Replacement Computer Recommendations

[Sudanna]

After about a year of decay, my computer has finally become nonfunctional. I can find a couple places to get new ones online, but I'm not clear on the specifics of hardware and pretty sure that the prices I'm finding can be improved upon. I was hoping that some of you guys could give me some recommendations.

 

There are three main requirements that I have. First, it needs to be a laptop. Second, it needs to run Windows. And, last, it needs to be capable of running modern games and likely to run future ones. Not at full settings, necessarily, but still. I realize that the first and last involve large increases in price, but I would still hope to keep the price around $1000.

 

I appreciate any recommendations you can give me.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Cyber Monday is coming up. There have been good sales on Windows laptops since yesterday, so that may be a good place to start. That said, I have no idea what sort of quality you'd be looking at. I'm no expert in computer hardware.

[Dantius]

I advise having HP custom-build one for you- it's base costs are very cheap, and you can pick and choose where you want hardware upgrades. I'd recommend picking up a dv6t (or even dv7t if you don't mind the extra cost) Quad Edition and tossing in a GPU and processor upgrade, which they install and ship for you. Plus, you can probably get free shipping or some such with all the sales going on.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

I advise having HP custom-build one for you- it's base costs are very cheap, and you can pick and choose where you want hardware upgrades. I'd recommend picking up a dv6t (or even dv7t if you don't mind the extra cost) Quad Edition and tossing in a GPU and processor upgrade, which they install and ship for you. Plus, you can probably get free shipping or some such with all the sales going on.

Every computer I have owned has been an HP, and they're all more-or-less running. Hell, the old box from '97 still works (albeit a little slow, since, you know, '97). I would recommend them strongly, as they build durable crap.

That being said, the only HP drawback is the boatloads of crapware they send with their stuff, but all prebuilt computers have that, and it's easy enough to remove.

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: Top in a Duck Hat

That being said, the only HP drawback is the boatloads of crapware they send with their stuff, but all prebuilt computers have that, and it's easy enough to remove.

Not true, and you can probably guess which computer manufacturer does not load their computers with crap. And yes, their computers will certainly run Windows.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

Originally Posted By: Top in a Duck Hat

That being said, the only HP drawback is the boatloads of crapware they send with their stuff, but all prebuilt computers have that, and it's easy enough to remove.

Not true, and you can probably guess which computer manufacturer does not load their computers with crap. And yes, their computers will certainly run Windows.

That's not really a helpful suggestion. Given that:

Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief

[it] needs to be capable of running modern games and likely to run future ones.

and

Originally Posted By: Thin Gypsy Thief

I would still hope to keep the price around $1000.

, Mac's don't fit the bill. When you consider that the 11-inch Air is "on sale" for $900, and you'd need to sink upwards of $2k into a Mac before you started getting comparable hardware specs to a dv7t costing half that; combined with the fact that you wouldn't be able to play most modern games without partitioning/emulating, a very simple cost/benefit analysis would show that getting any Mac would be a very sub-optimal solution in this case.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Soul of Wit

Originally Posted By: Top in a Duck Hat

That being said, the only HP drawback is the boatloads of crapware they send with their stuff, but all prebuilt computers have that, and it's easy enough to remove.

Not true, and you can probably guess which computer manufacturer does not load their computers with crap.

Getting rid of all the crapware isn't necessarily tough, but it can be time-consuming, especially when there's several GB worth to uninstall. My personal record was with a Compaq that had 4GB of garbage preloaded; I spent so much time uninstalling (and in many cases, rebooting) that I probably would've been better off overwriting the hard drive with an OEM copy of the OS.

It's been my experience that the only computers that don't come preloaded with crapware are ones you build yourself.

[Trenton.]

I don't think that you can make computers with just one person, you. I mean, sure repairing computers are one thing, but making them all by yourself from scratch, thats another.

[The Mystic]

Who said I was recommending that he should build a computer from scratch? I mean, it can be done (I'm posting this from such a computer), but unless you're willing to do the research to make sure everything's mutually compatible, I wouldn't suggest it.

[keira]

Buying the individual components (memory, motherboard, processor, etc.) and then piecing them together. There's a bunch of standards that all modern computers comply with, allowing you to swap in new parts quite easily (to an extent). For example, I can take a CD drive from anything and pop it into my box since they all follow the IDE standard.

 

Now I suppose you could get really overboard and buy yourself a chip and PCB factory, but everything's so intertwined you would end up having to buy Japan to truly be building it from scratch.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Trenton-Eye

I don't think that you can make computers with just one person, you. I mean, sure repairing computers are one thing, but making them all by yourself from scratch, thats another.

From experience, sometimes it's helpful to have a friend but it's quite possible to do it by yourself.

You save quite a bit by assembling parts you choose yourself, and a little bit for doing the labor yourself instead of outsourcing it.

—Alorael, who would, in the future, steer clear of putting computers together himself. It was fun, but enough things went slightly wrong and required redoing that he wouldn't want to risk a thousand dollar investment on it in the future.

[Trenton.]

I meant everything. Imagine that there was a huge nuclear war that BLEW EVERY FRICKEN THING UP! And you had yourself and everything you needed. However nothing was assembled. You had to put chips together, the green thing on which all the dots and tube looking things, you had to assemble those. Everything is separate. You would have to do the welding. You would have to make your own monitor, cut the glass, make the buttons, make the electricity.

 

I meant it was impossible from EXTREME scratch

[A less presumptuous name.]

