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And Dell's solution supports the iPhone too, although it requires keeping their iOS running in the foreground with the screen on.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-mobile-connect/ab/dell-mobile-connect

It's the second time I hear this company's name in less than a month. Some days ago I read a press release by Dell about a panoplia of new products, and the entire list, ranging from laptops to server computers was full of performance improvements (vs competitors) claims. all of them referring to paid-for reviews by this same company.

I personally find their motto - "win the attention war" - amusing. Also of interest is the fact (pun setup) they interchange links with their main domain and with a redirect from my country's TLD subdomain "facts.pt" (pun successful..?), as a subtle way to include their initials as something factual, and for the unsuspecting eye to believe it's a different company or to provide credit to their reviews with such a "reputable" subdomain. Genius stuff.

These companies are the audit companies of tangible products. Usually, you have Big Four conducting external audits for finantial institutions, country elections and whatnot, gathering data only these auditors are given access. The process is usually compulsory, but still paid by the targets of the audit, and there's always the sense the best auditors are usually the more positive. Now we get these paid product reviewers acting exactly the same way, getting paid to review products before they come out so companies can make bold claims. Then just NDA every other actually independant party interested in reviewing the product. See a pattern?

But you absolutely can buy new computing hardware without windows as just a few examples. So there's no excuse for buying substandard security for any reason.

Not that I know of... Especially when you compare them against what you can get from Dell, HP, and even Lenovo for under $500. A $600 Chromebook seems like a really big stretch...

Why does stating facts seem to piss you off?

Because these particular "Facts" are being SPUN to make them look like they are a behavior/policy/business-model that is EXCLUSIVE to Apple.

Every. Single. Time.

But even this SLIGHTEST effort will show them to be anything BUT Apple-Exclusive behaviors/policies/business-models.

For example: Since we were talking about Adapters (so-called "Dongles"), these were found in about 5 minutes of Googling, and I didn't even have to try hard AT ALL (my search term was [mfg] USB-C Adapter:

https://www.cdw.com/product/De...

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-DA...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/sho...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/wor...

So, where's the Outrage at Dell?

https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp...

https://www.amazon.com/HP-USB-...

https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp... ...and IMHO, the MOST egregious:

https://www.amazon.com/HP-N2Z6...

So where's the outrage at HP?

I could probably go on an on with other laptop OEMs; but I think (hope) you get the point.

I'll take my apology now...

Why does stating facts seem to piss you off?

Because these particular "Facts" are being SPUN to make them look like they are a behavior/policy/business-model that is EXCLUSIVE to Apple.

Every. Single. Time.

But even this SLIGHTEST effort will show them to be anything BUT Apple-Exclusive behaviors/policies/business-models.

For example: Since we were talking about Adapters (so-called "Dongles"), these were found in about 5 minutes of Googling, and I didn't even have to try hard AT ALL (my search term was [mfg] USB-C Adapter:

https://www.cdw.com/product/De...

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-DA...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/sho...

https://www.dell.com/en-us/wor...

So, where's the Outrage at Dell?

https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp...

https://www.amazon.com/HP-USB-...

https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp... ...and IMHO, the MOST egregious:

https://www.amazon.com/HP-N2Z6...

So where's the outrage at HP?

I could probably go on an on with other laptop OEMs; but I think (hope) you get the point.

I'll take my apology now...

It's pretty cool and all, but not really new.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/sho...

I've actually played with external PCIexpress boxes that connect to Thunderbolt 2 you can put graphics cards in - granted not to this same performance level.

Hardware incompatibilities continue to occur in the 21st century, though not nearly as often or as harshly as before.

I installed Xubuntu 18.04 on a new Dell Inspiron 11 3000 series laptop (Pentium CPU, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD) two days ago, and my Xubuntu partition feels much faster than Windows 10 on the same hardware. But I still had to edit a config file as root to get the Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys to work. The laptop's keyboard controller has a bug such that those four keys send only make (key down) codes, not break (key up) codes. Those keys also have problems in some Windows applications, but compared to X.Org X11, Windows is by and large more automatically tolerant of keys that only make and do not break.

Examples? Much as I'm an Apple user, I am also an Android user, have been for 7 years, upgrade yearly simply because I want the latest and greatest, and have never seen this.

Very specifically the 4.2 releases on T-mobile vs AT&T vs Verizon vs the 4.4.x releases by each on the same type devices for those that were able to be upgraded. I don't recall specifically what the calls were that got broken, but switching between those devices while testing as far GUI interaction was concerned was ... excruciating.

