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  • Yelta
    replied
    Originally posted by foana View Post
    An SSD will certainly help. Do you know what motherboard you will be getting with this build? 16gb is quite a lot. Though without knowing what you're going to be doing with it, I would suggest 8gb. Could save a few dollars on that to put towards an SSD, which will be of far more benefit than the extra 8gb ram.
    As I said have placed the order, will stick with the WD HDD, not a money thing, just a personal decision.

    Full size ATX Motherboard (Socket 1150), I can use the extra RAM.

    As I said, I have the information I need so don't need to discuss further, thanks again to all who took the time to reply.

    Leave a comment:


  • foana
    replied
    Originally posted by Yelta View Post
    Intel i7 4770 processor, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM and 1TB WD Black HDD with 8.1 installed.
    An SSD will certainly help. Do you know what motherboard you will be getting with this build? 16gb is quite a lot. Though without knowing what you're going to be doing with it, I would suggest 8gb. Could save a few dollars on that to put towards an SSD, which will be of far more benefit than the extra 8gb ram.

    Leave a comment:


  • Journeyman
    replied
    New box, willingness to tackle a new view of how to do things... you should be fine. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts after (say) 6 months of use. Make sure to note how many GB's of 'updates' you get as well please. I just recently rebuilt a Win7 box and promptly got about 1.5GB of updates - can you spell 'New OS'?

    I started with Olivetti M24's in a work environment but my real job was running Prime Information across the State and fixing DB's to give out useful information to queries. (and teaching all the users how to do them ) I loved DOS for the fun it was, and my bestest Win was WFWG 3.11 - mainly because I could make it sing with tweaking.

    Everyone seems to have forgotten Win NT4 - replacing the slow old dog that was 3.51 it foreshadowed WinXP in a stable and secure environment. (as an aside, we had a section in the Dept requiring secure workstations - I talked the ITD Manager into getting NT4 for them and came in on Monday to find most of the IT section looking to hang me off the balcony - the Manager had decided if NT4 was good enough for THAT section, the entire Dept should have it. We promptly had over 1000 PC's to rebuild or replace - NOT HAPPY JAN!)

    My personal opinion of Win8 is MS once more dumped on its users in favour of corporate strategy to take on Android. Vista and Office 2007 were disasters for MS in spite of their cooking the figures to make it all look better. Win7 and Office 2010 rescued them but, learn from their mistakes? Not on your life. I doubt Win8 will do much to improve MS standing in the consumer market which seems hell-bent on smaller devices runing Android, and from a business PoV, as mentioned above, the learning curve will have many IT budgets screaming NO to upgrading.

    We looked at the cost for upgrading to Office 2007 when it came out (we'd already convinced Management to scrap any plans our vendors had to give us Vista) and the potential drop in productivity as well as the stress on many of our staff (Aged Care industry, lots of old-timers and many facility staff who had skills at the level of, push this button, then that one) left us with )ff2K3 until we showed 2010 to be much more friendly.

    I think Win8 is doomed to be an also-ran. MS should have brought out a corporate upgrade to Win7 (or even just not bothered, it is running fine almost everywhere) and a consumer level interface for tablets etc. Trying to change the interface for desktops is an expensive nightmare for their biggest customers.

    Leave a comment:


  • Yelta
    replied
    Originally posted by fruity View Post
    Nice machine, Yelta. If you can stretch the budget, grab an SSD too and you'll substantially improve the general feel of it! ;-)
    Thanks Fruity, would you mind PMing me with a bit more info on the SSD.

    Leave a comment:


  • fruity
    replied
    Nice machine, Yelta. If you can stretch the budget, grab an SSD too and you'll substantially improve the general feel of it! ;-)

    Leave a comment:


  • Yelta
    replied
    As I expected, this thread certainly took off, thanks for the replies.

    Have had a play with 8.1 and doubt I will have any problems coming to terms with it, everything I need is there, just a matter of taking the blinkers of and getting used to it.

    Have ordered a new box, Intel i7 4770 processor, 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM and 1TB WD Black HDD with 8.1 installed.

    As I said in my OP, was looking for comments from people who have been using 8 for a while, a couple of the people who replied fit the bill admirably, the rest, not so much.

    I know Apple people feel they are duty bound to spread the gospel (bit like those nice young men in suits who knock on your door) according to Cupertino, however I did explain I will be sticking with MS, has always worked well for me so I have no reason to change.

    Thanks again for the input, its been very entertaining.

    Leave a comment:


  • TampIt
    replied
    Originally posted by fruity View Post
    Can't say I ever liked Vista, TampIt: that genuinely was a very underdone OS, and the driver support at release was absolutely woeful. I can still here myself bitching about it. ;-) Mind you, you might recall that XP RTM was also a horrible pig of an OS: SP2 was where it really became great.

    Personally I still use a mix of platforms depending on requirements, and yeah, it still includes an ancient XP machine. I keep it offline though, and it only has one job to do. :P
    Hi fruity

    What can I say? Never buy version one of anything MS.

