Crap selection of laptops

[Mercutio]

I spent the better part of the afternoon refurbishing my old T61p. I upgraded it to 8GB RAM and installed a 240GB M100 and a new battery. I'm probably cheating because of the SSD, but it was pretty funny to watch it smoke a brand new i3-based Satellite C55 in terms of startup/browser load time.

Eventually common desktop apps are going to start assuming that everyone has a 4 thread-capable CPU, but right now I have to say that it was worth the $150 I spent on the battery and SSD; it's at least on par with a brand new vomit-top.

 

[sedrosken]

Well that's just not fair at all!

I upgraded my Celeron Satellite C55 to 8GB RAM and a 240GB Kingston SSDNow 300. No new battery here, though -- I get about four hours off of my current one and a larger one won't do me much good. I was in awe of just how much snappier it is -- previously, it would be up and running and ready for input after about five minutes if I was lucky. Now it's there in less than 30 seconds. Of course, I was running KDE4, and now I'm running MATE, but it still applies -- I even had KDE on here for a short while and I can safely say that the SSD totally smokes the hard drive.

 

[timwhit]

My laptop has 32GB of RAM. Yesterday I had it completely maxed out and was using a bit of swap space. 8GB would be unusable for me.

 

[Mercutio]

My laptop has 32GB of RAM. Yesterday I had it completely maxed out and was using a bit of swap space. 8GB would be unusable for me.

That's the story of dev tools and really at that point you're talking less about a laptop and more about a portable workstation.
Whose hardware is it? HP? Lenovo? Apple?

 

[timwhit]

It's a Dell Precision.

 

[sedrosken]

Well, I'm happy that you have what you need, but I don't think I'm going to need 32GB for at least another five years. Even 8GB is more or less a luxury for me. I've never used more than half of it in normal use, which leads me to ask myself just why I spent $70 on the upgrade. I have not touched swap once (which is sad, because I have a 20GB swap partition -- overkill, I know, but it's not like I'm suffering for disk space, and I've always followed a rule similar to 2.5x RAM = how much should be dedicated to swap) since the upgrade. Well, I can't quite say that, Linux has to have swap to hibernate, and I do that often. Rarely do I actually shut down. But while I'm using it, I never dip into swap now.

 

[ddrueding]

The guideline I used to hear was 1x RAM for swap. Because of the crazy amounts of RAM on the systems I use (this one has 64GB), I usually set it to 0.5x RAM.

 

[sedrosken]

I tend to do 2.5x, just to be safe. Though I might just get rid of the partition entirely, and resize my root partition while I'm at it. I really wish I had the foresight to make this all one big partition, and I might still be able to yet, by copying the data from it and editing my fstab so that I only have one root partition and /home is just a directory in it. It'd be a lot less confusing to just have one free space statistic to keep track of. Make a swap file in that partition so I still have swap and can still hibernate, and call it a day. I'm going to go ahead and make a Debian live USB with GParted so I might be able to do that, and get back to you guys later while I'm in an ambitious mood.

 

[Chewy509]

Re: swap/pagefile size...

According to MS, (from the NT4/2K days), pagefile should be 2.5x the amount of RAM to allow for full crash dumps and hibernation. Since XP/2K3, the MS guideline was allow the OS to determine it. (but most admins will set 2-2.5x times)

In the Solaris world, swap should be 1/4 of the amount of RAM, eg 4GB RAM, 1GB swap. However in Solaris the crash dump volume (which is separate to the regular swap) should be 1/2 the amount of RAM, eg 4GB RAM, 2GB for dump volume.

In the Linux world, swap if RAM <= 2GB, then swap = RAM size, othersize swap should be 1/2 RAM size (with a min of 2GB Swap). If you're running a DB, (according to Oracle documentation of OracleDB and MySQL), the swap should be equal to RAM for upto 8GB and for more than 8GB, then 1/2 of RAM upto 64GB, and thereafter 1/4 RAM...

But the amount of swap you have should be determined by what you are running... remembering the above are merely guidelines only...

 

[Stereodude]

According to MS, (from the NT4/2K days), pagefile should be 2.5x the amount of RAM to allow for full crash dumps and hibernation. Since XP/2K3, the MS guideline was allow the OS to determine it. (but most admins will set 2-2.5x times)

2.5x on systems with 16gB. That's 40gB!!! There's no way you need 40gB of swap for any sort of desktop usage. If somehow you were actually using that much swap you need a lot more RAM.

