+1 on the refurb - particularly if it's a manufacturer refurb. I have picked up many good deals that way from PCs and printers to monitors and Macbooks.

I always buy refurbished - Mac, or Toshiba for PC.

Papyrus!

This is absolutely not true (unless we're using "specs" to mean a few arbitrary numbers like absolute clock speed and amount of RAM - which would be a really really silly thing to do).

Happy to bet on it.

Im glad someone else enjoyed this. I felt like a weirdo thinking it was hilarious

When I searched for it, it was trending on google. So a few other people must have. My parents liked it.

As I was saying, it depends on what you are using it for. At a prior job, I was using a just-released brand-new Alieneware w/ Win7 business. It was $1500 or so, brand-new. I crashed it within 10 minutes of using it. I think that Windows does great if you are mouse-clicking all the time, but once you combine 80wpm and hot-keys, it starts to really fall to pieces.

But you are correct. When I complained about "edging" in this computer all the time, despite it's "gaming" specs, my coworkers, who built a lot of computers on their own time, had me read out the specs. For them, CPU, Memory, HD, etc, were utterly worthless metrics. Turns out a full-spec reading got a ton of LOLs. The Alienware was then christened as a $400 computer with $1000 of LED lights.

So, yeah, specs in this small sense is rather confusing. My Lenovo laptop was able to utterly destroy any of the 8g RAM / i7 desktop Dells I was unfortunate enough to use over those years, and it wasn't even close.

I just don't know that much about this stuff. My current computer was a Win7 before I swapped out the HD to SSD, and Win7 was lagging hard, though I managed to get it back to okay-ish speeds after considerable operations.

You're delusional.

What exactly do you think I do with this windows machine that I use every day? I program 10+ hours/day most days. I am not "mouse clicking all the time"

My windows machine is running my dev environment, docker, a postgres and mongo server, plus all the other stuff, chat clients and web browsers and media players and what not.

Once again, it depends on what you do. Programming does not take nearly the resources it would take to run, for example macro-enabled Excel files and PhotoShop.

This is why I'm suggesting getting something better, in case he decides to run with something new in the future.

it's amazing.

So your first theory was that windows can't handle 80wpm and keyboard shortcuts and your new theory is that it can't handle excel files and photoshop.

You don't know what you're talking about. I'm also an avid photographer. I use Lightroom and Photoshop extensively. I do photoshop edits with 20 full size RAW layers. If you're having crashes, Windows is probably not your problem.

Anecdata I started a new job and got a pretty decent spec wise laptop with lol windows 7 because enterprise and it runs like hot garbage with just normal developer stuff open. My windows 10 machine at home is great for it though.

Wat - I've worked on ginormous applications written in Excel VBA and it's nowhere near as resource-intensive as running Slack, let alone the craziness that is modern web development. VBA hasn't even really changed since the 90's - VB 6 came out in 98 and other than a minor change to add 64-bit support, VBA even in 2017 is just VB 6.

I find it dubious any non-server grade PC from 2009 could compete with any PC anyone in this forum would use for work.

I guess I have no clue what I'm talking about since I worked in ecommerce for years and know very much how to use the programs in question. Admittedly, I haven't used any of these things for the past 2 years, but I really doubt there is a significant difference today.

FYP

jfc I just looked up visual studio 2017 and it uses up 130gb of space. how is that even possible? 2015 only used up like 8gb iirc.

That seems absurdly huge?

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/p...equirements-vs

Hard disk space: up to 130 GB of available space, depending on features installed; typical installations require 20-50 GB of free space.

They are bundling a whole bunch of features or tools that used to require separate downloads/installs. If you're doing pretty much the same stuff as before, it shouldn't require that much more space. The number of different platforms/runtimes supported in VS nowadays is quite astounding:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/p...mpatibility-vs

lol I just tried to use Task Scheduler in Windows to create a regular reminder for something, you used to be able to do that but in Windows 10 they have deprecated the popup message feature, the only thing you can do with Task Scheduler now is launch programs. What a monumentally stupid thing to do, just getting rid of a very simple and widely used feature for absolutely no reason that I can see. There are guides all over the web on how to do it that are now obsolete.

It's a bit of a running theme with Microsoft, they are a business-oriented company, not a normal user-oriented one. My ex recently logged into her Hotmail account, which has been moved to outlook.com, to discover that a whole pile of her saved emails were just unceremoniously permanently deleted in the move. This is why when Google ask me to give them unfettered access to all my personal data, link my Google account to everything under the sun, etc, I cheerfully comply, but when Microsoft try to get me to create a Microsoft account and use it for stuff, I tell them to **** off. It's because customer-oriented stuff is what Google do, so I have every confidence they will not **** it up, whereas for Microsoft it's an afterthought and it shows. I typed "set a reminder" into Cortana experimentally, seeing if there's a replacement, and Cortana was like "yeah of course, I can do that... just one thing though, you gotta log in first". Nah bro, I'm good thanks.

ok, I see what it is saying. still, 20-30gb is hudge. I am only at 8gb on my 2015 update 3 and I have every option checked to installed. I needed some of the C++ stuff for installing some npm stuff on VS Code so I just checked it all off.

I like how, even when they try to help. microsoft can **** up the simplest goddam things.

At some point MS came out with a way to share clipboards across shared computers. Did they do it like synergy where you copy in one computer and paste is now available to other computers? Hell no - it was like a 10-step process, which defeats the whole point of a shared clipboard. Might as well just email it to myself.

For the longest time Excel had no auto-save feature. All I ever wanted was something like Sublime and every other IDE out there. Just save it for me every minute, or even better, when I lose focus. Nah - we'd rather do an annoying temp file that can't tell the difference between actual content change and changing tab in the view. So whenever there's a crash (which happens a lot on my mac because the battery is crapping out) - I have to go through this whole song and dance of resaving the temp file over the original file - with all the scary warnings. Just auto-save over the original you putzes.

I enjoyed the derail into how taxing 80wpm and hot keys were for a computer running Windows.

Obv master race builds their own and rolls 128 RAM.

Shockingly programming doesn't make people tech savvy, nor does it necessarily carry the need for much more than a text editor.

This would not be an acceptable default to actual advanced users in finance, insurance, etc, not to mention that it would break add-ins, VBA, etc, which can attach handlers to save event.