Mining? On a laptop? No. As I was writing my previous post, I had a browser and an IDE open. I had been playing some YouTube videos while I was working, but paused them while I replied to you. Truly nothing strenuous; and, before you suggest I check it, my battery has seen 140 cycles, has a "full charge" capacity of 6385mAh, and reports condition "Normal". My battery is fine.

That just makes me more curious. My laptop generally runs at least 2 IDE instances, 2 DBs, at least 1 DB GUI client, at least 1 appserver, mail and calendar clients, 2 or 3 messaging clients, and any where from 0-100 browser tab/windows depending on the day and that day's work habits. I admit I do not play YouTube videos, or really any videos, but I do on occasion have itunes or other music media players running. Under that working load I can easily make 6 hours, even when running multiple builds with full tests, which tend to hammer that entire system. If I watch a movie, it's generally 5 or so odd hours.

If you're watching this under Safari, have you tuned Safari not to aggressively preload 1 or 2 layers of links? Otherwise, I'd seriously investigate what's eating your battery. There's no reason for that load to drop you down to 2 hours of battery life.

Consumer includes the Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware lines. Business includes the Vostro, Latitude, and XPS lines. XPS is the odd man out, as they're "dual purpose" but the quality is more in line with their consumer junk.

I'm aware they make those distinctions, but other than Alienware definitely being high end consumer, I'm not seeing any material differences in XPS and Latitude regarding biz vs consumer. Vostro I haven't looked at at all as they lost me as a customer before that line came out.

Well, when they both break easily, there needs to be some way to differentiate them. Mind you, I've never broken a keyboard on a PC laptop. Seems we have had opposite experiences in that regard, so I'll chalk that up to I was lucky with PCs, you were luck with Macs, and they both have shit keyboards; being able to replace the keyboard easily and without disassembling the entire machine, then, becomes a discussion point.

I will agree that opening any MBP after 2015 is nontrivial, and you definitely have a case there if something breaks. Regarding solid keyboards - the original IBM Thinkpads has some seriously decent keyboards.

Examples? Much as I'm an Apple user, I am also an Android user, have been for 7 years, upgrade yearly simply because I want the latest and greatest, and have never seen this.

Very specifically the 4.2 releases on T-mobile vs AT&T vs Verizon vs the 4.4.x releases by each on the same type devices for those that were able to be upgraded. I don't recall specifically what the calls were that got broken, but switching between those devices while testing as far GUI interaction was concerned was ... excruciating.

Mining? On a laptop? No. As I was writing my previous post, I had a browser and an IDE open. I had been playing some YouTube videos while I was working, but paused them while I replied to you. Truly nothing strenuous; and, before you suggest I check it, my battery has seen 140 cycles, has a "full charge" capacity of 6385mAh, and reports condition "Normal". My battery is fine.

That just makes me more curious. My laptop generally runs at least 2 IDE instances, 2 DBs, at least 1 DB GUI client, at least 1 appserver, mail and calendar clients, 2 or 3 messaging clients, and any where from 0-100 browser tab/windows depending on the day and that day's work habits. I admit I do not play YouTube videos, or really any videos, but I do on occasion have itunes or other music media players running. Under that working load I can easily make 6 hours, even when running multiple builds with full tests, which tend to hammer that entire system. If I watch a movie, it's generally 5 or so odd hours.

If you're watching this under Safari, have you tuned Safari not to aggressively preload 1 or 2 layers of links? Otherwise, I'd seriously investigate what's eating your battery. There's no reason for that load to drop you down to 2 hours of battery life.

Consumer includes the Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware lines. Business includes the Vostro, Latitude, and XPS lines. XPS is the odd man out, as they're "dual purpose" but the quality is more in line with their consumer junk.

I'm aware they make those distinctions, but other than Alienware definitely being high end consumer, I'm not seeing any material differences in XPS and Latitude regarding biz vs consumer. Vostro I haven't looked at at all as they lost me as a customer before that line came out.

Well, when they both break easily, there needs to be some way to differentiate them. Mind you, I've never broken a keyboard on a PC laptop. Seems we have had opposite experiences in that regard, so I'll chalk that up to I was lucky with PCs, you were luck with Macs, and they both have shit keyboards; being able to replace the keyboard easily and without disassembling the entire machine, then, becomes a discussion point.

