enough. If performance is your yardstick well, you're stuck, because even the best SAS HDDs can't get close to what a cheap SSD will do.
Edited by P-Jay on Thursday 20th September 14:27
We'd supply a new Logitech keyboard/mouse set (under a tenner) and a 22" monitor. End users were happy as they got a PC that would boot quickly & zip through Outlook, Word, Excel and typical LoB applications. The people making the buying decisions were happy paying around £250 for a PC setup (excluding Office of course). Some of the base units were a bit scruffy being refurbished but the they generally got shoved under a desk and forgotten about. The "contact points" were new and looked smart in an office.
I upgraded my sons' computers last week. The younger one's PC (QX9650, Asus P5B Deluxe, 680 GTX) was suddenly struggling with some of the newest games. I had found my old Asus Rampage IV Extreme with an i7 3820 in a drawer, so I go it out and tested it. It wouldn't POST, so I couldn't even get into the BIOS. Fortunately, the board has lots of diagnostic LEDs and one of them told the there was a CPU error. I went onto ebay, couldn't find a replacement i7 3820, but found a Xeon E5-1620, which is compatible and very similar in specs and performance for £30. With the Xeon, the board POSTed, so I used it to replace the motherboard and processor in my elder son's PC (Asus H81-M Plus, i5 4460) and moved elder son's old motherboard and processor into younger son's PC. They were both pretty happy with the results this weekend.
To recap, we are very much wedded to desktops, with four gaming PCs at home (plus PS4 Pro, Switch and WiiU):
me - Asus Rampage V Extreme, i7 5820K (overclocked to 4.5 GHz), 32 GB DDR4, 1080 GTX
elder son - Asus Rampage IV Extreme, Xeon E5-1620, 16 GB DDR3, 980 GTX
younger son - Asus H81-M Plus, i5 4460, 8 GB DDR3, 680 GTX
daughter - Shuttel SH55J2, i5 750, 8GB DR3, 1050 GTX
To recap, we are very much wedded to desktops, with four gaming PCs at home (plus PS4 Pro, Switch and WiiU):
me - Asus Rampage V Extreme, i7 5820K (overclocked to 4.5 GHz), 32 GB DDR4, 1080 GTX
elder son - Asus Rampage IV Extreme, Xeon E5-1620, 16 GB DDR3, 980 GTX
younger son - Asus H81-M Plus, i5 4460, 8 GB DDR3, 680 GTX
daughter - Shuttel SH55J2, i5 750, 8GB DR3, 1050 GTX
snuffy said:
zippy3x said:
deleting windows files - luxury - in my day you had to do this st in config.sys
Those were the days. At work we had to fiddle around with config.sys and autoexect.bat for hours to get stuff rammed in because we used comms software that had to load in a specific area of RAM. We used QEMM a lot as well as I recall.t in config.sysDEVICE=C:\Windows\HIMEM.SYS
DOS=HIGH,UMB
DEVICE=C:\Windows\EMM386.EXE NOEMS
FILES=30
STACKS=0,0
BUFFERS=20
t that's taken me back I remeber writing a *.bat file that immediately oaded after DOS had come up and gave you a choice of what you'd like tdo
i also remember installing X-Wing and Tie fighter on my 486SX from about 15 1.44mb floppies
My first PC was a 286 with 16 colours
My first computer was an amstrad CPC6128 which used a tape drive to load games- it took an hour to load something like 512kb!
I built a new machine recently with an emphasis on photo editing -
i7-8086 (hex core 4Ghz)
32GB 3200Mhz RAM (will upgrade to 64GB)
Intel Optane 900p 280GB for OS and lightroom library/cache
Old Crucial 1TB SSD as a scratch / temp drive
2 x Seagate 10TB mirrored for storage
Nvidia Quadro P2000
Dell UP3218K 8K screen
33 megapixels, 30-colour hence the Quadro card.
My desktop image is a photo I took myself in Bryce Canyon in 2016 using a 50MP Canon 5DS, shrunk down to 7680 pixels on the long edge to fit the screen, the detail has to be seen to be believed.
Totally echo the comments above re SSD - I haven’t had a PC with OS on spinning disk for years. In fact my first SSD equipped machine is a 2006 thinkpad which my kids still use with Windows 10, it’s not only bulletproof but totally useable despite a dual core 1.4Ghz CPU and 4GB RAM. It’s incredible how CPU/memory minimum standards have barely changed in a decade.
i7-8086 (hex core 4Ghz)
32GB 3200Mhz RAM (will upgrade to 64GB)
Intel Optane 900p 280GB for OS and lightroom library/cache
Old Crucial 1TB SSD as a scratch / temp drive
2 x Seagate 10TB mirrored for storage
Nvidia Quadro P2000
Dell UP3218K 8K screen
33 megapixels, 30-colour hence the Quadro card.
My desktop image is a photo I took myself in Bryce Canyon in 2016 using a 50MP Canon 5DS, shrunk down to 7680 pixels on the long edge to fit the screen, the detail has to be seen to be believed.
Totally echo the comments above re SSD - I haven’t had a PC with OS on spinning disk for years. In fact my first SSD equipped machine is a 2006 thinkpad which my kids still use with Windows 10, it’s not only bulletproof but totally useable despite a dual core 1.4Ghz CPU and 4GB RAM. It’s incredible how CPU/memory minimum standards have barely changed in a decade.
PugwasHDJ80 said:
My first computer was an amstrad CPC6128 which used a tape drive to load games- it took an hour to load something like 512kb!
In the late 1970s, pre zx80, kit like this was on sale:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MK14
To quote from the article:
wikipedia said:
The computer is based around National Semiconductor's SC/MP CPU (INS8060) and shipped with 256 bytes of random access memory (RAM) as standard.
The 256 bytes is not a misprint.Gassing Station | Computers, Gadgets & Stuff | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff