My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

[JSR]

Having experienced recently how big of a hurdle Microsoft have put in our way with Windows 8, and with the real issue of them ceasing support for XP in a little over a year, it's become apparent to me that putting off the inevitable upgrade to Windows 8 until the eleventh hour is not going to be the wisest of moves - given all the incompatibility issues.

As a consequence, I'm putting some real thought into making the move to Windows 8 sooner rather than later, so that I can at least continue to be productive on my Windows XP machines while trying to solve the many problems that Windows 8 will put at my feet.

Due to Windows 8's bloated nature, I don't have a system here that will run it. My apologies to the local landfill, but I'm going to have to buy a new machine if I'm going to make the move to Windows 8.

My budget is lower than most people's but, if my recent experience with a friend's new budget Windows 8 laptop has taught me anything, it's that Windows 8 is more of a hinderance than a help if the machine in question doesn't have a touchscreen.

With all of this in mind, which Windows 8 laptop would you recommend?

My intention is to go with a laptop because there are times that I need to take my work on the road and there's no certainty that the places I go to will have Windows 8 on hand - so, if I move to Windows 8, I need a portable solution. While at my home office, I'll be plugged into a wireless keyboard/mouse (presuming there are drivers for it), and my Dell 2412 monitor via VGA (presuming that there's eventually a software/driver update for my ColorMunki). The Dell 2412 has no HDMI input, so the laptop in question will require VGA output (I doubt there'll be any laptop with either DVI or DisplayPort output in my price range).

The size of the laptop isn't important - and I'd be tending to favour portability over size.

Most of my work involves running old software, most of which will doubtless need replacing thanks to Windows 8's incompatibilities, so I can't really list the software I'll be using because I just don't know yet. Needless to say, everything I currently use runs well even on an old Atom netbook, so I don't think my hardware requirements are that exorbitant.

With all of the above in mind, I'm considering the Asus VivoBook S200E:

http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/S200E/

It's an 11.6" touchscreen Windows 8 laptop running Intel Core i3 3217U processor (whatever that means), with 4GB RAM, 500GB hard drive, all the required ports, perhaps not the best battery life. It's a little outside my budget, but there's not a lot of choice when it comes to touchscreen laptops at present. It's my belief that this is a fairly low-spec system, although not as low as the non-touchscreen budget range that uses dual core Pentiums (please correct me if I'm wrong!).

I haven't bought a new computer for several years and all existing machines here run Windows XP, so I'd appreciate any insight or advice anyone with a more modern machine might have. I'm out of the loop when it comes to processors and other hardware spec these days, so I'm kind of approaching this blind. If I've not provided enough info, just ask.

Thanks all!

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

That's an up to date Ivy Bridge Intel processor - it's a low voltage and low performance CPU so battery life should be good and it should run cool - actual battery life depends on how big the battery is really. It should be around 5-6 hours for non-intensive use (wifi/web). It also has the latest HD4000 integrated Intel GPU which is pretty good. The CPU benchmark is nearly 50% higher than my current desktop and I run Photoshop and Lightroom on that tolerably well. You might want to fit more RAM - 8GB is an affordable and worthwhile target - if you can't just add a second 4GB module, swap the 4GB out for an 8GB part and sell the 4GB one. Does it have an SSD?

Ian

[JSR]

low performance CPU

What does "low performance" mean in these days of Windows 8? I read words like this in other reviews, but they're typically comparing with other (more expensive) models with i5 and i7 processors. I'm currently using a desktop PC with a Pentium D 2.80GHz CPU and 1GB RAM with Windows XP. A machine offering hyper-threaded dual-core and 4GB RAM sounds like it should leave mine in the dust, but phrases like "low performance" confuses me. I mean, I worked for several years with a netbook running an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU with Windows XP, which was adequate for most of my tasks.

Does "low performance" in the context of an i3 processor and Windows 8 equate to the "adequate" nature of my old netbook? Is it on a par with my Pentium D desktop? Does "low performance" actually mean "much faster than I'm used to", or does it mean "as slow as a three-legged tortoise dragging a ball and chain"?

Thanks for any insight you can offer.

