So a bit fed up with Apple keep changing ops sys. and screwing up my mac book pro, so thought I would have a look at a cheapy Windows machine just for my music. Limited in the first instance to an HP machine.

 

1) HP website - noted all their current offerings.

2) PC world - have none of them

3) Argos - have none of them

4) John Lewis - you guessed it , have none of them.

 

To make things worse all the offerings from the above have different models so there is no chance of comparing like for like pricing.

 

Think I will just buy a red one!

 

Can any techy people out there tell me why there are so many similar spec models. it just seems insane to me.

 

 

I really do feel sorry for non techy people. It really is a minefield!

 

I'm not sure of the reasons why they have so many different models but you're right.

 

I guess becuase they will start with the same base model then:

 

Intel CPU - Celeron, Pentium, i3, i5, i7- then for each of the processor types they have a difference model of CPU and different speeds so you could potentially already have 15 models already. Same for then AMD variants.

 

Then different memory and hard drive capacities. Then models with dedicated graphics and different screen sizes.

 

So I guess it's all about choice?

 

Phil

PCs are a bit like cars, there is a basic chassis then you have the various engines and body shapes to add plus finally optional extras.

 

Best to start out with exactly what your needs are. With a laptop that's extra important since you really can't change much with them.

 

What will you use the machine for, you say "music" but can you say a bit more? I'm assuming you don't need a £300, 5Kg MP3 player.

 

What else might you use the machine for? Best to plan ahead.

 

Where will you use it? At home only? In one place or all around the house? How much space do you have?

Or on the move out and about? How long will you be away from a power point? Do you need access to the internet on the move?

 

There is a computer for every niche now, you just need to figure out what your niche is?

Edited 10 November, 201411 yr by Aspman

As above, basic chassis from HP then they are customised by each retailer. Part of it is to avoid 'price matching' and keep prices inflated!

Not to mention the fact that the big players all pack their machines with bloat and crapware to give perceived value.

 

First thing friends ask me is why their new PC is slow slow compared to their older, lower spec one.

 

I wish Tiny7 had been better supported, it was great for stripping out the OS bloat and had none of the manf. bloat or crapware.

I wish Tiny7 had been better supported, it was great for stripping out the OS bloat and had none of the manf. bloat or crapware.

That you know of. Installing random ISOs off the Internet seems like a pretty silly idea to me, for all you know you were just installing the rootkits straight out of the box so a third-party had a backdoor/keylogger right from the word go.

nLite was good, you started with a proper ISO and did your own modifications, but in fairness even that could have been inserting malicious things. And yes, I know you could say the same of any software that gets installed afterwards, but the difference is that I download my software straight from the manufacturer, not from "torrents.unsupportedsoftwarewithabsolutelynothingmalicoushonest.ru"...

Just need a bit of surfing, itunes, Handbrake and Excel.

 

Suppose best way is go to for something with at least 1tb hard drive, 4gb ram. Won't be watching video (only copying from VIDEO_TS files, hence Handbrake) or playing games, so I expect the answer is something with the minimal amount of pre loaded software (I don't want or need) and take it from there.

If you're used to using iTunes on a Mac it's a world of pain on a PC. Have you thought about buying a second hand Macbook?

Otherwise, what storage will you need for your music, do you use lossless? If you do you'll need at least 750gb for your collection and then other stuff My music takes up 600gb. Be warned if you use airplay it can be problematical from a PC, and from experience of you have a Mac infrastructure at home it won't sit happily on it.

Just need a bit of surfing, itunes, Handbrake and Excel.

 

Suppose best way is go to for something with at least 1tb hard drive, 4gb ram. Won't be watching video (only copying from VIDEO_TS files, hence Handbrake) or playing games, so I expect the answer is something with the minimal amount of pre loaded software (I don't want or need) and take it from there.

If I can help it, I'm never buying a laptop with a traditional hard drive again. SSDs are much quicker, much quieter, probably better on battery life, and much more resilient. They're more expensive, but they'll extend the useful life of a laptop like nothing else I know - I chucked an average SSD into an 8 year old Core 2 Duo laptop and it's basically as fast at average surfing/email/light office work as a machine 6 years newer.

 

If you NEED the storage for your music library/videos/pics then fair enough, but if you have any kind of cloud storage/NAS/whatever then there's a lot to be said by buying a "small" SSD for your laptop so that the browser and stuff you interact with all the time is much quicker, and accessing your media hardly suffers.

ALWAYS pick the one second from the right..............................EASY

Not to mention the fact that the big players all pack their machines with bloat and crapware to give perceived value.

 

First thing friends ask me is why their new PC is slow slow compared to their older, lower spec one.

 

I wish Tiny7 had been better supported, it was great for stripping out the OS bloat and had none of the manf. bloat or crapware.

