They're also cheaper from a price:performance standpoint.

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

April 23 2015 23:44 GMT

#10682

if that's all you need to do you dont even need a laptop, just get a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard

jrb701160

1 Post

April 23 2015 23:45 GMT

#10683

thanks

Karis Vas Ryaar

United States4396 Posts

April 24 2015 23:31 GMT

#10684

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?

pheer

5398 Posts

April 24 2015 23:41 GMT

#10685

huh? any reason you can't just use VLC?

Karis Vas Ryaar

United States4396 Posts

April 24 2015 23:43 GMT

#10686

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

April 25 2015 00:06 GMT

#10687

If it's a Windows OS, Microsoft does not license the codec so you have to buy (or find) some other method of performing the decrypting and decoding of Bluray video - the method to get VLC to work can be annoying or hit and miss.

(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

April 25 2015 00:38 GMT

#10688

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?

Craton

United States17287 Posts

April 25 2015 01:42 GMT

#10689

I seem to recall using media player classic to play a bluray disc.

Djzapz

Canada10681 Posts

April 26 2015 21:54 GMT

#10690

Alright so I have this fairly old computer that I want to make usable as an office PC that I'll use. Unfortunately it's very slow even for basic tasks and I want to make sure that I'm correct in thinking that adding ram would make it better. It hangs a lot, browsers take a while to open up. While I may feel like this because I'm used to SSDs, I'm pretty sure it's still not supposed to be this slow and annoying to use.

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 Kingdom20333 Posts

April 26 2015 22:21 GMT

#10691

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

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

April 26 2015 22:27 GMT

#10692

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

April 26 2015 23:10 GMT

#10693

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 Kingdom20333 Posts

April 27 2015 01:02 GMT

#10694

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

April 27 2015 03:40 GMT

#10695

On April 27 2015 10:02 Cyro wrote:

Show nested quote +

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 Kingdom20333 Posts

April 27 2015 04:29 GMT

#10696

It happens surprisingly often, even for stuff like the Nvidia GPU driver. My firefox does it too, but that might be configurable

felisconcolori

United States6168 Posts

April 27 2015 04:32 GMT

#10697

Huh. Haven't noticed it. Then again, I think I still have a paging file, and it's probably on my system SSD. I do remember, though, many problems when I turn off paging files from a long time back, so I almost never disable the paging file completely anymore.

Craton

United States17287 Posts

April 27 2015 23:05 GMT

#10698

Yeah I had that problem, too. Ultimately I ended up changing the settings to keep my HDDs awake more so I wouldn't have to deal with it. I'll just deal with the lifespan decrease.

zev318

Canada4306 Posts

April 28 2015 04:50 GMT

#10699

not sure where to put this, but its a simple question. what do you guys use for a torrent client? im still using utorrent but the ads are really starting to get annoying, they just keep adding more and more to the client.

Myrmidon

United States9452 Posts

April 28 2015 04:56 GMT

#10700

Locally, on a Windows machine, qBittorrent, though I really don't need a torrent client for much or frequently so I haven't exactly scoured the space and tested every single option. I haven't used µTorrent since they went adware on us, though technically there should be the option of using an older version of it before the ads and bloat.

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