All things are very difficult from extreme scratch. That's why we don't do that, we use the work of thousands of years of progress. It is the natural assumption that, whenever we do something new, we are allowed to use all resources created prior. For example, when proving a theorem in math, you are allowed to use all previously proven theorems. And you don't have to recreate the numbering system from ground up. Argument ad absurdum is, well, absurd. And that's what you're doing.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Trenton-Eye

I meant everything. Imagine that there was a huge nuclear war that BLEW EVERY FRICKEN THING UP! And you had yourself and everything you needed. However nothing was assembled. You had to put chips together, the green thing on which all the dots and tube looking things, you had to assemble those. Everything is separate. You would have to do the welding. You would have to make your own monitor, cut the glass, make the buttons, make the electricity.

I meant it was impossible from EXTREME scratch

Some dude made a toaster from extreme scratch. Mine the ore, forged the metal, everything.

I don't know what he was trying to prove, other that industrialized production of consumer goods is the best thing ever.

[Dintiradan]

It's still an interesting question. While I know a decent amount about computing, I only have the vaguest idea how a transistor works. I certainly don't know how vacuum tubes work, and I'd never get Babbage's engines to work.

 

It reminds me of the fifth book in the Hitchhiker's trilogy. Arthur Dent is stuck in a primitive society. He's seen what humanity can do, and more importantly, he's seen a lot of the galaxy. He's travelled in space ships, used computers, teleported, and so on. So what's the one thing he knows how to make when he's marooned? Sandwiches.

 

In a less comedic example, take the computer game Alpha Centauri. Humanity's pretty advanced by the time they launch the mission. But for the first few decades after they land, they're still working out how to make cars and ships operate in the new environment. Getting society to the point where spacefaring can happen again takes a long time.

[Alorael at Large]

It takes a long time, which is still only a single human lifetime. And the human genome project has to be completed in space. Alpha Centauri takes an interesting approach—it's easier to become psychic than invent synthetic replacements for fossil fuels.

 

—Alorael, who agrees that you can't make a modern computer from scratch. Microchips are very, very micro and require some advanced hardware to produce. You could assemble the factory, of course, after assembling all the tools necessary for its construction, but at that point you're way over your budget.

[The Mystic]

Originally Posted By: Particle, wave, and wobbly bits

—Alorael, who agrees that you can't make a modern computer from scratch. Microchips are very, very micro and require some advanced hardware to produce.

Well, there's always the option to make the computer with all components large enough to be visible to the naked eye. Of course, there's a good chance the thing would take up about a cubic mile and/or collapse under its own weight, but it could be done.

[keira]

Or just build a mechanical computer/Babbage engine. I mean, if they could do in in the 1800's...simple computers have even been made in Dwarf Fortress using kitten-based logic gates.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

It's still an interesting question. While I know a decent amount about computing, I only have the vaguest idea how a transistor works. I certainly don't know how vacuum tubes work, and I'd never get Babbage's engines to work.

Babbage's Engine would be your best bet, though really it would only be "useful" for computing very accurate approximations of functions with Taylor series; it certainly isn't logic based like actual computers are, so its practical functionality would be limited to things like navigation and such that require extremely precise measurements.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Some dude made a toaster from extreme scratch. Mine the ore, forged the metal, everything.

were the tools he used for the mining and forging also made from scratch

[nikki.]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Some dude made a toaster from extreme scratch. Mine the ore, forged the metal, everything.

were the tools he used for the mining and forging also made from scratch

did he also make the bread and butter (and milk and cow) from scratch to take advantage of the toaster?

[Andraste]

The toaster video.

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

That's not really a helpful suggestion.

I'm pretty sure that I was commenting on the falsehood that all computers are laden with crapware, and not making a serious suggestion of a MacBook as a gaming laptop. My comment that Macs run Windows was an aside. Having a PC with both Mac OS X and Windows on it is quite nice, if irrelevant to someone seeking to pay $1,000 for a portable gaming device.

[Alorael at Large]

While Macs are better about not filling the hard disks with absolute garbage, even they are laden with plenty of software that many people in the aggregate want but that you, in particular, don't. It just also tends to be very easy to find in the Applications folder and delete as preferred.

 

—Alorael, who is fairly sure you can build a computer from scratch in Dwarf Fortress. Starting material: seven dwarves and a few tools. You can go try to make all new tools out of rocks if you want to be really hardcore, but just making the tools you use to make the computer, and not the tools used to make the tools, is probably acceptable.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Particle, wave, and wobbly bits

—Alorael, who is fairly sure you can build a computer from scratch in Dwarf Fortress. Starting material: seven dwarves and a few tools. You can go try to make all new tools out of rocks if you want to be really hardcore, but just making the tools you use to make the computer, and not the tools used to make the tools, is probably acceptable.

I believe it's possible to build a completely self-sufficient fortress with a starting embark of just one pick. Don't quote me on that though, but I'm certain it's something like that.

If you look at the various DF-satellites, there's a multitude of dwarven computers. From things as simple as counting up on a seven-segment display, all the way to full-blown calculators.

[Harehunter]

Resurrect the Nixie-tubes.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Originally Posted By: Top in a Duck Hat

Or just build a mechanical computer/Babbage engine. I mean, if they could do in in the 1800's...simple computers have even been made in Dwarf Fortress using kitten-based logic gates.

Someone made a computer (or part of one) in Minecraft. He had plans to make the circuits for additional components, such as RAM. Not sure if he ever finished.

[Harehunter]

RAM, Recursive Actuarial Matrix.

Wasn't he a friend of TRON?