I will agree that opening any MBP after 2015 is nontrivial, and you definitely have a case there if something breaks. Regarding solid keyboards - the original IBM Thinkpads has some seriously decent keyboards.

That may or may not work, on that particular version. Yes, it's that bad.

Examples? Much as I'm an Apple user, I am also an Android user, have been for 7 years, upgrade yearly simply because I want the latest and greatest, and have never seen this.

Are you mining by chance? It's one of the few workloads (along with hi-res gaming) that would drain the battery in 3 hours or less.

Mining? On a laptop? No. As I was writing my previous post, I had a browser and an IDE open. I had been playing some YouTube videos while I was working, but paused them while I replied to you. Truly nothing strenuous; and, before you suggest I check it, my battery has seen 140 cycles, has a "full charge" capacity of 6385mAh, and reports condition "Normal". My battery is fine.

Not sure what's consumer and "business" from Dell these days.

Consumer includes the Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware lines. Business includes the Vostro, Latitude, and XPS lines. XPS is the odd man out, as they're "dual purpose" but the quality is more in line with their consumer junk.

changing the argument to one about keyboards being easily replaceable (really?) vs not breaking in the first place is shifting the original goal posts.

Well, when they both break easily, there needs to be some way to differentiate them. Mind you, I've never broken a keyboard on a PC laptop. Seems we have had opposite experiences in that regard, so I'll chalk that up to I was lucky with PCs, you were luck with Macs, and they both have shit keyboards; being able to replace the keyboard easily and without disassembling the entire machine, then, becomes a discussion point.

That may or may not work, on that particular version. Yes, it's that bad.

Examples? Much as I'm an Apple user, I am also an Android user, have been for 7 years, upgrade yearly simply because I want the latest and greatest, and have never seen this.

Are you mining by chance? It's one of the few workloads (along with hi-res gaming) that would drain the battery in 3 hours or less.

Mining? On a laptop? No. As I was writing my previous post, I had a browser and an IDE open. I had been playing some YouTube videos while I was working, but paused them while I replied to you. Truly nothing strenuous; and, before you suggest I check it, my battery has seen 140 cycles, has a "full charge" capacity of 6385mAh, and reports condition "Normal". My battery is fine.

Not sure what's consumer and "business" from Dell these days.

Consumer includes the Inspiron, XPS, and Alienware lines. Business includes the Vostro, Latitude, and XPS lines. XPS is the odd man out, as they're "dual purpose" but the quality is more in line with their consumer junk.

changing the argument to one about keyboards being easily replaceable (really?) vs not breaking in the first place is shifting the original goal posts.

Well, when they both break easily, there needs to be some way to differentiate them. Mind you, I've never broken a keyboard on a PC laptop. Seems we have had opposite experiences in that regard, so I'll chalk that up to I was lucky with PCs, you were luck with Macs, and they both have shit keyboards; being able to replace the keyboard easily and without disassembling the entire machine, then, becomes a discussion point.

I dunno, this computer runs things plenty fine for most non-techie people. Surfing, Facebook, e-mail, basic gaming, etc. All-in-one for under $500.

Must've been something like 13 years ago. For the life of me, I can't remember the type, but a quick search turned up this:
https://www.dell.com/community...
I just received my new Inspiron 8600. I love everything about it except the heat. I feel that there is too much heat on left side of the mouse pad area. As a result, my left palm hand is feeling so warm when I am typing. Is this normal situation for Inspiron 8600? It bothers me alot.

I definitely wasn't the only one. But it was ages ago, so who cares.

Same here. We had several Dell Precision 5520 laptops bricked after installing:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=NFKYX

We have several locations, and unfortunately our IT department didn't communicate that the update did that before I think five were bricked. We paid a lot extra for Dell's ProSupport Plus, but they have no solution yet and won't offer replacements.

That's not even remotely aimed at the same audience. That Alienware box looks like it's as thick as three MacBook Airs, stacked one on top of another.

The XPS 13 is designed more along the same lines as an Air - and still has an SD slot and a headphone jack.

You can pay $1,000 for Apple's bottom-of-the-line MacBook Air, or for just $150 more, you can get an Alienware 13.

Besides being a beast of a (small) laptop, the Alienware...has a headphone jack! And an RJ45, 3 USB 3 ports (type A and C), Thunderbolt, and HDMI.

If I were to buy a small laptop for around $1,000, I know which one I'd pick!

