scott wrote:
>> More like, the stickers on the front say something that looks like 
>> gibberish with the occasional "Core 2 Duo" or something thrown in. ;-)
> 
> Aww I feel left out now, my laptop didn't have any such stickers :-(  
> (well I assume the tiny "Intel Centrino Duo" will be the same in any 
> language)
> 
> OOC I wonder why they put those stickers on there, on my monitor I have 
> 3 such things in barely readable text size that say it's created for 
> Windows Vista (WTF!), energy star, and TCO 03.  Will it make me more 
> likely to buy it because of those stickers, or are they hoping someone 
> else will notice them on my monitor and say "oh wow that Samsung monitor 
> you have there is so cool with its 3 tiny stickers like that".

Yes, I especially like the way you buy a laptop and just below the 
keyboard there's a huge sticker saying something like

"Experience the future with the new Acer Aspire 1352642. Fitted with the 
latest cutting-edge technology, this is truely a laptop of the future. 
Fast, powerful and energy efficient, it embodies the Acer vision of the 
digital lifestyle. [etc]"

Seriously, WTF??

I ALREADY BOUGHT THE LAPTOP! How is sticking an advert to it going to 
make me buy it even more?

Now, if the laptop is sitting in a shop window, that's another matter. 
But it isn't. It's sitting in my house, where nobody except me will ever 
see it. Go figure...

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Gilles Tran wrote:
> 2 GB is enough,

1 GB is "enough" if you keep a clean install and you don't use it for 
memory-sucking programs like POV-Ray. The laptop will probably come loaded 
with all kinds of "helpers" that for some reason try to replace (poorly) 
what Vista does for you anyway (display controllers, NIC controllers, etc). 
But 1G leaves about 450M comfortably free on my wife's machine, so it only 
thrashes around a little when she has five or six programs open. Of course, 
   a laptop is probably going to have a slower disk, too, so...

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Invisible wrote:
> Anyone wanna take a guess at what kind of RAM it requires?

Looks like DDR3 SDRAM SO DIMM 200-pin. :-) It looks like 3G too.

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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Darren New wrote:
> Gilles Tran wrote:
>> 2 GB is enough,
> 
> 1 GB is "enough" if you keep a clean install and you don't use it for 
> memory-sucking programs like POV-Ray.

POV-Ray is memory-sucking? I haven't checked recently, but IIRC last 
time I looked, Explore.exe uses about 30MB to POV-Ray's 2MB. (Depending 
on what you're rendering, obviously.) IE or Firefox also drinks RAM like 
it's going out of fashion...

> The laptop will probably come 
> loaded with all kinds of "helpers" that for some reason try to replace 
> (poorly) what Vista does for you anyway (display controllers, NIC 
> controllers, etc).

Yes. Acer especially seems to like to do this. It's usually easy to 
remove all that stuff.

(I *really* hope this laptop comes with propper restore CDs. I got an HP 
a while back, and rather than give you a restore CD, they make you go 
through the initial Windows setup process, and then order you to burn a 
drive backup to [several] CDs/DVDs. In other words, *you* pay for the 
cost of something to restore from, and you can't restore to factory 
condition.)

> But 1G leaves about 450M comfortably free on my 
> wife's machine, so it only thrashes around a little when she has five or 
> six programs open. Of course,   a laptop is probably going to have a 
> slower disk, too, so...

Yes, 5200 RPM disk. (Like it matters...)

The laptop comes with 2GB, and I've ordered an additional 2GB because it 
was cheap.

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Invisible wrote:
> POV-Ray is memory-sucking? 

It does if you programmatically build scenes with lots of stuff in them. 
Aren't there regular complaints about running up against the 2^32 memory 
space in POV?

> (Depending on what you're rendering, obviously.) 

Of course.

You're unlikely to use as much RAM with a Word document as you are with a 
Menger sponge. :-) And your paging is likely to be much less with Word, even 
if you do, due to the way you access memory in the two programs.

Or, more generally, it's not hard to write your own program that will use up 
much more memory than you can use up using non-user-programmed software.

> Yes. Acer especially seems to like to do this. It's usually easy to 
> remove all that stuff.

That's cool.

> (I *really* hope this laptop comes with propper restore CDs. I got an HP 
> a while back, and rather than give you a restore CD, they make you go 
> through the initial Windows setup process, and then order you to burn a 
> drive backup to [several] CDs/DVDs. In other words, *you* pay for the 
> cost of something to restore from, and you can't restore to factory 
> condition.)

The restore CDs one makes this way are usually factory-condition CDs, not 
just a backup. They're actually generating a CD based on the files on the 
disk, not just making an image backup.

The more advanced versions of Vista have a "complete PC backup", which is a 
very nice drive-image backup that will very simply do a full restore from 
the boot CDs.

