Theo wrote:

FYI there was a typo in the uk.d-i-y in the newsgroup line of your post:

Thanks Theo. Fat fingers and ageing eyes. :-(

Chris
--
Chris J Dixon Nottingham UK
[email protected] @ChrisJDixon1

Plant amazing Acers.

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On 26/03/2025 20:06, Chris J Dixon wrote:

Theo wrote:

FYI there was a typo in the uk.d-i-y in the newsgroup line of your post:

Thanks Theo. Fat fingers and ageing eyes. :-(

Chris

I've had a number of Dell laptops for my job and one HP laptop. My son
has had a number of Dell laptops and he never managed to destroy any of
them as a teenager.

I'm quite happy with them and currently have an i5 13th gen running
Win11 for work but it's used just as a terminal to access the compute
farms in our data centre. I've no idea what it's like as a computer.

Before that I had a Dell 7490 laptop. i7 8th gen 16GB / 256Gb, thin
light, long battery life. It was a great workhorse and was used for lots
of software development. Ran Win10Pro just fine. It was replaced by the
i5 which I don't feel is as well made.

I so liked my 7490 that I bought one for myself from eBay refurbished.
It was £189 for a 16GB/256GB i7 8th gen. This one was from 2019 and
still the battery lasts a good 6hrs+ when browsing/emailing. It came
with Win11 Pro installed which was quickly replaced with Debian. But
there will be a Win11 licence in the BIOS if the one you buy doesn't
have it installed.

It maybe 6 years old and *ONLY* an 8th gen i7 but laptops got more power
and resources than most people need sometime around 2015. All they do
now is wait faster for the user to do something. Maybe it's not quick
enough for games. Buy a console for them!

There are plenty on eBay, just make sure you buy one without cracks etc.
in the plastic and not too much wear on the keyboard. 32GB/1TB would be
nice but if this is not to be a main machine, 16GB/256GB does me fine.
Though I do run Debian Linux not Win11.

My wife has a Lenovo T480 with issues (keyboard legend wearing off keys, intermittent battery fault)... I think I'll pick up another 7490 for her
as the prices are not much as they are perceived as "a bit old".

Of course, you mileage may vary.

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On 27/03/2025 16:38, Bernard Peek wrote:

["Followup-To:" header set to uk.d-i-y.]
On 2025-03-27, Jeff Gaines <[email protected]> wrote:

On 27/03/2025 in message <vs2ptj$3jchh$[email protected]> Lawrence
D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:02:39 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Well I have had pretty good results for MY needs with HP laptops BUT
anything to run Windows 11 seems very expensive. Like £400

Whereas a Windows ten capable refurbished is under £100

Would you entrust mission-critical business operations to obsolete,
unsupported software?

I use Windows 8.1 on all my machines that will run it because it allows me >> to download updates and install them when convenient to me. Why this
facility doesn't exit on Win 10 goodness knows.

Because the vast majority didn't install updates resulting in huge
bot-nets. As 8.1 is unsupported Microsoft no longer confirms or
acknowledge security bugs. As it shares code with 10 and 11 it probably contains many of the same vulnerabilities.

The scripts the script kiddies use target vulnerabilities not Windows
versions so any use of an old OS is risky.

I see you've been suckered by MSFT marketing bullshit :-)

Yes and no. As an IT Manager I described myself as custodian of the corporate paranoia. One of the options I had was to check that any machine connected had the right OS and had all of the patches I considered
essential. If I had been managing financial or other critical data the patches might have been added to the critical list within a few days of release.

It takes about three days for miscreants to download a patch and reverse-engineer an exploit. So exploits by skript-kiddies are most likely three days after a patch. They get progressively less likely after that.

I had the same approach. At one point we deployed fixes to test machines
for a week to check their impact on production machines. After a couple
of incidents we swapped to deploying as soon as possible as we decided
the impact of a bad patch was less than that of a security breach...

Dave

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On 27/03/2025 17:15, mm0fmf wrote:

It maybe 6 years old and *ONLY* an 8th gen i7 but laptops got more power
and resources than most people need sometime around 2015. All they do now
is wait faster for the user to do something.

... or wait with the clock running very slowly for all the cores.

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On Thu, 3/27/2025 7:43 PM, Nick Finnigan wrote:

On 27/03/2025 17:15, mm0fmf wrote:

It maybe 6 years old and *ONLY* an 8th gen i7 but laptops got more power and resources than most people need sometime around 2015. All they do now is wait faster for the user to do something.

 ... or wait with the clock running very slowly for all the cores.

Core state transitions are ultra-fast now.

Previously, the F-V curve (as depicted at the URL below),
required making small steps of voltage and frequency, and it might take
a millisecond doing it that way, to go from
the lowest P-state to the highest P-state.

But I recollect a diagram being drawn, showing a
core jumping pretty well directly from one frequency
to another. And the time scale was at the microsecond
level.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/14873/reaching-for-turbo-aligning-perception-with-amds-frequency-metrics-/7

The staff at Anandtech were laid off, and there is no one
to write articles like that any more. But I understand
the latest 14900K or the like, there is a capability
at the microcode level, to modulate the clock at the
instruction level (I know this sounds ridiculous on the
face of it). Such a thing might be proposed as
a response to the "system shock" of execution of
an AVX512 instruction. There had to be some microcode
patches, to correct errors in what was going on there.
I only mention that, to give some idea just how
small the timescales for this sort of shenanigan,
have become.

Paul

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