    Reliability: Windows took several releases until 3.11 finally (mostly) worked. Win95 was rubbish until B so MS "fixed it" by adding/embedding Internet Explorer so C sucked. Win98 a rare mix: totally unstable & insecure until second edition. Then MS "patches" screwed the speed towards the end of its life (to force people into XP?). WinXP: SP3 made it work properly (still insecure unless beaten up severely during setup), that is when I finally moved my 98 clients over. IMO Vista 7 & 8 are still way too immature in a lot of areas where XP "just works". Sad to think I was running 8 monitor systems under MS Dos 3.3 & Slackware 2 (stockbroker client) and Win7 barely manages 3 without shooting itself. Try it with two portraits (A4 word processing) with one landscape (spreadsheets & firefox) one in between them. Even the backgrounds fail (see attached)Click image for larger version

Name:	Win7 Background.jpg
Views:	1
Size:	221.8 KB
ID:	736971. Junk. Especially since my old Red Hat v5 machine ('96?) or WinXP (2001) would even allow me to use differing backgrounds & resolutions on each of 5 screens.

    Anyway, back to a decent coffee with... (too many choices today). At least I know that will work today.

    TampIt

    Leave a comment:


  • fruity
    replied
    Can't say I ever liked Vista, TampIt: that genuinely was a very underdone OS, and the driver support at release was absolutely woeful. I can still here myself bitching about it. ;-) Mind you, you might recall that XP RTM was also a horrible pig of an OS: SP2 was where it really became great.

    Personally I still use a mix of platforms depending on requirements, and yeah, it still includes an ancient XP machine. I keep it offline though, and it only has one job to do. :P

    Leave a comment:


  • TampIt
    replied
    Originally posted by fruity View Post
    And I have to disagree with just one point, amellor: 7 & 8 are both vastly more stable/reliable than XP. Plenty of stats on that one available on the web. :-)
    Hi Fruity

    You sound just like a friend of mine who uses Win8, after a lot of prior praising of both Vista(!) & Win7. My background: My company rolled out over 2000 WAN's and LAN's all over Aust from 1989 onwards, mostly my design. I also build custom servers, notebooks or specific task desktops (i.e. "Mac prices" with "IBM speed and business functionality"). FYI, in house Microsoft user functionality tests failed Win8 months ago (using their own people as guinea pigs!).

    My first computer use was what is now called chat / messenger in 1970. I currently use various 'nixes (including MacOs) and flavours of Windows.

    I have 4 industrial strength desktops (different flavours of top drawer hardware) that multiboot (Slackware & Debian Linux, FreeBSD Unix, Win XP w PAE, 7 (32 & 64 bit), 8 & 8.1). The only time they blue screen: you guessed it: Win7 and 8 both crash ("kernel panic" if MS had the guts to say so) about every three weeks or so. They are never in Win for more than one day as their memory map is shot in light use by that time. Oh, I had to move the memory back down to 16Gb because Win8 crashes even more often when using 32Gb. If I kept on that path I reckon I would have go back to a single monitor (down from three), take out one graphic card, perhaps start downgrading CPU cores (down from 8 to ???) and perhaps go back to 32 bit & 4Gb RAM as well. Programming is the best that India has to offer (put a debugger on it and be horrified: more lost memory pointers than cheap map). Perhaps they are suitable for internet use & emails, certainly not for my real work. And don't even get me started on the compatibility issues which vary from accounting spreadsheets snafu's to power station control system meltdowns. Complete junk IMO, although I admit Win7 is at least 100% more stable than Win8 (not saying much there).

    My 1999 personal workhorse has never crashed using any of the 'nixes or Win 98 & XP. It was supposed to be upgraded by one these 4 machines just over a year ago. I am now on the point of making yet another machine running ZEN Hypervisor so if Win 7 / 8 drops it guts I can just restart its shell. Option 2: Run a 'nix and use VMware, virtual box parallels or whatever as a virtual machine and quarantine the various Win's that way. For an upgraded machine that I expected to have operational in a spare month circa Dec 2012, all 4 are proving to have untenable stability and compatibility issues but only in Win7 & 8. That is why businesses are (reluctantly) moving away from XP now. If it didn't run out of support, I doubt that they would bother.

    Originally posted by Dimal View Post
    For what it's worth....

    I reckon Mac's of various incarnations are pretty decent computers. Used to own an Apple II way back when and I loved it, for what it was. Nearly bought an iMac a couple of years ago when I was trying to setup a decent DAW, just so much trouble with hardware/driver compatibility with PCs, but I managed to luck out with a combo that worked, at the last minute before decision time.

    I also love Linux boxes. Heaps of flexibility and the sky is the limit for the sorts of things that are possible. Unfortunately though, I have a plethora of dedicated and aged MS and other software, that will not run properly on anything other than a Windows box, so that is pretty well where I'm stuck. In reality, it doesn't much matter what hardware/OS combo you have, so long as it does everything you want in an efficient and effortless way. Rather than get too involved in future windows builds, I'll build a Linux box out of spares I have on hand and use that for everything I can; anything I can't, well, that stays on the current Windows box.

    Mal.
    Hi Mal

    "I also love Linux boxes": Considering they just work, it is hard not to.