Frankly, my ideal situation is to have enough RAM to where I don't need any swap.

 

[sedrosken]

Well, about three and a half hours and a couple of headaches later, I have a working system again!

Everything went fine, mostly. The first headache was just waiting for it to complete and my system to be able to leave the live environment. Well, I actually hit one minor snag. I didn't end up using a Debian-based distro for the job -- I just reused my Manjaro install media as it was handy and already had GParted. I had to use the root account to copy my home directory to its place in my root directory partition after the resizing completed, and I didn't realize until much, much later that this meant that I had changed the ownership of it to root.

That was the big headache -- fixing the permissions, as it wouldn't even let me log on without them being fixed! I had to log on as root. I didn't know about the recursive options to the chown command at first, so I was changing it using a file manager and wondering why it wasn't applying it to everything in the folder like it said it would. Eventually, the chown command (specifically "chown -R sedrosken:sedrosken /home/sedrosken") pulled my butt out of the fire, and everything started working again.

Now I'm using a 12GB swapfile in my root directory, under the wonderfully creative name of 'swapfile'. Hey, it works. And I can still hibernate, while still having a little leeway in the unlikely event that I ever actually use swap in normal use and want to hibernate as well. You have to have at least 1x RAM dedicated to swap in order to be able to hibernate. I learned that the hard way.

 

[Mercutio]

The guideline I used to hear was 1x RAM for swap. Because of the crazy amounts of RAM on the systems I use (this one has 64GB), I usually set it to 0.5x RAM.

I just set it to 8GB on pretty much everything. The way I see it, if the machine actually needs more swap space than that, it needs more RAM or better hardware that can support more RAM.
I have one server that occasionally uses more than the 32GB it has, but since the machine will probably be replaced before the end of this year, I probably won't make an issue of the $750 RAM upgrade it should probably have.

 

[Mercutio]

Toss up whether this belongs in the Crap Laptops or the Media Appliances thread, but I clicked this one first so...
Intel has moved in to the PC on a Stick form factor. Broadwell-based Atom CPU, 32GB internal storage, Windows 8.1 Bing Edition, 2GB RAM, uSD slot.

 

[Will Rickards]

And available as a linux version iirc.

 

[sedrosken]

Yeah, except the Linux version only has 1 GB of RAM and 8GB of storage. And it comes with Ubuntu, which is decidedly NOT light enough to run on such a small amount of RAM or even such a small amount of storage. It'd be very cramped, to say the least. Now, if it came with something like CrunchBang, Lubuntu or even Xubuntu, it'd be more feasible, but not by too much.

 

[Mercutio]

You can add storage. The guys selling the knock-off versions of the Intel stick even say they can get units with more RAM added, quoting $80 for 8GB.

 

[Clocker]

After 4 years I'm getting a new work laptop to replace my Elitebook 8540w. Based on the specs, certainly seems like (not) crap.

Processor: Intel Core i7
Memory: 32GB 1600MHz DDR3 (4x8GB)
Primary Hard Drive: 256GB SSD
Secondary Hard Drive: 1TB Hybrid drive
Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro K2100M
Display: 15.6” FHD (1920x1080) Anti-Glare
Optical Drive: None
NIC: Intel gigabit
Wireless: Intel WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0
Webcam: Integrated HD
Primary Battery: 8-cell (75Wh) / *9-cell (97Wh) - 3 year warranty
Power Supply: *180Watt /200 Watt
Ports: RJ-45, USB 3.0, USB 3.0 Charging, *eSATA, USB 2.0, headset/microphone, *54mm ExpressCard, SD card, VGA, DisplayPort,*HDMI, Thunderbolt
Systems Management: vPro
Warranty: 36-month NBD, On-site
Weight: 6.2 – 6.3 lbs.
Thickness: 35mm /*40mm

 

[timwhit]

What's the model, Clocker?

 

[Clocker]

DELL M4800

I just read a bried review on it . Luckily the weakspot of this machine is the display. For me, it will be a secondary one as I use a 24" IPS for my primary work space.

 

[Stereodude]

The power brick is probably the size and weight of the machine itself.

 

[timwhit]

I have a Dell Precision M4700, the power brick is quite heavy.