> The laptop comes with 2GB, and I've ordered an additional 2GB because it 
> was cheap.

Oh. The link you gave (with the Italian) said it came with 3G. Extra RAM 
never hurts, tho. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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>> POV-Ray is memory-sucking? 
> 
> It does if you programmatically build scenes with lots of stuff in them. 
> Aren't there regular complaints about running up against the 2^32 memory 
> space in POV?

Don't look at me. I've never had that trouble.

> You're unlikely to use as much RAM with a Word document as you are with 
> a Menger sponge. :-) And your paging is likely to be much less with 
> Word, even if you do, due to the way you access memory in the two programs.
> 
> Or, more generally, it's not hard to write your own program that will 
> use up much more memory than you can use up using non-user-programmed 
> software.

Well, yeah.

I do recall attempting to use volumetric photon maps and being unable to 
do so because POV-Ray swallowed several times the amount of physical RAM 
on the machine, and then attempted to destroy my harddrive.

Seriously, has *anybody* ever rendered something using volumetric 
photons and had it work??

>> (I *really* hope this laptop comes with propper restore CDs. I got an 
>> HP a while back, and rather than give you a restore CD, they make you 
>> go through the initial Windows setup process, and then order you to 
>> burn a drive backup to [several] CDs/DVDs. In other words, *you* pay 
>> for the cost of something to restore from, and you can't restore to 
>> factory condition.)
> 
> The restore CDs one makes this way are usually factory-condition CDs, 
> not just a backup. They're actually generating a CD based on the files 
> on the disk, not just making an image backup.

Well, we'll see.

I still dislike having to pay for the restore CDs myself. :-P

> The more advanced versions of Vista have a "complete PC backup", which 
> is a very nice drive-image backup that will very simply do a full 
> restore from the boot CDs.

It looks like that's what my mum's Acer did. Does a complete backup of 
your harddrive - although I think you have to run the restore program 
from the PC. (So, if your HD dies, the backup is no use until you 
reinstall the restore program. Nice...)

>> The laptop comes with 2GB, and I've ordered an additional 2GB because 
>> it was cheap.
> 
> Oh. The link you gave (with the Italian) said it came with 3G. Extra RAM 
> never hurts, tho. :-)

I just hope the laptop has more than one RAM slot...! o_O

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Invisible wrote:
> I do recall attempting to use volumetric photon maps and being unable to 
> do so because POV-Ray swallowed several times the amount of physical RAM 
> on the machine, and then attempted to destroy my harddrive.

That's the sort of thing I was talking about, yes. :-)

> Well, we'll see.

Well, that was for HP. Others may do it differently. My Motion Computing 
laptop came with CDs that were the bog-standard XP install CD with a script 
tacked on the end that prompts for the second CD full of laptop-specific 
drivers and patches.

> I still dislike having to pay for the restore CDs myself. :-P

Probably cheaper than Dell manufacturing and shipping them. I.e., you'd pay 
for them anyway, but it would be included in the higher price of the laptop.

> It looks like that's what my mum's Acer did. Does a complete backup of 
> your harddrive - although I think you have to run the restore program 
> from the PC. (So, if your HD dies, the backup is no use until you 
> reinstall the restore program. Nice...)

Ick. That's silly, considering there's a full-backup program in Vista and a 
restore program on the Vista CD they could have used.

> I just hope the laptop has more than one RAM slot...! o_O

It said it has 1x1G and 1x2G included. You *did* read the chart, didn't you? 
Is that the one you ordered?

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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scott wrote:
> Will it make me more likely to buy it because of those stickers,

If some corporate dude needs to buy 8000 monitors, it might.

 > I ALREADY BOUGHT THE LAPTOP! How is sticking an advert to it going to 
make me buy it even more?

You bought it mail order. When you go in a store and look at the floor 
models, it's built-in advertising they don't have to rely on the store to 
provide.

 > It's sitting in my house,
So peel it off when you get it home. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   There's no CD like OCD, there's no CD I knoooow!

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On Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:12:35 -0700, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:

>
> > It's sitting in my house,
>So peel it off when you get it home. :-)

That is a PITA. The sticker comes off and you spend three weeks removing all the
glue. If you don't take it off it slowly uncurls and irritates your hand.

The seventh tier of hell for these guys.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I ALREADY BOUGHT THE LAPTOP! How is sticking an advert to it going to
> make me buy it even more?
>
> Now, if the laptop is sitting in a shop window, that's another matter.
> But it isn't. It's sitting in my house, where nobody except me will ever
> see it. Go figure...

Two more things to what Darren said: They want you to be satisfied - just before
you go through the headache of personalizing a new system.  Something along the
lines of the "thankyou for purchasing our quality product" like in a user
manual.  Also I'm sure they wouldn't want you to think it looked 'plain' after
you open the box ;)
Charles

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