Linus' House of IT: 15 cents please

[Linus]

My apologies for the delay in answering. I saw this last night (or rather early this morning) and was too tired to answer straight so figured best to answer this morning.

Originally Posted by MsDemeanor

Two questions, please *dropping thirty cents in tip jar*

Question 1
Mister has an old Dell laptop. It's used for web surfing and pretty much nothing else. It keeps getting slower and sllloooowwwweeerrrrr, even though there's practically nothing on it. Why do computers get slower as they get older? I know that it's the computer and not the DSL because I have two other computers on the same network, one for home and one for work, that run screaming circles around his laptop when it comes to internet response time.

There are a variety of reasons for this:

- newer computers have faster CPUs, better motherboard designs, bus speeds (the path used between CPU and memory, and CPU and other parts), amount of memory, speed of hard drive, etc.. Depending on the years apart from old to new will show significant speed differences.

- as you fill up the hard drive, less space is available for the swap file and it means more wait time while the system swaps out pages if it doesn't have enough memory.

- too much network traffic can overload the CPU, causing it to queue up traffic and slow the response down in general

- malware/spyware/viruses. The more that exist, the slower the system can get. Many of these are poorly written and thus, cause the system to slow down.

Question 2
I want to get Mister a new laptop. What is the correlation between processor and net surfing speed? I'm wondering if I need to go over my budget for an Intel Core 2, or if a cheaper Intel processor give the same result. I've been looking at the Toshiba Satellites; they all seem to have good reviews and there are plenty of low price models available with the cheaper Intel processors. We might occassionally hook it up to the HDTV to watch stuff, so an HDMI port would be a nice bonus. I know that a netbook would probably meet his needs, but we're both too old for 10 inch screens.

Faster processor means more network packets translated faster. And pages interpreted/render faster. And pictures rendered faster. And new OS to do all that faster. And... (I think you get the picture).

While you don't need the ultimate (I believe most of the newer systems are coming with quad cores) a dual core Intel cheap (NOT celeron please) would be sufficient for both short term and long term (I always look at long term being 3-5 years, at least, as a lifetime for a good system).

Toshiba Satellites have gotten a better and better rap over the years.

Netbooks are interesting but smaller keyboard and screen can be a challenge. For a couple of hundred more you can get a decent laptop. One of the things you should consider is support plan. If you buy from a manufacturer, what kind of phone support do you get? Do you get any? (and that's a question about the laptop listed below).

Oh, wait, third question *tosses in another 15 cents*

TigerDirect has this MSI notebook on sale this weekend for $419. It has the Intel Celeron T3100 and an HDMI port, so it seems to fill the bill. Do you know anything about MSI Computers?

As I said, I personally prefer to stay away from celerons. I know they designed them for laptops but I find that a laptop with a celeron doesn't last as long as one with a full Intel Pentium or Intel Core CPU. I've never used MSI so I can't say it's good or bad but reviews on Epinion.com and apparently on TigerDirect suggest that it's good. To me, it's an unknown and I tend to stick with brand names (yes, I know I pay more but it's a known quantity to me so saves on a step).

[MsDemeanor]

Originally Posted by Linus

My apologies for the delay in answering. I saw this last night (or rather early this morning) and was too tired to answer straight so figured best to answer this morning.
.

Thank you for the wonderful answers. I wrote the questions before bed, and woke up to find answers, so there didn't seem to be any kind of delay at all

You rock!