who has ditched a desktop permanently?

[Soundguy]

what netbook do you have?

mine is an asus.. I found that you have to manually turn it to full performance mode. it's 2 automatic performance modes are power save and high performance. when on battery, it slips to power save, unless you change it, and when on wall power it goes to high performance... after digging a bit, I found out high performance was still like only 80%.. you can manually select super performance and open up full processor and video speed.. made a difference on my asus netbook anyway.. but beware.. if you use it on battery, it will kill the bat in about 45m vs the 2hrs it normally has.

soundguy

Have the wife's netbook for portability, but also bought a refurb Gateway SX 2800-01 small form factor for pretty cheap. It takes the Atom processor in the netbook quite a bit longer to run digital compression on an audio file than the Gateway. The Gateway isn't portable. It's a tradeoff between speed and portability. Maybe I should have bought one laptop instead of two machines.

I'm still experimenting with it, but so far I'm liking OpenOffice. Free to download.

 

[Soundguy]

go buy you one of them inexpensive 32, 36 or 42" tv's from best buy.. whatever the house brand is.. they all seem to have vga ports on them. when we got a new tv for christmas, I played with the tv ont he computer for a while.. looked awesome!.. and was way cheaper than an lcd monitor half the size..

soundguy

I played around on a Dell Netbook with a 10 inch screen, and before that a Dell Laptop with a 17 inch screen, but I just hated the size of the screens. I have a 22 inch screen right now, and wont a bigger one. I like to have allot of screens up at the same time, and I enjoy chating on yahoo or facebook. When I have chat going, I'm also surfing the web and going from screen to screen. I just can't do that with a small screen.

Eddie

 

[Soundguy]

I have to say one thing I miss about a desktop is multiple screens...I could cry now that someone reminded me--thanks.

.

you can get a laptop with a dual head video card.

I have a gateway with one and my friend has an alienware laptop with one..

soundguy

 

[texasjohn]

Yep, use a laptop now for almost everything.
Have multiple bricks so I don't have to carry it around too often between several "home" locations.
At each "home" location, I have an additonal display so I can have two going at the same time.
Will never purchase another tower/desktop.
However, still have several towers laying around...plan to do a server thing soon as someone else is doing.

I, too, on my desktop use 4 displays and when doing a lot of production work absolutely use EVERY display and even use 3 desktops...this effectively gives me the content of 12 display screens on 4 physical displays at one time.

Just replaced a hard drive in son's laptop..$80 at Fry's for .5 terrabyte, 7200rpm... having been in the industry for over 30 years, I still am completely amazed by continued dramatic reductions in cost, size while increasing capacity and performance.

 

[Soundguy]

remember when tb hard drives were something that was 'talked about'.. now it's like 'run out and get one at walmart'

heck I remember upgrading to a 524mb hdd in a 386 sx 16 compaq at work.. and was peeved that dos would only format about 90% of it.. ( as a single partition that is.. )

soundguy

 

[tommu56]

H I use it to connect the serial port to machinery to control PLCs and run diagnostics, load firmware, retrieve logs, etc..

The tried to get me to use a laptop at work for plc stuff I still prefer a desk top I don't have too far to go so I built a crash cart with all my stuff on it and use it to do the programing.
IT keeps pushing us to go the laptop route wont do it for now.They are resistant to let us network the plc's on "their" network, I pull the wire and program so we (other techs and I) got our own pirate network they do give us the IP addresses so no real hassle if it gets cross connected.

tom

 

[2manyrocks]

We have the Dell inspiron mini 10. It probably has more power and features than the desktop I bought ten years ago. I have no clue if you can run it in a performance mode or not.

I noticed a product at Newegg the other day that allows you to plug in SATA drives almost like usb flash drives. It and a 1T drive was on combo sale for $99. I didn't buy it because I was concerned about bending the connectors on the drive with repeated swaps.

In concept, however, I think we're going to see smaller, portable processors with enough drive space to operate on a portable basis and separate, larger external storage drives that are plugged in only when needed for backup.

We're getting to the point where there are so many older desktops that they can be had pretty cheaply and will still work for typing, internet access, and some media applications. I bought a working, complete Dell 170L optiplex system a week or so ago with the original software for $60. I intended to use it in an application where it wouldn't matter much if it were stolen or broken, but it would still be adequate for its intended use until that happens. It's not like a netbook that is going to walk off if I leave it laying around. Plus, I can mess around with different types of Linux and if I totally mess it up, it was only $60.

 

[jwstewar]

After the house burnt, while we lived in the trailer the only thing we had was the laptop. At that time it was pretty new, so it was speedy enough for most things (actually still is). As soon as we got in the house and got all of the furniture, I built us a new desktop. The laptop just doesn't have the performance we need/want for what we do. We do a lot of photo editing and video creation. The last few days I've been doing a file conversion for a car dealership using SQL Server. With the size of the file, I would think of trying on my laptop - maybe some of the newer high end ones, but not this one at 2.2 Gighertz. Just as an example, there was one of the videos Monica was working on. She started it on the laptop, took it almost 4 hours to render, moved it to the desktop for some reason and re-rendered. It finished in just under an hour.

Like someone else, I'm wanting to build a new desktop, install Windows 7, and then redo the existing desktop and make it a home server. Currently it has dual 640 GB drives in it, but has room for 4 more internal drives and supports RAID. So when I redo it, I'll probably RAID the 640s together for the OS and get 3 or 4 larger drives and RAID them together for data.

 

[bp fick]

Gave up the desktop 10 years ago. Found the notebook to be more personal and simplified "clutter", both physically and in having access to files. Since I travel a lot, my "brain" and "filing cabinet" are always with me, at the kitchen table, in my easy chair, or on the road.

Wifi certainly contributed.

 

[eepete]

Eddie, I agree there is nothing like more screen space!

Soundguy, one of my screens is a TV using the HDMI input. Also, the 1st hard drive I bought was $2K for 8 megabytes! Had to build my own controller.

Texasjohn, wish we had a frys around here. Screens are good, here's a pix of the 6 screens on my MAC. Two of the high resolution apple ones, 3 of the sub $200 HDTV sized montiors, and the TV.

So I've not ditched my desktop, I've added more attachments! I do have a laptop for when I'm traveling and need more than the iPhone.

Pete