(October 30, 2011 at 6:03 am)apophenia Wrote: I'm not gonna make apologies for the above comments. People who are very computer literate often forget what a challenge things can be for someone not as technically advanced, and, in my experience, have an undesirable tendency to engage in snobbery and elitism. I've been building my own machines for over 10 years, but if I were to go to buy something today, I'd have an immense research project on my hands. The technology changes so fast, and it is difficult for the inexperienced to navigate their way around a morass of what is often conflicting and uninformative technical advice (which likely includes this post, lacking clear suggestions). Anyway, you have my sympathies, though I suspect (hope) that once the unit is replaced, your frustrations will be reduced to much more manageable and solvable ones.
True, apophenia, I would agree with you taking up issue with the lack of help here if that was all it was. However, I do note that Padraic often purchases computer equipment and then manages to discover some show stopping flaw with it, whatever it is. As such, the solution, in my mind, is not to purchase another one but to discover why, just why, the equipment we hear about fails so often.
I suspect that either Padraic simply has terrible, terrible luck (it takes me months to decide what my next target computer is; so I am leaning heavily towards this interpretation) or has the static thumb for computers.
Unfortunately for him, asking for "what is best?" never works, because the build quality, price, performance, etc, etc, all do influence each other. But it is an imperfect world, and we never exactly know what his needs precisely are. This contributes to him being given advice to buy computers that are probably unstable to begin with, but the audience to whom those computers are targeted to either doesn't care about that or simply replaces it on a whim.
Pad is not that audience, and as such, will fell shafted time and time again with hardware that, for him, will be of too-low-quality.
I'd advise a Panasonic Toughbook (http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughb...puters.asp). Wait and see.
If Padraic manages to break one of these quickly, I'm uncertain of any computer surviving him over a month.
Slave to the Patriarchy no more