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Well, i3 is the lowest level of Core ix processors. My laptop has a 2nd generation top tier Core i7 CPU (quad core) and the one you are considering is a 3rd generation third tier (dual core). Inbetween are Core i5 models with mainly dual core CPUs but with higher clock speed and bigger and more efficient caches. The core i3 processor you are looking at is clocked at 1.8GHz and the cpumark test result is around 2200. My four and a half year old laptop that my daughter now uses has an AMD Turion 64 X2 (dual core) TL-60 clocked at 2.0GHz but its cpumark rating is only about 960, so the Core i5 is more than twice as fast and runs cooler despite having a slower clock speed. My Core i7 CPU in my new laptop is rated at over 6000 in the cpumark results. The third generation equivalent of my CPU is even faster and cooler. Core i5 CPUs will be around double the speed of your Core i3. So it's all relative - your Core i3 flies compared to my old laptop but it's slower than i5 and i7 CPUs available now. As it's a third generation i3 it does have a much better integrated GPU. Integrated GPUs used to be a joke but the Intel HD4000 in current Core processors is very respectable.

A 3GHz Pentium D CPU is only rated at about 683 by cpumark, so the Core i3 CPU is over three times faster to start with. Core i dual core processors also support hyperthreading so they can behave like quad core processors when running compatible software so you should be able to get even more out of the i3 than just a simple cpumark comparison.

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

That last paragraph is the most helpful to me because it suggests that the Vivobook should be quite nippy compared to what I'm currently using.

Where do you find these "cpumark" numbers? If they're considered to be a common ground for comparing CPUs, I'd be interested to make some comparisons of my own.

Last time I was into buying "new" computers, all you needed to know was GHz. The only other question was Intel or AMD, but GHz was the common ground. These days there's all of these confusing monikers on everything that it's difficult to see at-a-glance whether something is better or worse than what came before.

Thanks again.

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Just google the model of your cpu plus cpumark or passmark and you will easily find lists of CPU benchmark results

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Thanks, Ian.

If anyone else is interested, I've found this page here: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_list.php You can search for your processor and see where it lands in the chart.

It's both enlightening to compare current processors, and also quite comical to compare older processors.

I've compared a few processors, from my humble netbook - all the way up to Ian's i7. The difference is a factor of 20x - in other words, my netbook runs 1/20th of the speed of Ian's i7. On that basis, my netbook clearly came out of Noah's Ark and isn't capable of anything more complex than being an abacus. Of course, in the real world, it's adequate enough for humble tasks, but the cpumark shows how wide the gap is.

It's also quite amusing to think that the netbook is comparable to an old Pentium 4 running at 3.06GHz (the PC I had before the netbook). That doesn't make it sound quite so crippled as the 20x difference to the i7.

I wish that the CPU manufacturers would get back to giving them nomenclatures that are instantly identifiable and comparable, to save us from this confusing situation. I'm currently trying out DraftSight (free CAD software because Windows 8 will not even install my version of AutoCAD LT). Its minimum system requirements states a 3.0GHz processor - so I thought I would get by with my desktop (Pentium D 2.8GHz), but it's actually quite sluggish compared to AutoCAD LT (particularly if you have the computer doing something else at the same time). However, it runs reasonably well on my friend's 2.20GHz Pentium B960 and, according to the cpumark, it'll run even better on the 1.80GHz i3 of the laptop I'm looking at. Slower clock speed means higher cpumark and faster processing ...

How can program-makers suggest a minimum processor when speed is so meaningless? I mean, my 2.80GHz Pentium D desktop apparently runs at a tenth of the speed of Ian's 2.20GHz i7. How can you possibly know, at a glance, which is the better machine?

You can't just say "i3, i5, i7 in that order and anything else is cr*p" because some i3s have a higher cpumark than some i5s. Some i5s have a higher cpumark than some i7s. Heck, there are even some i3s that are "better" than some i7s - depending on generation (I think). So you can't tell which is better by speed, and you can't tell which is better by name. How are you supposed to know which to buy without first spending six months working through cpumark league tables?

Why does Intel (and I presume AMD does the same) make it so difficult for the end user to know what they should be buying?

I think, based on the cpumark, the Vivobook will be just fine for my purposes. There are laptops with much higher cpumarks for the same price or less, but they don't have the touchscreen - so that's the sacrifice I think I'm going to have to make. Even with that speed sacrifice, the cpumark suggests that it'll still be almost 4x faster than my current desktop (and 8x faster than my netbook).

[JSR]

Re: How much RAM?