    "plethora of dedicated and aged MS and other software": Me too. Especially since a lot of these client systems are CAD/CAM where replacing a few million $$$'s worth of manufacturing gear (30 year lifespan is common) to "upgrade" your OS is validly seen as a really bad joke. I am getting to the point (as you may well be) of getting back into virtual machines to gain some overall reliability. Full retirement from IS is looking more attractive by the day!



    TampIt

    Leave a comment:


  • bxp
    replied
    I've had this discussion a few times with people and based on my research the failure rates between computer makers are pretty close . Like the study I read had all the reputable brands within 5%. So it boils down to what OS, what warranty and what price you get as the components are all the same. The components quoted MTBF doesn't changed based on who's building the system.

    I agree I see a lot more broken down PCs than Mac and it has nothing to do with quality, it's to do with there being less Macs being used. As failure rates are similar the higher systems sold will have higher total figures fail. Anything else you want to tell yourself is placebo.

    Leave a comment:


  • Dragunov21
    replied
    Originally posted by fruity View Post
    for the same money you'll get as good or better quality components in PC-land.
    Of course, no-one's arguing that. All I can go off is the fact that most people I know running anything from Dells to Asuses to HPs (spit) to Acers have had something fail or start malfunctioning within about three years. The few (6, that I can recall) that own Macs haven't had anything fail in 2-6 years of ownership.

    I'd assumed that part of it might be better-engineered cooling solutions, as that's where most laptop PCs I've seen fall down.

    Not a representative sample, but that's where my opinion comes from.

    Leave a comment:


  • fruity
    replied
    Windows 8.1

    Originally posted by Dragunov21 View Post
    Without the 'tude, but otherwise, this^^

    They might be expensive to repair, but the build quality is better than anything I've seen in the consumer-PC world and I get the impression that they're significantly more reliable.
    They're mostly made with the same components, so how could they be more reliable? Sure, you average $1000 Mac is a better machine than the $299 Acer at the supermarket, but what else would you expect?

    I'm not speaking as a Mac user, I'm speaking as someone who fixes the damn things. And I'll say I've seen some seriously shoddy PC designs out there, and some very, very cheap components, but for the same money you'll get as good or better quality components in PC-land.

    But that wasn't really what I was getting at anyway: I was getting at the actual cost of repairs. I'm glad you haven't had an issues personally, but when I see a standard power supply replacement on an iMac costing 4 times the price of an equivalent PC one, you have to say "WTF?!". They do fail (particularly HDDs & PSUs), and when they do it's expensive. Often so much so Mac users tend to just go buy a new one.

    Whether that's ultimately fiscal or philosophical I don't know.

    So bias? No, not really. Just empirical evidence. I know it offends the sensibilities of Mac users though, so usually I just smile and nod when they tell me they're magically indestructible machines. ;p

    Leave a comment:


  • Dimal
    replied
    For what it's worth....

    I reckon Mac's of various incarnations are pretty decent computers. Used to own an Apple II way back when and I loved it, for what it was. Nearly bought an iMac a couple of years ago when I was trying to setup a decent DAW, just so much trouble with hardware/driver compatibility with PCs, but I managed to luck out with a combo that worked, at the last minute before decision time.

    I also love Linux boxes. Heaps of flexibility and the sky is the limit for the sorts of things that are possible. Unfortunately though, I have a plethora of dedicated and aged MS and other software, that will not run properly on anything other than a Windows box, so that is pretty well where I'm stuck. In reality, it doesn't much matter what hardware/OS combo you have, so long as it does everything you want in an efficient and effortless way. Rather than get too involved in future windows builds, I'll build a Linux box out of spares I have on hand and use that for everything I can; anything I can't, well, that stays on the current Windows box.

    Mal.

    Leave a comment:


  • Dragunov21
    replied
    Without the 'tude, but otherwise, this^^

    They might be expensive to repair, but the build quality is better than anything I've seen in the consumer-PC world and I get the impression that they're significantly more reliable.

    Leave a comment:


  • chokkidog
    replied
    Originally posted by fruity View Post
    Ah, my mistake. Harder to convey attitude online!

    And you missed two extra steps in you Mac scenario: Mac dies after 2 years, buy new Mac. ;-)

    Seriously though, from a repair/service point of view, Macs are an expensive PITA. It really prejudices me against them as a whole. :-/
    Seriously........ and you're an experienced Mac user???????

    Sorry fruity but that's a load of twaddle, I mean like, a complete load.

    I have two Macs running in the house, one is 8 years old, the other 6.
    They are used to run a business.
    I bought 3 when I first got into Macs, one went with a split up so I don't know about it but it did run a hairdressing business for 4 years.
    The other; my daughter had it for 5 years, as a Textile Designer and online business; she upgraded for a bigger screen.
    None have ever required repairs.

    Yes, I've upgraded RAM in one, nothin' unusual about that; if you want to take advantage of new OS.

    Spreading misinformation, prejudice and biased generalisations are a waste of time.
    But that's the 'Punch and Judy' ;-D

    Leave a comment:

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