" It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers."
I respectfully disagree. Learning to use a computer in the way that you'll very likely be using it later in college and at work is one of the few sane things about school. In "IT class" (7th grade, I think it was), we learned basic HTML, Excel (formulas, charts, little tiny intro to macro) and basic Word (headings, automatic generation of dynamic content, how to use headers and footers and all that junk) and to this day I find that stuff useful. Every time I write internal documentation of any sort, or papers, or anything else more extensive than a one-page letter, it's great to simply be "fluent" in Office instead of having to Google the more advanced stuff (something I see my coworkers doing a lot)...
Interesting, what do you mean by more demanding resolutions? I haven't had any problems whatsoever with good old 1080p source material, even when playing back on high-res displays (2560x1600) with rather old hardware.
Are you playing 4k or 8k something else insane? Have you checked your CPU load? Activated HWA decoding?
Sorry if I'm being dense but... Click where? Sure, clicking and dragging down is easy, but how the hell are you supposed to know that? Not everyone reads Slashdot:-P
I've been playing around with Windows 8 on and off for weeks now (with a keyboard, mind you), and I didn't know anything about click-and-drag-down for closing apps...
Except that just typing what you want is broken in Windows 8. Anything other than app names requires extra keystrokes or clicks to switch categories... example: typing background and pressing enter takes you to the desktop background settings on Win7. Windows 8 just gives you no search results... it's the same for all the other control panel tasks that worked fine in Windows 7...
I'm sticking with Windows 7 for this reason alone... have Win8 pro 64bit running in a VM too, but it usually only takes me about half a minute to get to the point where I want to throw the laptop out the Window and switch back to 7.
Don't get me wrong - Windows 8 is great, but only on tablets...
Now why would you want to keep that upgrade treadmill running? I for one quite enjoy the fact that I can play many of the latest games on a $100 video card and can focus on efficiency (just bought a Radeon 7750, which doesn't even need an additional power connector) instead of brute force... And the games look great. Does Battlefield 3 (the first PC game I've played that nearly *requires* a quad-core to run well) really look better than, say, Call of Duty MW3? MW3 feels like it needs about half the processing power that BF3 does, but visually, the difference is pretty minimal.
Am I missing something big here? Hell, I must be... I'm still gaming on a Core 2 Quad:p
What I consider a usable laptop? At bare minimum, Core i3 level horsepower backed up by at least 4 gigs of RAM and a real SATA(3) SSD. Which is, in terms of perceived speed, about 100x the power of the proposed design, even for basic internet and office use.
The existence of a niche doesn't mean a product isn't effectively dead.
I can see the appeal of E-Ink, but the benefits (long battery life, high contrast, little eye strain) don't really outweigh the negatives for me (mainly that you can't use it for anything else and therefore have to carry yet another device). And to me, AMOLED or a good IPS LCD set to less than retina-searing brightness levels is close enough (I'm currently reading my eBooks on a Galaxy Nexus).
You should always ask yourself whether you really need to be playing games or doing 3D content creation on a device with a very small thermal envelope, limited power consumption and limited screen space... eventually you'll reach the point where it's easier to put a desktop in every room and just lug a hot-swappable hard drive or sync everything.
And apart from gaming, a lot of the high-horsepower stuff is easily done on a workstation via RDP...:)
"...the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time."
Unless you need more than a few hours of battery life at a time. I've been buying solely Intel graphics based Thinkpads for a few years now, and currently I no longer need to carry a power supply with me... the 9-cell in my T520 lasts all day (from about 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM when I get home, with a few short breaks for lunch and such... I use public transit, so it's usually in use during transit as well). Can't see doing that on nVidia graphics (I'm getting about 12-13 hours of actual use on a charge, while colleagues with the NVS4200 based T420/T520 get about 6 hours when they turn Optimus off in the BIOS - and that's with the same 94Wh 9-cell battery).
SSD, gobs of RAM, lots of CPU power, nice bright screen with high resolution... all of these things belong on a laptop because they're useful in places where you can only use a laptop, without significantly reducing battery life or being useless 80% of the time.
High powered gaming graphics, on the other hand, belong in desktops or luggable workstations... or in an eGPU unit.
No, he was complaining about nVidia Optimus (nVidia's switchable graphics), which isn't properly supported on Linux. The Intel graphics part seems to be working fine...
If 1600x900 is too low, look no farther than the T530... a little bit bigger, but only very slightly heavier (not really noticable if both machines have a 9-cell battery installed) than the T430, and the screen is fantastic (MUCH better than the T430 1600x900 screens). 1080p, great color reproduction, extremely bright, high contrast, and very wide viewing angles as far as TN panels go. Now if only there was a 2560x1440 version...:D
It's a big honkin 27" all-in-one touch-screen desktop computer... so pretty much a big tablet. If you can't get the full Windows 8 experience on that, you'll never get it on a dinky little tablet.
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Don't forget shopping lists (when the Tasks pane in Google Calendar won't suffice)... :)
" It's dumb for school districts to buy Office for most of their computers."
I respectfully disagree. Learning to use a computer in the way that you'll very likely be using it later in college and at work is one of the few sane things about school. In "IT class" (7th grade, I think it was), we learned basic HTML, Excel (formulas, charts, little tiny intro to macro) and basic Word (headings, automatic generation of dynamic content, how to use headers and footers and all that junk) and to this day I find that stuff useful. Every time I write internal documentation of any sort, or papers, or anything else more extensive than a one-page letter, it's great to simply be "fluent" in Office instead of having to Google the more advanced stuff (something I see my coworkers doing a lot)...
