Be Excellent To Each Other

Hi folks.

My laptop went kaput just before Christmas, and I'm going to need a new one.

The problem is, I'm so used to Macs now that I'm not sure what I'm looking for by way of a 'normal' laptop, as the broken one will be too spendy to replace.

I'm not really sure about Windows 8 - can you still install program's as normal or is it all app based?

The thing is, it will need to be able to run photoshop. I won't push it stupidly hard, but I know that can be a bit of a memory drain.

It's mostly for my website, making graphics, editing pictures, writing patterns and for Russell to update his site, as well as general web surfing stuff.

I think perhaps £400-600 if that would be enough to buy something that will cope with what we want, but frankly need some guidance on what to look for. Not sure if there might be any savings to be had in sales (do laptops ever appear in Jan sales?)

Any help appreciated

Does it need to be a laptop? If you have a screen, you may want a Mac Mini

Ys,. (Windows RT you can't, so avoid that)

Depending on how you use things, you may find it's either quite a bit nicer to use than previous windows (Me), or very much not.

For basic use such as that Mimi literally anything will do you really, even the new wave of sub-£300 laptops.

I'd link a couple but the Ebuyer website appears to be down at the moment.

£300 gets you this, for example, although whether or not you want a laptop in dashing pink is another matter.

http://www.dabs.com/products/samsung-np ... html?src=3

Do be aware that any Windows laptop you buy will come pre-loaded with the most awful array of shite in the world, so set aside a couple of hours to ruthlessly uninstall a load of crap before you use the laptop in anger. *

But you really don't need to spend £500 or more on a laptop for 'normal' stuff these days.

* Would Windows 8 avoid this I wonder? RT might, but the normal version won't I guess.

Yeah, I really want a laptop. We do have a desktop, but I want to be able to use it sitting on the sofa whilst Russell is on the Xbox, or whilst the TV is on, etc.

The thing is, I have had basic laptops, and they run Photoshop like it is frozen treacle. I'm used to a MacBook Pro, and though I know they are nippy I don't want one that crawls along when making graphics or processing mg photographs. Bright pink is fine, though

I would like something that ran quite smoothly, so would rather spend a little more to get something that wasn't cumbersome or too slow, if that makes sense.

I've heard this. I've only recently returned to Windows (7) at work, but I hear that 8 is a bit of a leap.

What resolution screen are you after then Mimi?

If you're wanting to use Photoshop in anger I guess you'll want something beyond the standard 1366x768 panel? Or is that not an issue?

Do you know what res your old Macbook ran at?

Used Macbook off Fleabay?

Why drive a Skoda when you have been driving a Ferrari?

Decent spec pc, copy of snow leopard, BAM! Hackintosh!

Yeah 'cause a second hand out-of-date computer with no warranty off eBay is a far better way to spend £500 than a brand new laptop from a reputable retailer.

The hardware and software 'gulf' between the two platforms is far more a perception thing than reality these days.

[looks at Retina display on Macbook this is being typed on, looks at display on Mrs Chinny's Windows laptop]

Yep, entirely perception.

So Mimi's going to get a second hand Macbook off eBay with a retina screen for £500 then, is she?

I also note that the cheapest MacBook with a retina display, according to Apple's site, costs £1449.

what about this one?
http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/hp-pavi ... re-1420320

It's a pretty low-end CPU and it has the standard 1366x768 panel.

Mimi has indicated she wanted a bit more grunt than that, and we're still waiting to hear back if a screen with a pretty low resolution like that will be adequate.

Certainly a nice i5 based laptop is within her budget, although it might be a struggle to get a high res screen in there on budget.

I can't recall the resolution precisely, but certainly it wasn't too shoddy for what I used it for. I'd like a nice display, but I wouldn't say it was my primary concern.

What I don't want is to be sitting there listening to it grinding away to make small changes to pictures, slowly applying each change, simply because I use a lot of images and those 5 second pauses waiting for things to happen quickly add up to hours

This is a pretty impressive beast in terms of bangs for bucks.

http://www.ebuyer.com/414824-hp-pavilio ... 4v72ea-abu

Powerful CPU, plenty of RAM (which is where Photoshop will hammer it) and a decent sized hard disk.

It's also got a 1600x900 resolution display, which is a very useful bump up from the standard 1366x768 panel.

Windows 8 64-bit, so that might colour your opinion of it.

