LeSving wrote:
Yes, it’s a jungle. I tried to ask my sons, but when I mention “laptop” they just shake their heads and turn away
How old are your sons? My impression is that the youth of today knows less about PC hardware than we did 15 years ago, when LAN parties where all the rage for teenagers…
I tried to ask my sons, but when I mention “laptop” they just shake their heads and turn away
That is just “modern youth” which lives on instant messaging, and very very occassionally email of which only the first line is read – basically stuff you can do on a phone or an ipad. Yesterday is yesterday and irrelevant (unless it is something which affects you and which your parents have not sorted for you) and tomorrow is for your parents to worry about 
Laptops are thus pointless, and PCs are for the “power gamers” who are into that scene.
OK, a caricature of “modern youth”, but it is obvious from hardware sales which way things are going. The priorities of the IT user population are also obvious from smartphone contracts, with the top iphones on £65/m (plus a £500 up front) contracts, which is challenging to imagine (you can get a car for that) unless you are someone who needs a pocket device for storing 500GB of dodgy videos A friend has just got one of these and carries his entire music collection, of maybe 1000 CDs, on it.
You can buy “gaming laptops” but they are the big heavy ones which you can’t easily carry around, so you may as well buy (or build) a high-end desktop PC for a similar price, and then you have something where you can sit in front of without damaging your back being hunched over it. Plus you get a nice big screen for looking at/editing photos etc.
Re RAID hard drives, every RAID system I have ever built has failed, and usually with a total loss of data because the PSU blew up and blew both drives. We have one in the office, on which a drive fails roughly every year but I bought a stack of them so I just change that drive and ask it to rebuild. Despite a pricey Adaptec controller (€300+) the overall r/w performance is a lot slower than a single WD Black drive would give you (times have moved on). But that computer runs the accounting software so on balance I am keeping it… Backups are another story 
Peter wrote:
There are interesting calculations re how long an SSD lasts
You are talking about 10-15 years here? (new games & specs comes each 3 years)
Not the strategic storage/backup of EuroGA posts (tough you could argue the same about aviation rules, new stuff comes each 3 years)
Last time I switched an old ibm thinkpad 380 it worked after 20 years of sleep, not sure about the Acer Aspire I got in my hand now…
On “modern youth” jokes, I will leave this here:
I would check the figure for the data transferred. It is not time based. It was surprisingly low for the older SSDs say 80GB but with a 500GB one it is a lot more. Still would be a no-go for a lot of database apps. It also explains bizzare early failures of SSDs used with winXP and some other scenarios where the OS is repeatedly writing small bits of data every second or so (every SSD would fail after ~ 1 year of 24/7 operation; this was ok for travelling laptops). I believe google etc use vast quantities of dirt cheap slow hard disks, not SSDs.
Yes it is not just time based, there is write/delete cycles, but for a flight sim you just need read only big/fast and show on the screen
Preferably, one would install games (FSX) on SSD and have the whole OS crap or editing the Instagram pictures lot to HDD?
Or just call it “the flight sim PC” and unplug the rest
This is quite a good writeup on the SSD life calculation. However the 1750GB/year they assume could be generous, or it could be far short. It all depends on the application, because writing just 1 byte counts as a write to the whole block (typically 4k bytes).
This one is better. The SSD has a specific lifetime in terms of total bytes written:
Samsung states that their Samsung SSD 850 PRO SATA, with a capacity of 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 or 1 TB, is “built to handle 150 terabytes written (TBW), which equates to a 40 GB daily read/write workload over a ten-year period.” Samsung even promises that the product is “withstanding up to 600 terabytes written (TBW).”
Usually the flight sim people put the OS to a separate ssd, the sim core to another ssd and the scenery to large hdds.
Photoreal sceneries can get really really really huge (you can build them for free yourself in XP up to the max zoom level of the usual satellite map providers, imagine how much space you need even for a small country).
The processor will handle the computations (usually running half its cores to max all the time) and the gpu will make fancy graphics (lighting, complex clouds, fog etc).
The target will be to keep a steady refresh rate with the best possible graphics.
Peter wrote:
You can buy “gaming laptops” but they are the big heavy ones which you can’t easily carry around, so you may as well buy (or build) a high-end desktop PC for a similar price, and then you have something where you can sit in front of without damaging your back being hunched over it. Plus you get a nice big screen for looking at/editing photos etc.
That’s exactly what they mean. A powerful laptop is a huge waste. To big to carry around, and too small for anything “useful”. For my needs it’s just fine though.
MedEwok wrote:
How old are your sons? My impression is that the youth of today knows less about PC hardware than we did 15 years ago, when LAN parties where all the rage for teenagers…
They are 18 to 25. I also like to think I know more, but whatever I knew is since long become old and irrelevant. I still have my first computer. A Commodore 64. I also have my first PC, and original IBM XT Since the XT I have built dozens of PCs for myself and other family members. It came to a point, maybe 15-20 years ago when building a PC made no sense unless you wanted something truly special, like a gaming PC. By then the price had fallen so much that the difference was small enough not to be worth it. Laptops also started becoming powerful, practical and cheaper at that time. You could always get a bargain somewhere for a PC that was very good and in sum was impossible to do cheaper yourself by building it.
I switched to laptops, and my boys very soon didn’t want their father to interfere with a good gaming PC (well, other than finances ) I think they have a different view on things. A large display, a good chair, a mouse worth €200, top headset with mic is more important than the miniscule increase in power the newest processor gives. And they are online for everything they do. They sit and talk to friends when doing homework, on the PC. It’s all changed.
I still like laptops. It’s necessary for work, and when the i7 came, it seems to me the raw processing power haven’t changed much in almost a decade, or since whenever the first i7 came. No difference between laptop or desktop. With a decent GPU, I can also do some flight simming. The GPUs have changed though, a lot. But I haven’t really been paying attention. And no help from my boys, because they seem to mean that with a laptop I have already lost it big time. They simply do not see the point of a gaming laptop, and who can blame them ? They also have laptops, at school and university, but for them it’s 100% pen and pencil (+ social stuff along with their mobile phones), and this is because of the form factor.
