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Notebook Sales Outpace Desktop Sales
mikesd81 writes "Eweek reports that notebook sales have surpassed desktop sales for the first time in history. 'In the third quarter of 2008, notebook PC shipments rose almost 40 percent compared with the same period of 2007 to reach 38.6 million units. Conversely, desktop PC shipments declined by 1.3 percent for the same period to 38.5 million units. "Momentum has been building in the notebook market for some time, so it's not a complete surprise that shipments have surpassed those of desktops," said iSuppli principal analyst for computer platforms Matthew Wilkins. "However, this marks a major event in the PC market because it marks the start of the age of the notebook." ... The FBI's National Crime Information Center reported that the number of reported laptop thefts increased almost 48 percent over the last two years, to nearly 109,000 from 73,700.'"
Many parts in a laptop are user-replaceable/upradeable. The parts that matter, at least, such as the HDD and memory, for instance. Graphics cards and such often are not, however. PCMCIA was supposed to address this whole problem, but even that has its limitations.
My blog
Microsoft has one very big problem: they totally missed the low-power PC revolution. They have sunk insane amounts of money into their new OS that, as tradition has it, is slower and demands better hardware than the previous one, and released it when (1) XP had just started to mature enough for people to consider it good enough and (2) when the best selling PCs can't run it.
What they should do now is split OS lines, i.e. support XP for small PCs, and Vista for big machines, instead of trying to kill off XP. But they'll never do that, they're much too stubborn.
As for growing XP registry and general mess on the system, that's easy:
- Disable automatic Windows update. Yes, get a decent AV, a decent non-Microsoft browser, a decent non-Microsoft firewall, behave rationally when you browse the web and you'll be just fine. Each new update of Windows seem to be worse than the previous one anyway; one could almost believe they're trying to make XP worse than Vista for some reason I can't fathom. [/sarcasm]
- Disable prefetching for anything but boot programs. You'll recover many MANY megabytes of disk space, and you'll boot a ton faster.
- Run things like ccleaner regularly
- If you're really short of disk space, consider nLite
(This post made on a EeePC 901 w/ XP)
overgrown PDAs that still don't have enough pixels to do anything useful with.
It's painfully obvious that you're talking out of your arse and you don't have a netbook.
For what it's worth, I use SolidWorks 2008 on my EeePC 901 professionally. Sure the screen isn't as nice as a big desktop thing, but it's perfectly usable.
Huh? You can get serial ports, firewire,eSATA,parallel ,or a converter to PCMCIA
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They're almost there though : http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini?mco=MTE3MDI
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I believe you're right about IBM's nomenclature, but as I was *building* machines or upgrading, the case size was "AT". The original box I bought was, indeed, an IBM PC II (8086) 8Mhz. IIRC. I upgraded it to a 386sx then a 486 from Cyrix/IBM before ditching the case as its form factor was enormous (you may remember them from museums...) and wouldn't mount a 3 1/2" drive without an adapter.
Outside in the park? Out at the pub! With friends??? Lounging at a coffee shop!!! These people you speak of are NOT geeks.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."