Also do note that's a physically large laptop with a 17.3 inch screen, so not sure how you feel about that?

We won't be carting it about, so not the biggest consideration, but obviously something to bear in mind.

I shall have a look into that one and have a bit of a read up.

I suppose my considerations, in order if preference to me, are:

RAM and processing speed

Decent display (colour and sharpness more important than physical size)

Harddrive storage, physical looks and sound all lesser importance but will still count.

We bought a Sony Vaio yesterday with Windows 8 on it.

It's fucking shit. Mimi wants it mostly for graphics editing, but there's a known unfixed bug with Photoshop on Windows 8 that makes the canvas background flicker all the time.

On my side, the interface and trackpad are hateful. Chrome keeps putting itself into fullscreen for some reason, we gave to google even the simplest tasks, and shutting down now means hover in corner, click settings(!), click Power, click shutdown. That took a googling.

Windows 8 can sit under my hairy balls. The preview videos on YouTube made it look pretty good, but on using it it's a steamy pile of do not bother.

It will be going back to the shop tomorrow and we'll get a MacBook on credit instead.

Although my eventual solution was to install this rather than buy some Apple nonsense.

The photoshop bug makes it unusable though. Plus the resolution isn't as good.

I'm not a massive fan of Apple, but I can at least fuddle my way around things I don't know where they are. Not in Windows 8. I reckon on a touchscreen device with only the metro interface on would be ace. Love the live tiles idea and that you can customise them, and the swipy swipy stuff, but as a machine to actually design or develop on it's no good.

Which is a shame as it cost a lot less than a mac will

Or pressing the power button. I am the only one who uses the power button to turn off computers aren't I?

Damn sight more convenient than dicking around in menus ever was.

No, that put it into screen off mode with all the fans still whirring. That's another thing I forgot. Pc fans are whirry.

Yeah, I got a new Windows 8 PC yesterday too, and it took me a while to work out how to turn it off!

Every Vaio I've laid my hands on has been shit. It's like Sony want to make a Macbook but just end up with a clunky piece of plastic 3 times the size and a quarter as useful. Mr Chinny In-Law got through two Vaio's in the same time I had a single Macbook Pro.

If I was Sony or Dell I'd go round Rick Dickinson's house and start posting £50 notes through the letterbox until he agrees to design a Macbook beating laptop for them. If you go through his Flickr you jaw is often on the floor at the designs he was coming up with in the early 80's for Sinclair, many of them 20 years ahead of their time.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9574086@N02/sets/72157600856913881/

In all fairness Mr Russell I did push the resolution issue pretty hard with Mimi and basically didn't get an answer other than 'it needs to be alright I'm not really sure what the resolution on the Mac was'.

If you've got a Vaio with a 'standard' 1366x768 panel then yes, that will be inadequate for graphics work, which is why I kept asking about it.

Windows 8 was always potentially going to be a problem, but there are still plenty of laptops running Windows 7 in the supply chain.

I think buying a Macbook on credit is an over-reaction when you could spend £600 on an entirely capable Windows 7 laptop instead.

Depends on the user, surely? And the user in this case has been perfectly happy with Macs throughout, making a new one a sensible decision, if far from the cheapest option. (Still, having just installed Photoshop CS6 on my Mac, Adobe's stuff's all gone even more… Java-like, hasn't it? All weird proprietary interface components that are oddly sluggish compared to fully native apps. A pity.)

'Far from the cheapest option'?

You're not kidding there. Looking at the prices on both the UK Apple Store and at retailers such as Ebuyer, the starting price for a 15 inch Macbook Pro is around £1500. Chuck a retina display into the mix and you're up to £1800.

Yes the 13-inchers are cheaper but I can't imagine anyone wanting to do graphics work on a 13 inch screen. (And even there, the starting price is £1000.)

Those are horrendous amounts of money to spend, crazily so IMO, when you can get a better specified Windows 7 laptop for around the £500-£600 mark.

Sure the Macs look nice, but an extra £1000 worth of nice?

In fact, looking at the Apple spec tool on their own site, the 15 inch Macbooks only come with a 1440x900 panel as standard, it's an extra £80 to go up to 1680x1050 and an extra £300 to get the retina display.

Curious - I've put win 8 on 3 or so machines and the all default to the power button turning it off. It's possible sony changed te default, but it's easy enough to change it back to the sensible option.

