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Laptops lack cooling. Heat destroys computers. Mid or Plus size towers offer longevity and give far more options for upgrading - Go for power! 😃

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Yer the nicest func_mover I've ever met.

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Gaming laptops are generally bad, but there used to be office style laptops with dedicated GPUs that work reasonably well. I have an 11 years old HP Probook 6xxx like that with aluminium frame that's still working well, that particular line used to be really good and cheap. 

That's a thick brick from before the style of super thin "ultrabooks" though, which are even worse for cooling than laptops before that. No idea if somebody still makes laptops like that, maybe Lenovo, but those are going to be expensive.

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one can get away with passive cooling also, streacom makes some rather interresting cases which are fully passively cooled and they look rather great to. downside is that these cases are rather expensive and they usually only take mini itx micro atx format mainboards. also putting something like an RTX 3090 in there will probably blow up in your face as these cabinets simply dont have anough heat dissipation for those kind of gpu's. you will get a rather tasty looking  radiator for your flat though :P

 

https://streacom.com/products/db4-fanless-mini-itx-case/

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22 minutes ago, vozka said:

That's a thick brick from before the style of super thin "ultrabooks" though, which are even worse for cooling than laptops before that. No idea if somebody still makes laptops like that, maybe Lenovo, but those are going to be expensive.

Yes please. Thick bricks rule! Many today are not fond of them because they are heavy and so on. I remember old Siemends laptops. So cool.

Also, generally cheaper laptops have plastic cases and it's not very eco friendly and so on. We still don't know what's the long term effect of plastic getting stuck in our blood and how it maybe affects our sterility and makes us unable to have children (I hope lol). But metal or aluminum laptop cases are my favorite definitely.

"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

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There's extreme variance in laptop cooling quality (recently there have been stories about RTX 3060 laptops outperforming RTX 3070 laptops and so on), but in general I think laptops are lasting longer with better build quality than they used to. However, the move to extreme thinness fights any improvements in cooling capability and loses ports, and now soldered RAM is everywhere, hurting user value.

APUs are becoming a lot better, see Rembrandt, to the point where discrete won't make much sense if you just want 1080p resolution. And AMD is arguably sandbagging their APUs. They could make a premium, large die size APU with a lot more graphics compute units than 6/8/12, integrated High Bandwidth Memory, and/or 3D V-Cache, that would have a lot of performance while being more efficient than discrete laptop graphics. But there may not have been a clear enough market for that kind of product for them to make design a monolithic die for $100 million or whatever it is now. Apple's latest M1 Max/Ultra chips might prod them into doing that, and they might be able to adopt a chiplet approach for laptops, which Intel will do with Meteor Lake.

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hehe love those bricks as you call them, been a while since i last had one though.

my current which i use at work is also an older thingy though not exactly a brick it does sport some interresting things like

upgradeable apu (centrino core i3, can be upgraded to a core i7 centrino) and it is one of the few laptops i had that takes two internal hdd's. the gfx is shit though as it only has the intel hd 3000 so its not a gaming machine, works fine for watching netflix though :) and the case is just cheap plastic. It does have one serious flaw though it uses the conexant smart audio chip a company which has long since ceased to exist, and the existing drivers for it are flaky as hell as sound will simply dissapear after a few seconds of use, so i use the hdmi soundcard instead.

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I have a thinkpad from about 1999 that has somehow survived to the present day, like that antique light bulb in the fire station. The mouse nub thing is cracked, the CMOS is shot and I have to reconfigure the BIOS every time I turn it on, and I had to replace the original Windoze with a light Linux distro years ago, but it's still humming along. I can't make myself part with it because it's been been with me through a lot, and I still use it for the occasional undemanding task.

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1 minute ago, datiswous said:

replacing the CMOS battery dousn't fix that?

Nope; without a battery the laptop doesn't start at all. With a new battery I have to go through the BIOS.

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My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

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sounds like the print circuit might have been damaged by corrosion, happens on older laptops since we take them everywhere so they do tend to collect moisture due to changing temperatures. probably not much to do about it now unless you have a microscope and a "really" steady hand when soldering.

 

the mouse knobs did indeed tend to crack on these after some years of use to.

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Yeah, it's probably something like that. Or maybe I accidentally damaged it the first time I changed the battery- getting at it was kind of fiddly. But it doesn't bother me having to go F1 F9 F10 every time I switch the old beast on, or that it thinks every day is Jan 1 1999.

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My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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oldest one of those i had came with win 3.11 so it is quite an achivement in itself that it still runs besides the buggers :)

last one i had had win 98 non se and it turned up its toes around 8 years back.

