Laptops/Ubuntu/etc. (was: Gloomy Sunday)

"Lou Ravi" <j.murphy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote
Better that than several hours opening up. Hold the on/off button for about four seconds and tell it to bugger off when it loads
the 'complaint' menu at next boot time, just select 'Load Windows Normally'. It occasionally does that for reasons known only to
Billou and friends, it's a feature. If it only happens rarely then live with it, if it happens frequently or all the time you'll
have to look for the programme that isn't shutting down when you want to turn off the PC, for that is probably the problem.

Yeah.

Mine is *very broken*. It seldom shuts down, preferring, as you allude,
to just sit there, claiming to be about to shut down, but increasing
its mendacity with each passing minute. I end up hitting the "reset"
button while the disk is inactive, and then yanking out the IEC plug.

And I'm currently having to boot and run from the old 160GB disk, because
the 500GB one won't boot at all. It reboots when it's loading mup.sys, which
Google suggests is not an uncommon problem, but there doesn't seem to be a
consistent and simple fix. It's SP3; maybe I should roll the new mup.sys
back to the previous version from 2004 or whenever it was, but haven't been
arsed to so far. That's what I get for refusing to bother running firewall
software. I knew the risks; I chose to take 'em; you know the story.
I don't wanna pay someone each year for AV software that still isn't
guaranteed to work completely anyway. I tried one of the free ones on
a previous install, and it just turned out to be a PITA.

Really, I'm treading water until I get my laptop for which I've been
working overtime to save. I've got my eyes on Dell Studio 15 or XPS 15.
Any opinions or experience about these?

I must admit, I saw some of them in Manchester Arndale Curry's (used to
be Dixons), and actually they looked a little more plasticky than I'd
expected. For me, screen resolution is a big thing: I want their 1920x1200
screen option. Also, I want decent CPU performance, since this machine will
replace this nearly-7-years-old standard PC, and I want some longevity.

I've currently got 1200 GBP in the fund, and will probably do another month
of overtime to push that to about 1500, and then I'll feel ready to buy.
I'm kinda holding out for Core i7 processors to arrive in "normal" laptops;
anyone know whether this is actually imminent? I'm aware of Dell's "performance
portable workstation" range, but TBH they look a bit clunky and not really
all that practical. I want Core i7 in a "normal" laptop; or at least,
some form of quad-core; perhaps Core 2 Quad. The current "normal" Dell
offerings only have Core 2 Duo.

Also, I'm thinking about installing Ubuntu on a USB stick, and sometimes
booting from that. I assume this is possible; is it? Does anyone here do
that?

I must admit, I was impressed with Ubuntu's/gcc's speed. I have a very short,
somewhat optimised Eratosthenes' sieve prime generator I wrote in C, and
under Ubuntu, it found (IIRC), and wrote to a file, the first 100 million
primes in about 8.5 seconds. This machine is an Athlon XP running at
1.667 GHz, so not too shabby, I thought. I want the new machine to beat that
by a significant margin. (Not that finding primes quickly is that useful
to me, but I have some background in numerical computing, so speed
doing such things turns me on to some extent.)


Martin
--
M.A.Poyser Tel.: 07967 110890
Manchester, U.K. http://www.livejournal.com/userinfo.bml?user=fleetie


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