If the computer is running Windows 8, 8.1, or Windows 10 and had successfully been activated online at some point in its life, then you can download a Windows 8.1, or Windows 10 ISO directly from Microsoft for free online and reinstall the OS. Windows 8 is no longer available to download but you can install 8.1 on a machine that was running Windows 8. The license is digital and no longer requires entry of any license keys.

Regardless, here is Dell's information on how to obtain a replacement restore disc: https://www.dell.com/support/a...

Or online. As I have no idea of the size of the IAIAO and he wants it to use for photo editing under Windows, I assume he needs something like http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop...
Otherwise he could just use GIMP and ImageMagick under any Linux machine. I use a HP Chromebook that runs https://github.com/dnschneid/c... so I have both Linux an Chrome.

Crouton apparently stands for for ChRomium Os Universal chrooT envirONment ...or something like that. Only two disadvantages I found: Not possible to ssh to it. Not possible to mount NFS.

I don't want OLED. The quality degrades over time and not equally on each colour.

Posted from my computer with the same VP171s I used for over a decade and still working fine.

I've been using 4k tvs as monitors at my house for a couple years and the biggest issue is that even if you try for a tv with low reflections, you still get a lot of reflections, though it is manageable. I recently found out about this dell monitor 43 lcd

which might be a bit better. Apparently OLEDs are not magically better. As near as I can tell my next computer monitor is going to be something actually sold as a monitor again since they try a little harder for low reflections.

Has anyone found a good solution for low cost 4k monitors that have low reflections? You obviously don't need multiple monitors if you have one big tv. I know the problem with matte surfaces is you basically take a cut in resolution, though in some cases that seems worth it. I suppose you could put a filter in front of the screen. Has anyone tried that?

There may not be an official way, but if your possible systems are all from a limited set and you're really only having to differentiate between Windows and UEFI or DOS and Windows (the other poster pointed out that there's an official way of having both DOS and Windows entry points),

That was me

then it should be possible to find a system call that just provides information on both systems and has a return value that lets you tell them apart. You do this early and then jump to the relevant entry point.

The problem is that even though Windows and UEFI both use PE files, there are significant differences.

Windows applications use subsystem=2 for GUI and 3 for console

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

UEFI applications uses subsystem=10

http://wiki.osdev.org/UEFI#Bin...

Also windows executables are .exe and UEFI applications are .efi

I.e. it's hard to build a single executable that would pass the subsystem and file extension checks to run on both Windows and UEFI. Which of course is by design - otherwise people would run executables on the wrong platform and brick it.

Here it seems like Dell just distribute a bunch of different executables. One for Windows/FreeDOS(.exe), one for Linux(.bin) and one for UEFI (.efi)

http://www.dell.com/support/ho...

You could have them share a data file if space is at a premium.

Though a Win32/UEFI polyglot may be possible I can't find one. And I'm not sure how it would work.

The one possibility would be if Terse Executable files can begin at something other than offset zero in a file. TE files are a sort of stripped down PE file with all the unnecessary crap removed from the PE headers.

http://wiki.phoenix.com/wiki/i...

But it seems unlikely UEFI executable loader code is willing to skip bytes endlessly until it sees a VZ signature.

Like if someone internal goes to http://www.dell.com/, they can be sent to an internal site that fetches information from Dell's portal but shows the corporate pricing.

If the user is logged in to his user account on Dell's website, and this account has been configured with permission to show corporate pricing, then the site will show corporate pricing. The client IP address need not enter into it.

Or presents a different www.google.com front page that aggregates google's search with an internal search.

If the user is logged in to his Google Account, and this account has configured with permission to include internal search, then the results will include those of internal search. The client IP address need not enter into it.

Another common use case is that you as a company might want to present a different view of a site to your employees.

This is best done with authentication. Present the public view until the user has logged in as an employee. That way, even telecommuting employees will get the employee view.

Yes, but the site might be an external site. Like if someone internal goes to http://www.dell.com/, they can be sent to an internal site that fetches information from Dell's portal but shows the corporate pricing. Or presents a different www.google.com front page that aggregates google's search with an internal search. Or...

In order to satisfy those people with a single IGP, AMD has to build a GPU that's competitive in both domains. That's a challenge, to say the least.

I remember back in the Windows 2000 days reading that you could get by with a linear framebuffer. Adding acceleration had diminishing returns - much of the benefit came from a hardware cursor, line drawing and BitBlts. This was just to get the GUI running without lagging across the PCI bus. I know some systems which had a secondary monitor displaying data from an embedded system and allowed Windows to layer GUI elements on top of that and they were pretty much pure 8 bit greyscale frame buffers.