 

my desktops has had quite some more years on them before going out of commision completely, i still have my old abit driven celeron 300A overclocked to 600 and guess what it still runs xD

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strangely while theres talk about the old mechanical harddrives having a shorter lifespan than current ssd's i had the exact opposite experience, i still have my old adaptec scsi controller card and 2gb seagate drives and despite being laughably small by todays standard they also still run, no bad sectors whatsoever. these are currently mounted in the aforementioned celeron 300A pc which i still use from time to time for working with dos libraries. it runs windows xp as the main OS though :) and can even handle win 7 32 bit though not extremely fast. the scsi drives run xp and use a multi partition system not unlike linux to get around the size problem. heh we sure had to pull out all the tricks back then to get the max out of what we had.

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3 hours ago, revelator said:

strangely while theres talk about the old mechanical harddrives having a shorter lifespan than current ssd's i had the exact opposite experience, i still have my old adaptec scsi controller card and 2gb seagate drives and despite being laughably small by todays standard they also still run, no bad sectors whatsoever. these are currently mounted in the aforementioned celeron 300A pc which i still use from time to time for working with dos libraries. it runs windows xp as the main OS though :) and can even handle win 7 32 bit though not extremely fast. the scsi drives run xp and use a multi partition system not unlike linux to get around the size problem. heh we sure had to pull out all the tricks back then to get the max out of what we had.

Agree, although the SSD has some advantages over a traditional HD, this is expressed only mainly in the speed, not necessarily in the useful life. This depends on the manufacturer and the quality of these, not on anything else.
Regarding old PCs with few resources, well, even an old Pentium can still be useful, for example for certain office tasks or the like. Even as an auxiliary for a current PC, personal server, things like that.
Although yes, in such an oldPCl, instead of Windows, I would use a Linux distro (there are some, like Slax, MXLinux, PuppyLinux, etc., with less than 300Mb, which need only 256 RAM), which makes better use of the scarce resources of such an old pearl, improving the performance, apart with an OS with support.

Edited by Zerg Rush
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Sys Specs Laptop Lenovo V145 15AST, AMD A9- 9425 Radeon R5 - 5 cores 3,1 GHz  RAM 8Gb, GPU 1+2 Gb -Win10 64 v21H2

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I've got Puppy on that old beast of mine. It's more than adequate for the job. Another one I was considering installing at the time, but which ended up being much smaller than even I needed, was TinyCore.

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My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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Hmm, menuet looks interesting. One down side is that you can't boot it from USB (or at least it's difficult to set up) but that's not too big a deal. I'll try it later.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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it may also have some trouble with newer hardware and some of the drivers are probably not of much use unless you have these exact cards, it works pretty fine on older stuff though i tried it out on several old machines allready and no problems :) it can actually run in 64 bit mode to if needed but you should keep to older athlon or core2 cpu's if you want to try it.

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At this moment I consider two options:

  1. Send it via international post to one of my future colleagues
  2. Take it with me to airplane

I'm only considering taking the chassis and everything inside it.
I'll definitely let monitor, keyword/mouse, speakers rot.

Regarding international post: does anyone have experience sending PC abroad?
I'm trying to understand how to fill customs declaration, and how to specify cost. For instance, how to estimate cost of component which is no longer sold (the oldest piece is SB Audigy 4, which is about 15 years old)...

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as far as i remember if you take the parts with you in the cabin you dont need to fill in any forms, but since you are keeping the cabinet this might not be possible as it will probably fill to much to be considered hand baggage.

so they will probably want to know the weight of said items. besides that it should be pretty straight forward but i can ask my sister she works for SAS so she should know for certain.

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59 minutes ago, revelator said:

as far as i remember if you take the parts with you in the cabin you dont need to fill in any forms, but since you are keeping the cabinet this might not be possible as it will probably fill to much to be considered hand baggage.

If you travel by air, then you have to fill customs declarations when you come to a foreign country.
Or go through green corridor, implicitly saying that you have nothing to declare.
It has nothing to do with airlines.

Given that we will have two laptops and a miniPC for three people, I think carrying excess computer parts can cause issues on the customs. As far as I understand, one laptop per person is considered OK by customs, but not more.

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spoke with my sister and no there is no customs declaration nessesary, you will however have to remove the bios battery from everything which you dont take with you in the cabin as they can be a fire hazard. customs is only for resale but since you are on the plane yourself they wont question if that is the purpose. so weight declaration only :)

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Customs laws vary on the country of destination and the country you're leaving. Just consult a specialized lawyer and don't guess.

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"I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate — the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active — not more happy — nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago. The result will never vary — and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain — that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future — that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves — nor are we with our posterity. I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual, in man the mass."...

- 2 July 1844 letter to James Russell Lowell from Edgar Allan Poe.

badge?user=andarson

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When I took my desktop with me I didn't have to tell customs either.

My missions:           Stand-alone                                                      Duncan Lynch series                              

                                      Down and Out on Newford Road              the Factory Heist

                                                                                                  A House Call

                                                                                                  The House of deLisle                                                                                                  

                              

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