And Mrs AE's Vaio is still going strong after over three years of pretty intense use, including some harsh treatment from AE Jnr. It's also got a gorgeous 1080p screen on it and thanks to a discrete GPU manages a fair crack at running games without getting all hot and bothered and noisy in the process.

Sure it doesn't look as nice as a MacBook but at the time I bought it a similarly specced MacBook would have cost around £2000, the Vaio cost just over £1000.

Everyone's got a story of something that broke but it's extrapolating that to them all being shit that gets on my goat.

Athough apparently easily fixed, and the result of win 8 being fairly fresh out the door.

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/ima ... ckers.html ?

Or get latest drivers from amd/nvidia.

We have two ownerless Vaios at work, both of them unreliable and generally badly regarded.

I always think 'poor man's Mac' - maybe that'll sound a bit snobbish but for me, good value for money is Dell, tough and long lasting is Toshiba, and if you want a Mac, get a Mac.

Or spend £1500+ on a MacBook

Well I chose Mrs AE's Vaio based on the spec.

I wanted a 1080p screen and a capable discrete GPU, along with a fairly grunty CPU and a good wedge of RAM, as at the time we were playing WoW together.

The Vaio ticked all the boxes and did it at pretty much the best price as well.

'Poor man's Mac' maybe, but considering the equivalent MacBook was running to over £2000 (I did look into a MacBook as of course WoW is available on Mac as well), spending £1000 less on basically the same hard hardware seemed like a bit of a no-brainer.

I did a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate when we got it, and it's been running fine on that installation for over three years.

Well that sounds fair enough. My negative impression is based on them being typically more expensive than other PCs though, as in paying for supposed higher quality and better design represented by the brand, neither of which seems to be true (IME).

They like MacBooks... let them spend 1500quid on one and be happy with it

Except the starting point of this thread was that a replacement MacBook would be too expensive, (which presumably it still is, as they're buying one on credit), hence asking for advice on a suitable Windows laptop instead.

Both laptops I bought recently with Win8 pre-installed had the power button defaulting to either Sleep or Hibernate.

False economy if you actually wanted the other thing though, isn't it. Anyway, as often mentioned, the cost of Mac ownership is often cushioned by the second hand value remaining high. Get this, my old iMac, which only cost £659 in the refurb store in 2006, is still worth over £200 on ebay today!

I'm not entirely sure they did though.

The thread was started on the basis that a replacement MacBook would be too expensive, and thus Windows based advice was sought.

Unfortunately by all accounts the offered advice was completely ignored, the folks went out and bought entirely the wrong thing and got cross with it, and have thus ended up wedging out £1500 or more on a MacBook, when all they really needed was a nicely specced Windows 7 laptop with a decent screen in it.



Well, not if the old one breaks, as has happened in this case.

Hackintosh!

Err yes, cheaped out and got a PC?



Looking on ebay for "macbook pro broken" suggests otherwise. They can be worth repairing.

I know a company that issue Macbook Pro's with Windows installed as an option to staff*. I asked them why and they said their IT department worked out that the cost difference was minimal as the Macbooks will last longer in the field (accidents and mistreatment aside).

The only issue is that they refuse to support them if you boot it to OSX. You are only supposed to use Windows.


* You have to be above a certain pay grade. Choice is a Dell of some description or a Macbook with Windows 7.

My Macbook Air running Windows is the best laptop I've ever owned, but I certainly paid a premium for it.

Mm. I've got really good money for a lot of old Apple kit, but on selling two-year-old PC laptops, the same wasn't remotely true. Mind you (assuming the buyer on eBay pays up), my current favourite is the £119 I just got for the second-gen Apple TV that cost me about 80 quid on Amazon a couple of years ago!

My 18 month old mint Acer went for approx 2/3'rds of its price new when I sold it. And it seemed to be the going rate as well.

When I finally get around to selling my 2008 Macbook Pro (upgraded and in excellent nick) I wonder what it will get?

Probably a quite reasonable price given it's five years old and the battery will be beginning to feel a bit tired?

I'm looking to get Mrs Meaty a 2009 Macbook, and can easily find them within the budget we've set of about $500.

Battery is a little tired but its on its third. I also have a new spare ready to go in.

It had a new logic board about 18 months ago and prior to that it was killing a battery per year.

There's definitely a sweet spot for MacBooks, I'm swithering between the refurb store and an 08/09 one myself.
Old ones have the bonus of FireWire.