Of course most GPUs even then did a lot more than that, but the argument was that if you wanted to really strip things down you could get by with that. Most GPUs were labelled 'VGA compatible'. What that meant was that if you had a full screen DOS box Windows would release control of the graphics chip to NTVDM which would allow a Dos application to do register access. So theoretically old Dos games could get decent performance. I say theoretically because in practice they'd suck really badly - the CPU would be too fast, there was no emulation of a sound card, NT's NTDOS.SYS wasn't 100% compatible with MSDOS.SYS, NTVDM might not support your Dos extender and so on.

Now I bet most graphics cards don't support this now - 64 bit Windows doesn't even have NTVDM or any 16 bit support anymore.

Modern GPUs also did quite a bit of 3D acceleration even then - they supported Direct3D for example so WIndows games could render textured polygons to the screen with hardware acceleration. Of course back then the GUI didn't depend on any of that.

Problem is Windows has moved on quite a bit since then - I reckon you'd need to support a fairly wide feature set just to get the Windows GUI to run acceptably with compositing and for videos to play GPU accelerated.

Maybe AMD could do the equivalent of a big.LITTLE design. I.e. one small, low power GPU core to run the desktop and one large high power one which wakes up to do anything more complex. Or even a small low power GPU core and a bunch of modules to accelerate video, 3D etc.

Funny thing is NVidia's Optimus is basically a big.LITTLE equivalent. An laptop with NVIdia uses the Intel IGP for non demanding stuff and then switches over to the discrete NVidia graphics chip for demanding stuff. It still seems like Optimus isn't perfect though - laptops with it have worse battery life than a pure Intel IGP system even when not playing games.

AMD have an equivalent, though I've never used it

http://www.dell.com/support/ar...

Theoretically AMD should be able to beat Intel and NVidia at this. Intel and NVidia are not on good terms and have both sued each other whereas AMD bought ATI and thus controls the GPU design team - i.e. rather than having to cooperate between two companies to switch between two complete GPUs with separate, binary drivers, it should be possible for AMD to go for the modular approach if they control the CPU, GPU and all the driver code.

In fact that possibility is presumably why they bought ATI in the first place.

Still looking at this review they're not there yet.

Dell has the ethernet access tied to a code that is in the server case (if it is not permanently disabled), still limited to physical access, but could have somebody else report the number to you

Don't compare the consumer lines to the professional. They're designed by different groups. My wife's Inspiron required a near complete teardown to get to the hard drive.

http://www.dell.com/support/ma...

I'm considering a new laptop this Black Friday

Unless you need the latest and greatest the old ones work fine. I have a M6700 from 2012. The i7-3940xm still benchmarks fairly well. You can get one used laptop with CPU on Ebay for under $1k.

Strangely I just checked and the XPS13 which was the laptop they used to offer it on doesn't seem to be available in the states.

Tell a lie, they seem to be avaliable on special offer.

Please show me one laptop manufacturer that has a force-sensitive trackpad that doubles as a screen. Show me one.

Ok. Remember, a touch screen is nothing more than a touch pad overlaid on top of a display, and that all capacitive touch pads are pressure sensitive. That literally means that every capacitive touch display is exactly that. It's not accurate enough to serious use, which is why there's an optional active stylus available (and why the iPad Pro uses an active stylus -- the Apple Pencil -- rather than force touch). Force touch existed in the 90's (though not under that name) as nothing more than a gimmick, and that's all it remains to this day.

But, there you have it. There's your "one manufacturer with a touch-sensitive trackpad that doubles as a screen."

There are many, many more, as well.

There's no less than two companies (and maybe more, I just haven't been looking that hard) that make better MacBook Pros than Apple, with the single feature they can't do better is that you can't (legally) run macOS on them.

https://www.razerzone.com/gami...
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop...

Both have better displays, better GPUs, better RAM capacity, better CPU options, and are maybe slightly heavier, but not when you figure on all the dongles you'll have to pack around with you on the Mac to plug in shit you already own, or may run across.

Oh, they are also massively cheaper, even before the overpriced dongles. Apple is just behind, and it's by their own doing. And I say this as someone who has used an Apple laptop since the PowerBook 5300.

But if you like Windows go with 7 or 8.1 [for the time being] and see what developments there have been as they approach those end dates.

