This would be damn nice!!!
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/technology-of-the-year-usb-1322314935631926.html
USB C? Wow, Apple goes and eliminates all ports on their laptop except for one USB C port and suddenly it's product of the year?
My son's got it on his phone. What I don't like about it is that all USB-C cables aren't the same. Some are rated for power and some are not. You have to be pretty careful about what you buy in that sense. However I like anything that makes a solid connection and can't be inserted upside down. Like Lightning connectors, which I still like a little more just because you don't hace that fiddly center tab.
This is off subject but....
Charger....
I bought a HP Envy m6 laptop about a year or so ago. Had no problems for 6 months and then it started. The hard drive temp or whatever, is running at 200 to 220 degrees. Had thermal grease put on and it fixed it for about 2 months and now it's almost on fire again. Same temp. I think it's a matter of time before it takes a shit.
I need a laptop for doing basic, very basic, work. Do you have any suggestion on a really good, but basic laptop? I can't use apple, it has to be a Windows machine. Thanks in advance.
It's so freaking hard to pick a laptop. I will tell you that my laptop, my son's laptop, and my mom's and wife's laptop all have SSD drives. I doubt those can even overheat as they have no moving parts. My son is a huge geek (go figure) and he makes his own money and bought his own laptop. His is a Dell XPS 13 which is basically a Windows Macbook Air. It's super thin, super light, has a screen that has no bezel, and it's expensive. Mine is a work laptop that I would not recommend so I won't even mention what it is. On the budget side, both my mom and wife have the Asus Zenbook UX305. It's thin and light and has an SSD. It doesn't have a touchscreen which is about the only modern convenience it's missing. Neither of them have had a complaint. As far as the buying experience goes, also on my son's recommendation, we bought our last three laptops at the Microsoft store. Not only do they have good prices (the Asus is $100 less there at $599) but they also have great service and their computers are completely free of 3rd-party junk.
Stick to systems using the new Intel chips which are very low-power (and thus cooler), and stick to an SSD drive (no moving parts) and you will be pretty safe.
This is the Asus:
http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/ASUS-ZenBook-UX305FA-USM1-Signature-Edition-Laptop/productID.320751400
Have you had any issues with any of your SSD drives Charger? I've got one in my desktop as an alternate boot drive and my roommate (who was a computer tech) says their biggest fault is that when they die they just die (unlike platter style which will often give you a chance to make one last backup first). His suggestion is to have two identical SSD's raided (RAID 1) so that, if one dies, you don't lose any data. What do you think?
Yeah, SSD drives are completely shot when they die, unlike mechanical drives which fail slowly. Which does not mean that a mechanical drive failure is any better... it sucks when part of the slow failure is losing a critical file, or corrupting a critical file. I've also had the issue where when I tried to take a backup of the failing drive, parts of the drive were audibly grinding away, and the backup failed after many hours... so it's not always possible to save, though you can almost always recover a lot of data from a mechanical drive if you pay a couple hundred bucks to a recovery house.
Making an SSD drive fail usually requires something drastic though. For example, a power surge on a system with no surge protector (this is the only way I've ever killed an SSD). Dropping, freezing or heating an SSD will not break it.
Also, the mean time before failure for an SSD is orders of magnitude larger than a platter hard disk- my OCZ 480GB system disk has a MTBF of 2,000,000 hours, or 228 years. Some of the higher end mechanical hard drives have good numbers too, but most consumer mechanical drives do not even list a MTBF, and none of the 2.5" (laptop-sized) hard drives will list one... simply dropping the laptop can destroy the drive.
My recommendations:
For a laptop, use an SSD, period.
For a desktop, use an SSD for your Windows system drive, and don't put everything on that drive. For example I put all my audio apps, games, and data on other drives.
(Desktop) Store ALL your data on a different drive. Hard drives are cheap, buy a couple of 2-4TB drives and use them for your data.
Both- back up often, and by this I mean have a system that backs up your entire system disk image and your data disks regularly and doesn't require you to remember to do it.
Make manual backups often.
I have a system (crashplan) that backs up data to the cloud, and I also have an external 4 TB drive that I connect to my computer every week or so, and I back up all the disks manually. Crashplan also lets you back up one computer to another computer for free, even over the network.
Cool. Good info!
My plan, once I can afford it again, is to have two SSD's (250 GB) for the OS and RAID 1 them, then have two 6 TB hard drives for everything else. I started using Amazon Cloud in September and, with third-party tools to make it look like a normal drive (StableBit is one) keep disaster copies. I also have external drives that I use for in-house backups.
I still haven't fully recovered from having my main 3 TB drive that failed by slowing corrupting a LOT of files. It was slow enough that, before I noticed any issue, corrupted files had made it to all of my backups...
Yeah, that's the danger of a failing mechanical drive, corruption. As the memory cells in an SSD wear out it will simply stop using them (the SSD has some built-in intelligence) but unless the drive fails completely, you should not get corrupt data.
Thanks Charger. Sounds like good advice!