The Vent and Rant Thread

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Now we are jealous
I have been looking at SSDs for years, but unwilling to pay the price. I need way bigger than 64/128G for a desktop/laptop. Of course I only reboot every second Thursday so SSD not that important.

Helen

Helen- the price of even a 256Gb SSD, is now barely more than a typical notebook HDD. And the performance difference is huge.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Now we are jealous
I have been looking at SSDs for years, but unwilling to pay the price. I need way bigger than 64/128G for a desktop/laptop. Of course I only reboot every second Thursday so SSD not that important.

You may be surprised.

The current trend is hybrid - put the OS and applications on an SSD, and store the data on a hard drive.

SSDs aren't just faster to boot off of - they are faster to run from as well. Years back, I had a setup with two SATA drives, set up as a RAID array, where the RAID setup made the two drives look like one big drive. It sped up things like program loading a treat because the disk access was spread across two drives, and so were disk writes.

SSDs perform even better. With a standard hard drive, you have several variables, but to read or write any particular area of disk, you must move the drive head across the spinning platter to the right cylinder, then wait for the area with the data involved to come under the drive head so it can be read or written to. It's why drives that spin at higher RPMs are more expensive and preferred for performance: rotational latency - the time spent waiting for the data to come under the drive head - is reduced. But hard drives are also subject to fragmentation, where data winds up being scattered all over the drive, it takes longer to read it/write to it, and you periodically run a defrag operation to collect stuff into nice contiguous chunks.

With SSDs, you don't care about fragmentation. It's memory, and any part of the SSD can be accessed in the same amount of time.

You may only boot every second Thursday, but how often do you load programs and how big are the ones you load? If you can go with a hybrid approach, it might be nice indeed.
______
Dennis

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Speakingtohe: use a small SSX beside an HDD. Also, it's not just for beating. Programs also start a lot faster.

True but my slow loading programs often just stay loaded. Rarely do I need to beat them.

Helen

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

True but my slow loading programs often just stay loaded. Rarely do I need to beat them.

Helen

LOL

I meant 'boot.' I hate spell checkers in tablets. I must disable it

[Stitchawl]

I've been running a hybrid system for this past year and love it. I only put the OS and installed applications of the SSD, while all saved data goes to standard internal and external HDs. Very fast, very secure, and not that expensive to set up.


Stitchawl

[speakingtohe]

I've looked at hybrids and was all set to buy when the stock ran out. I may yet when I get back to the real world, And the prices are dropping and the sizes getting bigger.

Most programs load pretty fast. even on my old I5 laptop.More than 20 seconds is an exception and I guess I do not use the slow loading ones often. The laptop I had before took much longer. I know instant is nicer but I am not bothered by a 5 or 10 second delay. And my desktop is perhaps faster.

I am strongly considering buying a Surface Pro 3 next week, if so then I will have an SSD to compare

Helen

[Stitchawl]

Other than laptops, I haven't bought a 'pre-made' computer since the mid-'90's. When it's time for a new one, I research the individual components to find the best for my particular needs, then just pick up a tower that will hold them (and the cooling system I want,) and put it together. Once I discovered that it was almost impossible to plug things into the wrong sockets on the motherboards, my 'fear of computers' disappeared. And the step-by-step photo instructions that come with many motherboards today make it easier than putting together an Ikea bookshelf!

Stitchawl

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Stitchawl

Other than laptops, I haven't bought a 'pre-made' computer since the mid-'90's. When it's time for a new one, I research the individual components to find the best for my particular needs, then just pick up a tower that will hold them (and the cooling system I want,) and put it together. Once I discovered that it was almost impossible to plug things into the wrong sockets on the motherboards, my 'fear of computers' disappeared. And the step-by-step photo instructions that come with many motherboards today make it easier than putting together an Ikea bookshelf!

Stitchawl

QFT!

My notebook is up and running again. I received the new 120GB drive. Getting a 64GB drive was of no use, by the way; it would have saved me like €5 or €10

My desktop can use that bigger drive better, as I use it much more (and with a lot more, and bigger software) than my notebook. Thus, I made a new image of the desktop, swapped in the 120GB drive, and put the image back. (And extended it to fill the new drive, obviously.)

Then I put the desktop's 64GB into the notebook. It's the same model as the one that failed, and it's also three years old, but I haven't had any issues yet.

When putting back the last notebook's image, I discovered it was over a year old, so I had some updating to do today. Yeah, I only use my notebook in spurts; 3-4 months of heavy use, 3-4 months out of action. It seems I tend to neglect imaging the system drive. My desktop gets imaged once a week.

Tomorrow I'll image the notebook, so I'll have a more recent image if this "new but old" SSD fails as well

Oh, and I love DELL business notebooks such as the Lattitudes. They can be so easily maintained. Removing the HDD's is just a matter of loosening four screws, and you can remove the drives. The keyboard (swapped out under warranty, after breaking a key four years ago) can be replaced within 5 minutes, also by unscrewing two screws.

