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Post by jojo on Jan 15, 2016 9:52:53 GMT
My wife has been using a laptop for a number of years now. Sadly, the mouse buttons are not very responsive anymore and repairing them is not feasible due to availability of parts. Also, while she loves W10, everytime M$ updates it it locks up her machine for long periods. We have found this Mini PC, which will attach to the back of a monitor. It means of course that, while she will gain the advantages of a separate keyboard, mouse and large monitor, the footprint will be minimal. Appreciate the limitations of i3, but she mostly uses her PC for Skype, Facebook, Email and solitare type games. Not a lot of demand and she doesn't want to spend the huge additions for i7, understandable. Added to the cost of this using will be a wireless keyboard, see below, the monitor, the OS, and the warranty, about £30. The keyboard I am looking at is this:  www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-Wireless-Touch-Keyboard-K400/dp/B005LDLQXGComments please? |
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Post by jojo on Jan 15, 2016 16:04:36 GMT
Update. A mailshot from Novatech today offered this: ASUS 15.6" I5-5200U 8GB 1TB Windows 10 Laptop Performance Processor Intel® Core™ i5-5200U Processor Dual-core 2.2 GHz / 2.7 GHz with Turbo Boost 3 MB cache Memory (RAM) 8 GB Storage 1 TB HDD, 5400 rpm £400. I checked other sellers and prices there were around £660, so this would seem to be a bargan. Needless to say, we've bought one. www.novatech.co.uk/products/laptops/brandedlaptops/15to15.9/x555la-dm1672t.html |
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Post by mikkh on Jan 15, 2016 20:53:46 GMT
I take it you mean the touchpad on the old laptop, wasn't buying a USB external mouse a more frugal solution?
Ah well, depending on the specs it will still sell on Ebay to recoup some of the cost
Seems a good buy, I would never get an i7 either, I've seen my friends i7 laptop and I think it's pretty sluggish with the slow HD's they put in laptops the main culprit.
I've persuaded him to put an SSD in it to achieve it's full potential - it will still be inferior to my desktop, but I didn't tell him that
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Post by jojo on Jan 16, 2016 0:16:15 GMT
A number of options would have been more frugal and would have been my preference personally. But she wasn't having it. To be honest, if it had simply been the mouse pad I'd have bought her somehting like a drawing tablet which I'm pretty sure she would ahve gone for. www.wacom.com/en-us/discover/drawBut it is the interminable amount of time and frequency of M$ updates that make her PC unusable. She swithces on to skype her sister or a friend in Oz and the PC makes her wait several hours while it installs updates. My PC, i7, doesn't have that problem. All updates are unnoticeable. We took her PC to Novatech to see if there was anything they could do, but they said it was essentially obsolete. It is still very usable as a second PC. My wife intends to give it to the husband of one of her close friends. She wouldn't be selling it in any case. Too much hastle. Addition. There is a significant difference between users such as you, me and other on CIT and people like my wife. We are prepared to play about, to make do, to play with settings and try things out. But people like her just want soemthing that works. They don't want to know about the difference between an SSD and an HD, they don't want to know about the advantages of 8Gb RAM over 4GB. They don't want to know what a carberator is or the relative advantages of nylon over steel strings. They don't care about the differences between epoxy and solvent. They just want things that work.  |
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Post by mikkh on Jan 16, 2016 9:37:49 GMT
I know what you mean, I've just been given a bunch of laptops that he was trying to fix at component level - screen hinge broke, onboard graphics faulty, missing keys etc. Only one was working as such, in that it booted and displayed something on the screen
He's just a dabbler and he assumed I had electronics know how I haven't got. I just adopted a more logical approach and now I've got 4 of them working just by trying different RAM, HD's and using a new universal charger. Two more are too old to bother with and the two newest need more expert knowledge than I've got
I'll throw them all on Ebay, the working ones separately and make myself a quick £100 or so
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Post by jojo on Jan 18, 2016 15:31:38 GMT
The new Laptop has been delivered. I'm a bit disappointed at how complicated the set up has been. Asus has bundled so much stuff, each asking for registration. I've removed McAfee and a few M$ apps. But there are still a long list of apps of various kinds which remain and I'm not really sure if they are important. Some are things like companions for touch pad and such, others offering free storage. If anyone has any expeience I'd be grateful. Can I generally remove most of these nonsense? Also, any suggestions for a potable disc copy routine that is preferably free? I'd like to take an image before we do very much. Thanks again all  |
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Post by mikkh on Jan 19, 2016 1:08:20 GMT
Anything that says Asus or Asustek and Cyberlink (in the publisher column) I would immediately remove. It's probably quicker to tell you what to keep or what might cause problems if you remove them ...... Having said that, you could remove the lot and it would still work fine The microsoft visual C++ files, the Intel stuff apart from security assist (that's not really needed) The Cisco and Realtek files - the rest are personal choice and the choice should be Get Rid! Apart from the ones you've installed of course like Ccleaner and Chrome As for image backups, there's a perfectly good free one built into Windows 10 itself www.pcworld.com/article/3011736/windows/how-to-create-an-image-backup-in-windows-10-and-restore-it-if-need-be.html |
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Post by jojo on Jan 19, 2016 12:23:57 GMT
Thanks mikkh. I knew you were the man to ask.
I did start looking each one up on the web but became rather bombarded with conflicting information.
I'll do a backup of the image then remove all this nonsense.
The one problem that seems to remain with the driver updating is that many drivers are very obscure. Web Cam drivers for cameras built into laptops would seem to be a particular problem. On the old Laptop, the web can hasn't worked in months for example.
I'll use the restore Windows Apps facility posted in the Utilities section to remove the M$ apps. I actually found that after I deleted the Windows Store app, only to discover that one of her favourites, a program called Wordament, couldn't be installed without it. Eek!
Addition.
Completed the backup. I must hve missed something because it insisted on installing the backup on 5 DVDs. It isn't a problem, I now have hard copies.
What I was actually looking for was somehting along the lines of :EaseUS Disk Copy which I know works well and creates reliable copies that I can use if I install another drive.
But portable si I didn't need to install it.
I'm sure the M$ version will do fine though.
Thanks again.
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