Which raises the question of where to get a Windows 7 license for a newly purchased PC that came with Windows 10 Home. Windows Home has no downgrade rights according to this table. Would you recommend that everybody who buys a new PC with Windows spring for the Pro upgrade just for the downgrade rights?

You know, if you're going to be condescending and sarcastic, you could at least know what the fuck you're talking about, since apparently you have been asleep the last 20 years. I'll just go ahead and do a five second google and link you to Dell's offerings for the data center. I mean, whoever heard of GPU assisted computing, right? XD

I have one of those Magma boxes at work and have considered shoving a graphics card in there just to see what happens, but I don't have time to just play.

Dell has something akin to that which looks really awesome to me and it has mostly good feedback, but it's a proprietary cable so it limits what you can do with it.

Thunderbolt 2, like my Magma box supports, just doesn't have the bandwidth to really do 3D right, but it's great for desktop.

Now - to get Intel to release their death-grip on Thunderbolt so AMD and ARM stuff can play also.

Not easy to find but they still offer it for the Precision 5000 workstation line http://www.dell.com/en-us/work...

I've got a story about that.

We have a $10,000 Mac up in our studio. It's about three years old, but it's fair to compare it to a system I just built because Apple hasn't really updates their line.

A guy in our digital department (not part of the studio) needed to do his own video editing and wanted a $6,000 Mac to do it on. He wanted a quad core system with plenty of RAM. The company isn't spending much money these days.

I explained to him how Adobe and Apple have sort of been at war for about ten years and don't like each other all that much these days. I explained that Windows 10 finally got "the bones right" and that unlike previous versions of Windows is pretty danged stable and reliable, and it performs well. I said this and I've been a MIcrosoft hater for two decades, but I can't deny it - even if I don't like the extra layers of spyware, advertising, and some user interface decisions. I explained he wasn't going to be able to spend $6,000 but I could build him more or less a gaming system.

We got approved to spend $1,500.

I built him a system based on an ASUS 970 Gaming Aura, a GeForce 1070 (the 1080 was just out of budget), 32 GB of RAM, a 500 GB SSD to boot to, a 1TB hybrid drive for \Users, and an 8 core Athlon CPU.

It outperforms that $10,000 Mac in the studio.

Fine - it doesn't have Thunderbolt - but it doesn't need it. What it does have that the Mac doesn't is PCIe slots which I think are better if you're only going to have one anyways.

If I were to have had a $2,500 budget it probably would have had Thunderbolt, along with SLI 1080's. Honestly for the type of video editing he did the graphics card didn't really need to be all that kick-ass, the CPU does a lot of the processing, but I like to overkill that stuff.

The user was very happy with it, and even asked me to remove the iMac he already had at his desk because he no longer used it.

I tell our Mac people all the time that they could do their job cheaper with better hardware if they switch to PC, but Mac is so ingrained in their culture they won't even talk about it most of the time. I knew the user I built the system for - he wasn't a cultist, he was a pragmatist with a job to do, when he wanted a new system it really made my day because I knew he would be open to me making a gaming system for him.

I'm trying to tempt some of them over - especially the laptop people - by showing off the Alienware Graphic Amplifier which is about the most bad-assed thing I've seen for a laptop.

RAM is cheap

Unless you've already installed the largest RAM modules that your PC will take. I've seen new PCs for sale with no option to reconfigure for more RAM. For example, this product detail page for an Inspiron 11 3000 laptop mentions "2GB" but doesn't offer any choice to upgrade at build time nor state what sort of RAM slot it has.

> Until companies that make small laptops stop making small laptops.

Dell disagrees. 329.99 pesos^H^H^H^H^H Canadian dollars (approx $250 US) for an Inspiron 11 3000 with 4 gigs of RAM. http://www.dell.com/ca/p/inspi...

1366x768 11.6 inc screen is OK. The 32 gig eMMC drive may suck for capacity, but is reasonably safe from damage when the bus is travelling on a bumpy road. At home, plug in an external USB hard drive to a USB port (2.0 or 3.0). Or use a USB key. 256 gig keys are reasonably priced nowadays.

This is not just about phones. It's also about laptops.

Here's a link to a Dell Latitude manual that explains how to replace parts:

http://downloads.dell.com/manu...

