Comments on: Laptop lifesavers….

By: JFP

JFP — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 18:47:51 +0000

I picked up one of those cheap Toshibas last fall, a celeron version and barely touched it as I detest win8. Plan has been to pull the harddrive image it, store the physical drive as backup and just reinstall win8 onto a crappy ssd I have wasting space. Something to do on a rainy day. One of my big gripes has been that these companies won’t even give you an OEM restore DVD. They just tell you to use the Toshiba etc.. backup/image tool they include with all their bloatware.

By: tweell

tweell — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 04:11:39 +0000

I’ve had decent luck with HP laptops, as long as I got them with an Intel processor. The HP Pavilion 11t-h100 doesn’t look too bad, although it doesn’t upgrade worth a sh*t.

By: wimminz

wimminz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 19:14:00 +0000

Yeah, the X’s were reasonably good, X220’s were always popular…

As for which sub 12″ to buy, haven’t got a clue, I’d still go for T series.

By: ello

ello — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 18:59:52 +0000

I’ve been trying to find a laptop to replace my venerable X-series thinkpad, a travel laptop (this means <13", so T-series is out) with a good keyboard. I've been really struggling for about six months now looking for something decent, it seems like the longer I wait the more features are missing from laptops. New X series laptops don't even have F1-F12, just capacitive buttons. I'm at the point I'm going to buy a GETAC (probably v100, c2d gen, just to see if I can use it, hell u9400 is not a bad CPU and with an SSD/ram upgrade it's probably faster than the toshibabook). But I can't get my hands on one.

How are windows laptops so crap these days. They have an inch of bezel on each side of the keyboard but home/end/prtscr don't have their own buttons. Which <13" is worth buying?

By: wimminz

wimminz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:26:12 +0000

It’s not *just* Tosh, it’s ALL the cheap lappies, last year there was a scare based on *exactly* the thing I discuss here, if you put a linux live CD into the optical drive on a cheap Samsung laptop without FIRST disabling secure boot, not even booting the live cd, just inserting it while winders was running, it bricked the whole laptop…. back to the factory for replacement.

By: Joe

Joe — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 17:23:35 +0000

sounds like Toshiba is selling the laptop as a throw away appliance. If the hard drive crashes or Windows gets corupted, trash the laptop and buy a new one.

By: wimminz

wimminz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:29:16 +0000

well the old system you could only have three proper primary partitions, that wasn’t actually true, because you could create a logical partition and bang a bunch of logicals inside.

To me, three has always been enough for windows, 100 mb system, root and backup/storage, for linux I just went logical.

GPT under windows you can have up to 128 partitions.

The main arguments against MBR and for GPT, as far as I can tell, were that lots of people did shit they should not have done in MBR, which is all very well, but you can do shit you shouldn’t in GPT too, and it will be the same people cutting the same corners.

Got a bigger than 2 TB disk, you are going to want GPT

Got GPT, you are going to want XP pro 64 bit minimum

None of it has fuck all to do with SATA or transfer speeds.

HTH etc

By: hans

hans — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 16:12:16 +0000

Ah, I totally missed the boat on this whole new(to me) GPT thing.
Have to read up on that damn newfangled thingamagic.

By: wimminz

wimminz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 11:44:21 +0000

I’m going to be anal here Hans.
1/ The HD has it’s own “BIOS” of sorts, that’s what is on the PCB on the HD.
2/ UEFI is not really a BIOS, it is not a Basic Input Output System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS it is a Unified Extensibe Firmware Interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface

Like everything else, there is good and bad, there are good BIOSes, and nasty and crap ones (award etc) and the same is true of UEFI.

What is happening here is Toshiba and others are writing the UEFI to ***EXPECT*** to find a standard and defined file path to the GPT boot disk, if you fit a new disk, or the GPT partitions are damaged or deleted, it can’t find that path, and simply HALTS, it does not go on and try the next boot device, it “thinks” there is no HD, so why bother…

By: wimminz

wimminz — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 11:35:41 +0000

As a follow up to myself, yeah, I know about UEFI and GPT

The issue here is you have a laptop, have a genuine Win8 install DVD, have a brand new HD, fit HD to laptop, attempt to boot normall with Win8 DVD expecting it to do as normal and partition and format your new HD, and it won’t, it won’t even get as far as booting from the CD or USB, it halts the boot process because IT CANNOT SEE A FUCKING HD…