Interesting, what do you mean by more demanding resolutions? I haven't had any problems whatsoever with good old 1080p source material, even when playing back on high-res displays (2560x1600) with rather old hardware.
Are you playing 4k or 8k something else insane? Have you checked your CPU load? Activated HWA decoding?
... and focus on finishing the Android version.
Sorry if I'm being dense but... Click where? Sure, clicking and dragging down is easy, but how the hell are you supposed to know that? Not everyone reads Slashdot :-P
I've been playing around with Windows 8 on and off for weeks now (with a keyboard, mind you), and I didn't know anything about click-and-drag-down for closing apps...
Except that just typing what you want is broken in Windows 8. Anything other than app names requires extra keystrokes or clicks to switch categories... example: typing background and pressing enter takes you to the desktop background settings on Win7. Windows 8 just gives you no search results... it's the same for all the other control panel tasks that worked fine in Windows 7...
I'm sticking with Windows 7 for this reason alone... have Win8 pro 64bit running in a VM too, but it usually only takes me about half a minute to get to the point where I want to throw the laptop out the Window and switch back to 7.
Don't get me wrong - Windows 8 is great, but only on tablets...
Now why would you want to keep that upgrade treadmill running? I for one quite enjoy the fact that I can play many of the latest games on a $100 video card and can focus on efficiency (just bought a Radeon 7750, which doesn't even need an additional power connector) instead of brute force... And the games look great. Does Battlefield 3 (the first PC game I've played that nearly *requires* a quad-core to run well) really look better than, say, Call of Duty MW3? MW3 feels like it needs about half the processing power that BF3 does, but visually, the difference is pretty minimal.
Am I missing something big here? Hell, I must be... I'm still gaming on a Core 2 Quad :p
What I consider a usable laptop? At bare minimum, Core i3 level horsepower backed up by at least 4 gigs of RAM and a real SATA(3) SSD. Which is, in terms of perceived speed, about 100x the power of the proposed design, even for basic internet and office use.
USB 3.0? It's an ARM based design that uses a SD card for storage... how are you going to saturate even USB 2.0?
And here I was, all excited, thinking someone had designed their own *laptop* and not an oversized clamshell smartphone... :(
Is your IT staff mostly on touchscreen devices? Or do I detect a faint whiff of masochism? :p
The existence of a niche doesn't mean a product isn't effectively dead.
I can see the appeal of E-Ink, but the benefits (long battery life, high contrast, little eye strain) don't really outweigh the negatives for me (mainly that you can't use it for anything else and therefore have to carry yet another device). And to me, AMOLED or a good IPS LCD set to less than retina-searing brightness levels is close enough (I'm currently reading my eBooks on a Galaxy Nexus).
3360x1440 on the other hand would be acceptable.
Don't forget low resolution... standard 16:9 27" monitors have the same horizontal resolution and hundreds of pixels more vertically...
LOL, me too :(
Those $400 2560x1440 eBay monitors from Korea are starting to look pretty good though... :D
Um... no. This reasoning applies to all OSs... :)
You should always ask yourself whether you really need to be playing games or doing 3D content creation on a device with a very small thermal envelope, limited power consumption and limited screen space... eventually you'll reach the point where it's easier to put a desktop in every room and just lug a hot-swappable hard drive or sync everything.
And apart from gaming, a lot of the high-horsepower stuff is easily done on a workstation via RDP... :)
"...the battery life on my thinkpad is just fine using the NVidia gfx 100% of the time."
Unless you need more than a few hours of battery life at a time. I've been buying solely Intel graphics based Thinkpads for a few years now, and currently I no longer need to carry a power supply with me... the 9-cell in my T520 lasts all day (from about 6:30 AM to 7:00 PM when I get home, with a few short breaks for lunch and such... I use public transit, so it's usually in use during transit as well). Can't see doing that on nVidia graphics (I'm getting about 12-13 hours of actual use on a charge, while colleagues with the NVS4200 based T420/T520 get about 6 hours when they turn Optimus off in the BIOS - and that's with the same 94Wh 9-cell battery).
On a laptop? Yeah, you're doing it wrong.
SSD, gobs of RAM, lots of CPU power, nice bright screen with high resolution... all of these things belong on a laptop because they're useful in places where you can only use a laptop, without significantly reducing battery life or being useless 80% of the time.
High powered gaming graphics, on the other hand, belong in desktops or luggable workstations... or in an eGPU unit.
No, he was complaining about nVidia Optimus (nVidia's switchable graphics), which isn't properly supported on Linux. The Intel graphics part seems to be working fine...
Actually, that DisplayPort supports 2560x1600 output without problems... 1080p is child's play for an X220 ;)
If 1600x900 is too low, look no farther than the T530... a little bit bigger, but only very slightly heavier (not really noticable if both machines have a 9-cell battery installed) than the T430, and the screen is fantastic (MUCH better than the T430 1600x900 screens). 1080p, great color reproduction, extremely bright, high contrast, and very wide viewing angles as far as TN panels go. Now if only there was a 2560x1440 version... :D
It's a big honkin 27" all-in-one touch-screen desktop computer... so pretty much a big tablet. If you can't get the full Windows 8 experience on that, you'll never get it on a dinky little tablet.
Actually, the models you're speaking of are likely to all be old stock. I'd bet many of them even still have CCFL backlighting...
Sounds like you should be looking for a better browser rather than a virus scanner. How exactly are these sites infecting you?
But Youtube is definitely accelerated... and that's whee he's having problems.