I Got A New Computer!

HecticArt said:
Mine is still doing fine.
It did an update a while ago, and the touchscreen stopped, but I haven't gotten around to updating the driver yet.
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Was it the creators update? Eventually my computer had enough of me putting it off and updated on its own w/o prompting me to accept of deny.

If my touchscreen stopped working it would take months for me to notice. Matter of fact, as I'm typing this I made a point to check it. It still works.
 
HecticArt said:
I think it was before the creator update.

I almost never used the touch screen, so it's not a big deal.
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Hey Hectic, just wondering how much free space you have on your 1 TB hard drive? I save a ton of movies and TV shows to mine so yesterday I went through and separated the wheat from the chaff to free up a few gigs. For some reason I feel most comfortable having 120 GB or more. After my curation yesterday I'm back up to 130 GB.
 
JHDK said:
Hey Hectic, just wondering how much free space you have on your 1 TB hard drive? I save a ton of movies and TV shows to mine so yesterday I went through and separated the wheat from the chaff to free up a few gigs. For some reason I feel most comfortable having 120 GB or more. After my curation yesterday I'm back up to 130 GB.
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The real question is, how much porn do you have on your hard drive?
 
Wolf said:
The real question is, how much porn do you have on your hard drive?
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I know you were joking but here is the breakdown:

I've a total of 691.4 GB's of movies and TV shows. A modest 11.4 GB's of that is porn. No real need to have a hard drive porn collection with all the free websites.
 
I've got a little over 615 GB free.
I have a 4TB NAS that I archive everything on. (There's about 825 GB free on that.)
I've got about 80 GB of active music, & photos on my C drive that will make it to the NAS at some point.
 
Well I forgot to do my October Annual Update. :(:oops:.

So it's February computer update time! My computer is still running well. Except for one big thing that happened about 2 months ago. I run a Spybot Search and Destroy scan at least twice a week to make sure I rid my machine of all possible harmful shit.

The big thing had to do with the cooling fan. One day I tried to turn on the computer and it gave me a message saying the fan wouldn't spin. It let me boot up anyway and when I researched it I found out that even without a fan it has a fail-safe where it will shut itself down before any damage if the processor gets too hot. I was freaked out. I looked into fixing it and it's about $100 to have someone do it. At this point, 3 years in, $100 repair charge isn't really worth it. So a day or so later I had the idea to blow into the exhaust vents. One good blow did the job (as it does for all things in life) and I guess it blew loose some dust or whatever and now the fan has been working fine for the last 6 weeks!

Beside that issue, my $420 computer that is now 3+ years old, is running fine. I keep it on almost 12 hours daily and DL a ton of media and it's great! At this point I feel I got my monies worth. All the extra time it gives me now is great! Hopefully it will make it another year...we'll see. And I haul this thing around a lot. It goes from my place to my dad's place in my backpack, sitting in the car for 8 hours while I'm at work, multiple times per week.

I am very happy with my base-model, Best Buy, off-the-shelf, HP PC. See you for another update next year...or in October if I remember this time around.

Hey Hectic, hey Bylons, how are your computers holding up after 3 years of use?
 
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Dust is your enemy.
- My former IT guy


My lapper is still holding up pretty well. The touch screen doesn't respond anymore, but I never used it anyway. I think it's due to a bios update or something.

Your fan issue reminds me that I do a decent job of backing up my important files, but should do a better job of backing up the whole thing.
 
I just replaced the laptop I bought 5 years ago at the beginning of this thread.
It's another 17" HP Envy. Quad core, i7 with 32 GB of ram.
It's got a 1TB SSD and DVD burner.
I've only had it since Wednesday, so I'm still moving in.
I've got my music software and Photoshop installed, but still have a bunch of other stuff to get set up.

My old machine was starting to get me pretty nervous. It was taking forever and a day to get booted up enough to work on, the battery was only lasting about a half hour before it needed to be plugged in again, and it had fallen off of the coffee table a couple of months ago and the case cracked and the screen would separate from the body a bit. I was afraid the thing would crap out on me at any minute. I thought I'd be proactive for once.

So far, so good. It's noticeably lighter, and about an inch smaller in each direction. (Maybe a 1/4" thinner.) Snappy! It boots up crazy fast.
I'm looking forward to putting it through it's paces.
 
I know. I had to do some extra shopping to find one with the specs i wanted that had one.
I could probably be fine with an external drive, but it's nice to have one built in for the photography stuff I do. Burning a disk for the wedding couples and a few of our other clients is important. Granted, we haven't done any photography since the COVID thing started, but we should be getting back to it later this summer. We've already lost 2 of our biggest annual gigs. Hopefully we pick those up again.
 
HecticArt said:
I just replaced the laptop I bought 5 years ago at the beginning of this thread.
It's another 17" HP Envy. Quad core, i7 with 32 GB of ram.
It's got a 1TB SSD and DVD burner.
I've only had it since Wednesday, so I'm still moving in.
I've got my music software and Photoshop installed, but still have a bunch of other stuff to get set up.

My old machine was starting to get me pretty nervous. It was taking forever and a day to get booted up enough to work on, the battery was only lasting about a half hour before it needed to be plugged in again, and it had fallen off of the coffee table a couple of months ago and the case cracked and the screen would separate from the body a bit. I was afraid the thing would crap out on me at any minute. I thought I'd be proactive for once.

So far, so good. It's noticeably lighter, and about an inch smaller in each direction. (Maybe a 1/4" thinner.) Snappy! It boots up crazy fast.
I'm looking forward to putting it through it's paces.
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Probably 5 years ago, we got a convertible laptop, mainly for Mrs Scotch. It's a 13.3" Asus, core i3, 12g RAM, 500g HD. It was supposed to be for when she needed to see the full windows version of a website, and for backup of pictures, etc. But my work laptop was still available as our workhorse, because it has Office, a core i7, 16g of RAM, and a dedicated GPU. Well about a year ago, they started encrypting everything that came off my work PC. So other than using it for fast web searches, it's no longer practical to use for home stuff.

The home laptop has been freezing up more and more lately. I've been looking at replacements, and I'm interested in the HP Envy (the 13.3 or 14"), but I don't want to pay $1,000+ for a fooling-around home laptop. I suspect yours was close to $2k.
 
With shipping, it was a bit over $1,800. I couldn't bring myself to pass the $2k mark. I need something that can handle AutoCAD, Photoshop, and music production software, and has a big screen It seems that people usually replace laptops after about 3 years, so I suppose I get my value out of it.
 
Well, not to be outdone (not really), we got a new home laptop too. Like I said, it's just for the Mrs to go to websites, and keep our pictures, videos and music. Our old laptop was a 13.3", so I wanted to stick with a 13.3-14", to easily use while on a lap. I ended up with a Dell Inspiron 7000 with the 11th gen Core i5, 8gb RAM and 512gb SSD with 32g Optane. I know the RAM sounds insufficient, but it's high speed and the optane helps. The equivalent HP Envy didn't have the optane, and the higher memory models were much more expensive.

Anyway, when I took it out of the box, I was shocked at the size. I thought there was some mistake, because it's only about 2/3rds the size of our old one.
1610118953121.webp

But the display has almost no bezel, the hinge is in-line with the keyboard (not above), and they've eliminated any extra area around the keyboard. Hard to believe it's the same size display.

Oh and of course, I read a lot of helpful reviews, like this one
1610120273536.webp
 
That looks like it's got enough horsepower for the light duty you're using it for.
The lighter weight and being even a little bit smaller is nice.
Congrats on the new rig.
 
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