Please provide a similar link for a Macbook repair guide. Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

> My old Dell Latitude E6440 with 16 GB of low power memory used to last about 50 minutes on battery power

50 Minutes? that's horrible - even for a Dell.
But they claim to have 500+ minutes according to this marketing blurb! So you're getting 1/10th the listed battery life?

https://marketing.dell.com/Glo...

That they too can sell overpriced underspecd gear now?

What's underspecced about a device that will ultimately be used to process documents and browse the internet? If your goal is to play Doom 2016 on it, you're running a fools errand.

Hell not being able to load it with that crap may actually be a plus for educational institutions. In the mean time find us some other devices with similar specs for a better price.

Here's one now from Dell: http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop...
It's $1 cheaper.

Kaby Lake CPUs didn't come out at all until October 2016 and, when they did, all of the quad-core SKUs supported 64GB of RAM. That's irrelevant, though, as the Kaby Lake CPUs aren't what's in the 2016 MBP. The two prior generations (at least) supported 32GB. That includes the i5-6360U in the lowest-end 2016 MacBook Pro.

So, what's the excuse, again?

So, I went back and re-read some of the articles that came out at the time the 2016 MBPs were launched, and it turns out that I was sort of right; but not exactly right.

The real issue was that (if I got this right, synthesizing from a couple of different articles) the CPUs that were due to come out, but didn't, were due to support LPDDR4 (low-power DDR4) RAM, and when they didn't come out as promised by Intel, Apple chose to use a memory controller that supported LPDDR3 RAM (because that's all the CPU would support?), but limited it to 16 GB due to concerns with battery-life.

And that is a legitimate concern; because, if you visit the product-forums for the laptops that do support more than 16 GB of RAM, you will find scores of complaints about hideous battery life, whereas, Apple just got praised for being the only laptop manufacturer who actually generally meets or exceeds their battery-life claims.

http://www.dell.com/ca/p/inspi... Dell Inspiron 11" lattop/netbook with 4 gigabytes of ram and 32GB eMMC drive is $329.99 Canadian, which translates to $240 US, probably lower in the USA. We get shafted on prices here in Canada.

Can someone recommend a Linux distro where basic stuff like the mouse wheel works properly? Now that OPAL v2 is getting proper support I really want to switch.

I'm not a noob, I use Linux servers and embedded systems all the time, but the two desktops I tried recently (Mint Cinnamon and Ubuntu) were broken and/or generally sucked. I don't want to waste time trying them all if I can help it.

Unfortunately the meme that you can just install Linux on any PC is very common; whilst it's true that experts almost always can, and hobbyists will eventually succeed beginners who need something for real work should not listen. Your is not a distro problem. Your problem is a hardware problem. You need to buy a Linux computer, not buy Windows computer and then try to convert it (think of the difficulty you would have running OSX on a standard PC - Linux is not that bad, but you would laugh if someone complained to Apple that they don't support PC hardware).

There are a number of companies making Linux computers, for example:

• https://system76.com/ - System76 - one of the most dedicated producers
• Dell - the call them "Developers Edition"

Buy a computer from one of them. You will then have someone responsible for making sure your hardware has appropriate and working device drivers.

Fun fact: Quad sockets are SUPER-RARE.

Go ahead. Try and Google for a quad motherboard. They haven't made them since like... the Athlon 64-era Opterons.

Really? You should tell all the people that are making quad socket servers today.

• Quad socket Xeon E5 system
• Quad socket Xeon E7 system

Maybe you should try following your own advice.

There's one 13" model, three 15" models, and two 17" models. You've got options.

http://www.dell.com/developers

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.

• Precision 3520
• Precision 5520
• Precision 7710
• Precision 7510

They offer it on desktops too.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.

• Precision 3520
• Precision 5520
• Precision 7710
• Precision 7510

They offer it on desktops too.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.

• Precision 3520
• Precision 5520
• Precision 7710
• Precision 7510

They offer it on desktops too.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.

• Precision 3520
• Precision 5520
• Precision 7710
• Precision 7510

They offer it on desktops too.

Not sure how you come to that conclusion, I can't think of a place more obvious to look for such things than their website. And if you were to look at their website you would find there is plenty to choose from (yes in Australia). If the bar is set too high at the idea of hitting "customize" when buying a computer then there isn't much hope of Linux on the desktop in the consumer space.

• Precision 3520
• Precision 5520
• Precision 7710
• Precision 7510

They offer it on desktops too.

There are some lower priced models if you don't need an i7. Core i5 at $999. http://www.dell.com/us/busines...