| Forum Index > Tech Support |
|
Craton
United States17253 Posts
Really the reason to buy a laptop is if the mobility is important to you; desktops win in almost every other category. Laptops also have power outage protection (i.e. a power outage won't turn off the machine). A desktop can of course get a UPS, though. Laptops usually also come with wifi and bluetooth natively, whereas desktops usually don't (but both are easily added through PCI-e or USB). | ||
|
Kupon3ss
時の回廊10066 Posts
| ||
|
jrb701160
1 Post
| ||
|
Karis Vas Ryaar
United States4396 Posts
so apparently when you use the software it has a giant freaking watermark yay. guess I'm spending 35 dollars. an actual simple question. what's the best way to calibrate my monitors color and brightness settings/ is it just personal preference or what? | ||
pheer
5391 Posts
| ||
|
Karis Vas Ryaar
United States4396 Posts
On April 25 2015 08:41 pheer wrote: huh? any reason you can't just use VLC? apparently you have to do a bunch of stuff to get VLC to play blu rays I guess I could look into it. | ||
|
felisconcolori
United States6168 Posts
(Which is why I instead rip my movies to my hard drive from my bluray discs, and then play the video. Also keeps me from having to keep swapping discs around.) | ||
|
Karis Vas Ryaar
United States4396 Posts
| ||
|
Craton
United States17253 Posts
| ||
|
Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
Specs: CPU: Core 2 Duo E5700 @ 3ghz Mobo: P5G41T-M LX Ram: Only 2gb! Hard drive: ST3500413AS, a 500gb Seagate drive, @ 7200rpm OS: Win8.1 As far as I can tell, adding 2gb of ram for a total of 4gb might help. Do you guys think it would make a difference? Or is the hardware just too old and the lack of ram is just one problem out of many? | ||
|
Cyro
United Kingdom20312 Posts
You can check RAM utilization easily to see if you're near maxing or maxed out. I don't know how well SSD's play with those older chipsets, though. At best you'd only lose some sequential speed from sata 2 (which wouldn't really affect os/browser responsiveness) but when i set up my first ssd on x58, it was way more annoying/tricky than doing it with z87 and x58 was a gen ahead of those chipsets On April 25 2015 09:38 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote: I'm also looking into getting another hard drive since I'm starting to use up space with music and stuff. is there a difference performance wise between SATA and portable HDs? Yea, but the gap probably depends on which interface you use and the particular drive | ||
|
OsaX Nymloth
Poland3244 Posts
On April 25 2015 08:31 Karis Vas Ryaar wrote: not sure if this is simple but here goes. I bought a blu ray player/port/drive/whatever the technical term is for my computer a while ago but its powerdvd10 and in order to play anything recent I need to upgrade to powerdvd14. Is it worth spending th 35 dollars on the upgrade? or am I better off using a free software program, which apparently are a thing now. so apparently when you use the software it has a giant freaking watermark yay. guess I'm spending 35 dollars. an actual simple question. what's the best way to calibrate my monitors color and brightness settings/ is it just personal preference or what? I'm a bit late to this, but hey... I believe PotPlayer have no trouble playing Blu-Ray. I'm using it for years, absolutely stellar software, nothing comes close. | ||
|
Djzapz
Canada10681 Posts
On April 27 2015 07:21 Cyro wrote: One of those core 2 duo's should be fine for basic tasks like web browsing. Is the OS a fresh install? HDD defragmented? You can check RAM utilization easily to see if you're near maxing or maxed out. I don't know how well SSD's play with those older chipsets, though. At best you'd only lose some sequential speed from sata 2 (which wouldn't really affect os/browser responsiveness) but when i set up my first ssd on x58, it was way more annoying/tricky than doing it with z87 and x58 was a gen ahead of those chipsets OS is a fresh install, HDD hasn't needed to be defragged yet. As for RAM utilization, I haven't seen what it's at when it hangs but it idles at 60-70% when idle. Not sure what to make of it though. | ||
|
Cyro
United Kingdom20312 Posts
As for RAM utilization, I haven't seen what it's at when it hangs That's the only number that matters :D pagefile usage too i guess, you can probably see that in hwinfo. I doubt 2GB is enough to be comfortable though. Some stuff accesses my HDD that shouldn't and entire system grinds to a halt for like 5 seconds while it spins up | ||
|
felisconcolori
United States6168 Posts
On April 27 2015 10:02 Cyro wrote: That's the only number that matters :D pagefile usage too i guess, you can probably see that in hwinfo. I doubt 2GB is enough to be comfortable though. Some stuff accesses my HDD that shouldn't and entire system grinds to a halt for like 5 seconds while it spins up It can help to disable paging to the HDD, although more memory is likely a better option. (I say this because some older software and even some software that was just written poorly always, always will attempt to page to the HDD - I don't think it's very common now, but when RAM first started getting cheap it would always be a major annoyance to see multiple GB of RAM free and an error that there is not enough memory available because I set the pagefile size to 0.) I really don't think that's something that still crops often with current OS/programs, but I dunno. Just pinged my memory reading this. | ||
|
Cyro
United Kingdom20312 Posts
| ||
|
felisconcolori
United States6168 Posts
| ||
|
Craton
United States17253 Posts
| ||
|
zev318
Canada4306 Posts
| ||
|
Myrmidon
United States9452 Posts
I've heard that rTorrent is pretty lightweight and powerful, though it's limited to *nix systems (aside from dicking around with Cygwin, which is generally more trouble than it's worth). There should be some frontends for that. You may find this wiki page useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BitTorrent_clients | ||
| ||
|
|
|
EPT