Compare that to a consumer notebook which often has to be disassembled to the last screw to get at the HDD...

[Rumpelteazer]

It's already starting out to be one of those days.

My eye is swollen, the last couple of weeks it seems the infection is getting worse every time it comes back, I still have three weeks to keep trying to get rid of it by cleansing my eye with Zwitsal shampoo before I can go back to my doctor and get a referral.

My Kobo also went wacky. The home button stopped working. I had this happen a couple of months ago and fixed it by rebooting the Aura HD. That didn't work, neither did cleaning the edges or signing out and signing in again. So I'm now doing a factory reset and it's updating now. I didn't add any books for a while, though I did manually update the firmware. After updating it did work properly until this morning, hopefully it will be solved by a factory reset. Just in case I'm charging my Kindle 4.

[missimpossible]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

It's already starting out to be one of those days.

My eye is swollen, the last couple of weeks it seems the infection is getting worse every time it comes back, I still have three weeks to keep trying to get rid of it by cleansing my eye with Zwitsal shampoo before I can go back to my doctor and get a referral.

My Kobo also went wacky. The home button stopped working. I had this happen a couple of months ago and fixed it by rebooting the Aura HD. That didn't work, neither did cleaning the edges or signing out and signing in again. So I'm now doing a factory reset and it's updating now. I didn't add any books for a while, though I did manually update the firmware. After updating it did work properly until this morning, hopefully it will be solved by a factory reset. Just in case I'm charging my Kindle 4.

Oh dear, I hope your eye gets better soon. I also had issues with my Kobo yesterday of the freezing/crashing variety so I can sympathise.

On another annoying note, we've now thankfully found a flat. Trying to find a broadband provider is proving to be a pain in the butt though. Had been planning to go with Virgin Media but they don't have any services in my new street, so left with sticking with BT (expensive) or trying something else (risky). Grrrrr.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by missimpossible

Oh dear, I hope your eye gets better soon. I also had issues with my Kobo yesterday of the freezing/crashing variety so I can sympathise.

On another annoying note, we've now thankfully found a flat. Trying to find a broadband provider is proving to be a pain in the butt though. Had been planning to go with Virgin Media but they don't have any services in my new street, so left with sticking with BT (expensive) or trying something else (risky). Grrrrr.

Thank you. Luckily the eye is more annoying than painful, but after months of swelling and flaking skin I'm getting fed up with it.

A factory reset did the trick. I think it must have been the book I was reading or one of the books I accidentally opened yesterday when searching for my next read.

New rant:
the last couple of days have been hot, for today rain and thunder was predicted and we did get a little bit of that this morning, though it didn't cool down. A couple of hours ago a bit thunderstorm was heading our way according to the radar, but it split leaving us with nothing to cool off.

[Katsunami]

Hot? Hot? Shut up about it...

The coolest spot in my house is 32 degrees C at this moment. Outside, it's warmer.

[Rumpelteazer]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Hot? Hot? Shut up about it...

The coolest spot in my house is 32 degrees C at this moment. Outside, it's warmer.

That's even worse than here. My bedroom is currently 28C and outside 24.5C. I'm keeping the windows shut when it's warmer outside than inside.

The last couple of nights I hardly slept. I have trouble falling asleep, then around 4am I wake up and after that I doze for a couple of hours before giving up.

I'm so looking forward to next Sunday when my sister and I are going to Maastricht and visit one of the cave systems. It's around 14C in there all year around.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

That's even worse than here.

The only spot cooler than my living room (@ 32 deg. C.) is the basement, but that's out of the question for living in, I suppose.

A few days ago, the thermometers in my back yard, one in the shade and one in the sun, hit 38 deg. C. and over 50 deg. C. respectively. They don't even have numbers above 50 anymore.

This is just ridiculous. Some years we don't see the sun even once; other years it actually freezes half-way through May, before 'spring' eventually starts in the beginning of June, and then, through July and August, we're boiled alive.

This is in the south of the Netherlands, by the way, which actually has a different climate than the north part of the country.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer

That's even worse than here. My bedroom is currently 28C and outside 24.5C. I'm keeping the windows shut when it's warmer outside than inside.

The last couple of nights I hardly slept. I have trouble falling asleep, then around 4am I wake up and after that I doze for a couple of hours before giving up.

I'm so looking forward to next Sunday when my sister and I are going to Maastricht and visit one of the cave systems. It's around 14C in there all year around.

Rump:

82F (28C) is the temperature to which we COOL our house. An air-conditioner can, realistically, only cool 40F, and where we are, temps above 110F are pretty common. So, I feel ya. Our bedroom is in the 80's each night, and more in the mornings once that desert sun rises--at least, in the summer. ;-)

My sister, who is heavy in weight, can't visit. She and her husband, who live in the NE US, cool their house to 68F all the time. When I go to visit her, I have to take sweatshirts/sweaters.

Hitch