Ok, I'm going to hand out some amazing advice.
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Originally Posted by xr8cam
My 3yo Toshiba did exactly the same thing 3 days after the warranty expired. No warning, just shut down for good. The only fun was which tool to choose from my toolbox to jemmy the CD tray open to get a DVD out! I ended up getting carried away and now it looks like it's been run over.  Another $1000 I have to waste on below par electronica. Any suggestions for a replacement brand? I don't play games or design on it, just a nice fast machine for searching the web & photography etc. I don't have the skill set to make my own so will be buying one with windows 7. |
If I was going to buy a laptop under $1000 I would get a Dell - I have never had a problem with a Dell laptop or PC unless it was severely abused and right now I own six Dell PCs of various ages, most of which were ex-Gov or ex-corporate and were seriously abused. I would get this:
http://www.dell.com/au/p/inspiron-15...OyZ4z93O&ven2=,
Then I would put a 120GB SSD in it as the primary drive. In the end that would come under $1000 and would be a great laptop - fast, relatively good battery life and absolutely bulletproof hardware. It simply would not die. It would be the Rocky Balboa of laptops. Hell, it would even be capable of playing some fairly decent games too if you ever decided you wanted to. Although obviously not suited for gaming, it would be able to play GTAV at 720p.
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Originally Posted by paulie
Hijack.
I so don't get these so called 'specs' for the computers..
Ive bought 4 new laptops and each time i buy a new one i always try to get better than what i had. (Faster processor, more ram etc etc).
I show the sales guy exactly what i had and what i do.
Everytime its "This laptop will be almost twice as fast blah blah blah"
And i get stung everytime. I swear my original laptop was just as fast as my latest fang dangle wizz popper. And that cost me $700. The new laptop close to $2k...
For browsing the net i expect the page to just pop open. Not take 10-15 seconds.
Why the hell does it still sit buffering on a 15min youtube clip?
Old laptop had dismal ram etc and old ****** dongle sim internet.
New laptop has about 4times the ram etc and fastest nbn i could get.
All the sales people can say is. Each computer works differently. ...
That be like ford telling me why a new car (mustang/xr8 whatever?) Performs worse than a feista...... if something is better on the paper they are using to entice a buy then it should bloody work like that.
Did a back to back test of old vs new. Old laptop actually opens some pages faster than new. Its also ready to use quicker to.
My next laptop is going to be a sub $300 cheapie i think.
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It seems like we live in a world which is increasingly replacing religious worship with the worship of technology. It does get annoying updating all the time and seemingly still staying behind the times after spending big.
Still there are ways you can get maximum bang for buck. I have one idea that could help speed up your laptop. It will at least stop you from wasting $300 on a really crap laptop that you will hate at any rate.
Does your current laptop have a hard disk drive or a solid disk drive as the primary drive?
If you're using a HDD, I strongly (STRONGLY) recommend that you upgrade to an SSD. You will never, ever want to use a computer with a HDD once you have experienced an SSD. Adding an SSD to an old PC will make it seem so much quicker for general use.
Look up what they are or maybe even watch the first few minutes of this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLS6RrLnQOc
You can get a cheap Sandisk or Kingston 120GB SSD for about $65 on ebay and use your existing HDD as a secondary drive (most laptops have provisions for at least two 2.5" drives). I would recommend spending a bit more and getting a larger capacity (240GB) drive if you use a lot of different programs frequently and will actually use that space.
On the topic of videos loading slowly. This could be many things.
Sometimes videos just won't load because computers are really logical but extremely stupid and I found this plug-in for firefox that is essentially the best thing that ever existed:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...eo-everywhere/
^ This will force the video to play in HTML5 - basically it will just make the video work when nothing else will and it's really simple to use as well.
If that doesn't work, the issue probably is not with your PC or your internet connection but the server the video is located on. Quite often the servers become over-saturated and can't provide data for all of the clients which are trying to access them. This happens to me all the time on popular sites youtube even though I have the most expensive internet I can possibly get where I live and I have enthusiast-grade computers.
Finally there is also the possibility that the videos you're trying to load are just in a higher definition than you were previously accessing and therefore there is a lot more data to download than before. For example, going up from 720p to 1080p means you will need to download a lot more data because 1080p has more than twice as many pixels. 1280x720 = 921,600 pixels and 1920x1080 = 2,071,600 pixels.
I used to work in tech support and I guess it stuck with me because I still occasionally enjoy helping people with their tech problems... even though working one minute in tech support will strip you of your soul and make you hate the entire human race for the rest of your life.
All the best.