 

Google Decrapifier - Brilliant free software to combat this.

Hmmm, you're talking up a much more powerful system for video editing. That's probably a job for a desktop with an i5 8Gb ram and a couple Tb of storage. You could set it up as a media server / workstation andthen pull music and video over WiFi to a cheap windows tablet like a link tab.

That you know of. Installing random ISOs off the Internet seems like a pretty silly idea to me, for all you know you were just installing the rootkits straight out of the box so a third-party had a backdoor/keylogger right from the word go.

nLite was good, you started with a proper ISO and did your own modifications, but in fairness even that could have been inserting malicious things. And yes, I know you could say the same of any software that gets installed afterwards, but the difference is that I download my software straight from the manufacturer, not from "torrents.unsupportedsoftwarewithabsolutelynothingmalicoushonest.ru"...

 

 

All of my torrents are certified safe by the NSA and GCHQ.

.

.

.

.(JOKE ALERT)

ALWAYS pick the one second from the right..............................EASY

 

If I can help it, I'm never buying a laptop with a traditional hard drive again. SSDs are much quicker, much quieter, probably better on battery life, and much more resilient. They're more expensive, but they'll extend the useful life of a laptop like nothing else I know - I chucked an average SSD into an 8 year old Core 2 Duo laptop and it's basically as fast at average surfing/email/light office work as a machine 6 years newer.

 

I have done the same myself; often though, you find the SSD is faster than the onboard controller, which limits the potential speed increase.

 

Still maxing out the RAM and fitting the best SSD your system will take is as far as you can go with modding most portables.

ITunes on Windows is BAD, nothing else to say really. I've tried it on a windows desktop when I was trying to find a way to control music from my mac remotely. Imporing the library it failed tor recognise half the album artwork, and it would have meant going through at least 500 albums correcting the fault so I gave up.

 

Whats the issue with Apple anyway, just because another OS has been released does not mean you have to use it. Apple still support their old operating systems, releasing security updates. Microsoft are also switching to the annual OS update model, Windows 8.1 this year and Windows 10 next year.

 

I've done my dabbling with Windows and am now happy back on OSX Yosemite.

 

I do have one Windows box (currently running Server 2012 R2) that i've had for many years, its sat in another room and runs Plex Media Server, sharing out almost 1TB of music, films and TV shows. 

I have done the same myself; often though, you find the SSD is faster than the onboard controller, which limits the potential speed increase.

 

Still maxing out the RAM and fitting the best SSD your system will take is as far as you can go with modding most portables.

 

Speed increase as in raw throughput, yes. But for everyday computing use where you're never pushing much disk throughput anyway, the drop in latency is far more important. It doesn't sound like much, but going from 12ms seek time (which I think is pretty much best case on a 5400rpm laptop drive, most seeks will be slower) to <1ms makes everything feel far more responsive. Pretty sure the old laptop I have is a SATA 1 motherboard with an average spec SATA 2 SSD drive in it. Admittedly the controller tops out at 1.5Gbps, but most SSDs still can't achieve even that kind of speed so there's still plenty of headroom there. I've never really seen the point in SATA2/3, cos there just isn't any hardware that can actually take advantage of those speeds yet and it's not like you'll have the motherboard for the next 10 years while drives catch up since it'll almost certainly have failed or become obsolete due to being socket 1155 instead of 1156 or some other "forced obsolescence" change.

A big SSD will probably be too expensive unless you've cash to burn.

 

For now better to have a moderate SSD on the computer for the OS and software and have your bulky files sitting off to one side on cheap spinning disks.

What about looking for a laptop that has a hybrid setup like my ultrabook?

 

traditional 500gb HDD and a 32GB SSD that is managed by some clever intel software. It automatically caches certain files.

 

It boots as fast as a pure SSD laptop but with the extra storage of a normal HDD.

 

Phil

I always flatten a new laptop and then do a clean install and hand pick which manufacturer software I install. Much better that way and runs a lot faster that just out of the box.

HP are not a great choice in the UK as it's not a market they seem to support in any capacity for personal consumer laptops, at least whenever I'd previously looked for models I'd seen recommended I never found them for sale here.  If looking for a cheap laptop I'd have a look at the Dell outlet, it can take a little patience but there are some good bargains on there and even the scratch/dent PC's are in very good condition (It's usually a challenge to find the cosmetic defect)

 

I agree with the post above that if a PC has a lot of useless software installed it's easy enough these days to reinstall the OS, hardware support under Win8 is generally good (in particular it supports SATA which makes it much easier than WinXP to get started with) and the licensing is much simpler as well, there's no need to match disc versions (retail, OEM, VLU etc.), the serial key is part of the bios (automatically detected by the installer) and there's no need for OEM certificates.

 

John