I know Ian prefers a computer with more RAM than a field of sheep but, in real world terms, how much difference does RAM make on a Windows 8 laptop?

I come from never having more than 1GB in a computer - that's how much my current desktop (Windows XP) has. I did put 2GB in my netbook, but that was primarily so that I could use most of the other 1GB as a RAMdisk and so that I could turn off the paging file (swapfile).

The reason I ask is that I'm almost certainly going to go with this Vivobook but, further investigation reveals that the RAM is apparently soldered onto the motherboard - so upgrading the stock 4GB is going to be extremely unlikely to happen.

Will 4GB be enough? To someone coming from 1GB machines (heck I have a laptop here that has just 24MB - yes, MB! - that still works), 4GB sounds like it'll send ships to Mars and back but, when you read others saying that you need 8GB or 16GB, then 4GB feels like it'd have a tough time running Notepad.

Thanks for any insight.

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Yes, 4GB should be enough as long as you don't want to run big memory-hogging applications like video editing and computer games at the same time

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Well, I don't tend to do games and the most video editing I do is video conversion (I tend to have DivX converter running in the background converting MPG2 to DivX). I'd like to see a speed improvement on the conversion but, other than that, I don't do video editing.

That said, they do say that the more your computer is capable of doing, the more you want it to do!

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

I ripped some episodes of Death in Paradise off DVD so Julia can watch them on her tablet last night - that takes quite a bit of resources

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

The actual ripping doesn't take too long at all, it's the conversion that takes time. I always rip from DVD to HDD first (to save wear and tear on the DVD drive, and also so I can convert on devices that don't have optical drives). My media player attached to the TV can play MPG2 direct, but I don't like hoiking 5GB+ files around all over the place. DivX is more convenient.

Converting a 45 minute piece from MPG2 to DivX took around 4 hours on my netbook, and it takes about 2 hours on my current desktop (longer if I'm working on something else at the same time). That's pretty much in line with the cpumark which lists my desktop twice as high as the netbook (and it ends up taking half as long).

Given that the Vivobook's cpumark is four times higher than my current desktop, does that mean it should only take 30 minutes? We'll see...

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

I use DVD Shrink to backup to HDD and then Handbrake to convert to a customised video format for playback on Android devices. Four hour-long episodes took about an hour - converting to MP4/H.264 format using Handbrake. The quality is brilliant.

Core i processors have extra processor instructions for improving video encoding performance - as long as the software supports it you should find an even better improvement in performance than you were expecting.

I remember it took several hours to encode an edited video clip from a camera (full HD admittedly) on my old laptop and the new one did the same operation in under 10 minutes - something like a 25x speed improvement. But a good deal of that improvement was down to harnessing the GPU on top of the CPU thanks to Adobe's Mercury Playback Engine hardware acceleration which is compatible with parallel processing technology in nVidia GPUs with CUDA cores. Cyberlink are even cleverer as they can employ GPU hardware acceleration on a wider range of GPUs than Adobe and combine that with the embedded GPU acceleration in Core i processors. I don't think Handbrake uses GPU acceleration.

Ian

[JSR]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

Don't you hate it when you post something only for the website to throw up an error and you lose it? Humbug!

Anyway, what I was about to post was along the lines of -

I've no idea what CUDA cores and other gobbledegook means, but I'll take your word for it that I should expect some good speed improvement with the new machine.

I tend to use DVD Decrypter to backup to HDD, but that's a bit old now so I'm trialling DVDFab (not sure if I'll go for it because it costs a bit). I have used DVD Shrink in the past, but that was ages back.

I have used Handbrake when I need some footage to play on my iPad and/or iPod Touch. Typically, though, I convert to DivX using DivX Converter (bought and paid for). DivX plays fine on my Android phone and my media box. Quality is fine, except that my recording source (an old DVD/HDD recorder) doesn't really do the best job I could hope for. That's in need of replacing, but it seems that most recorders these days are just hard drives - with no obvious way of getting the footage off the drive for archival purposes.

I was hoping to find something affordable, like my media player only one that records as well. That would cut out a lot of the conversion because it would, I imagine, be in a suitably compressed format in the first place.

[Ian]

Re: My turn for new computer/laptop advice.

I tried DVDfab and it works well but as I am a cheapskate I am more than happy with DVDShrink and Handbrake - and both are free.

Ian