New Laptop/notebook help required!!

[OatFedGoat]

I bought two laptops at the weekend. The mother in law is visiting for a month(!) and disaproves of poker so I needed a portable refuge uregently as my two PC's are in the spare room and my better half needed a way to check her ebay auctions which I sure as hell wasnt going to be interupted on my laptop in the middle of a tourney for!
So off we trotted to PC World and begrudgingly handed over some cash for two lappys. Impossible to avoid Vista, but that's not the end of the world for me needs. Although I did opt for a machine with 2gb of ram, my other half got one with only a gig and the difference is very noticeable.

Out of interest, has anyone taken advantage of the £300 off deal which Orange broadband are doing? Sounds like it worth considering as £300 is a major saving. Just depends on how bad/good their broadband service is I guess as being tied to them for 2 years could be hell if you have a nice shiney laptop but an inconsistant connection

[happybhoy]

I'm not sure you can as the os was built around the drm, I think Rich might be confusing it with UAC (user account control). Try Googling Vista DRM, if you find anything complementary about it I'd be surprised.

http://www.forbes.com/security/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/vista_drm_analysis/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/27/windows_drm_monstered/

I also was making my best recommendation to the op, in the same way as I'd recommend Firefox over IE to everyone. On the surface there my not be a huge amount of difference but taking into the account the impact they both have/will have on the industry as a whole I thought I'd chime up. Still it's all about opinions.

[RichEO]

I think Rich might be confusing it with UAC (user account control).

Yep, 

[Ecosse]

Problems with copying, moving and deleting files because DRM is checking every byte to make sure you have a licensed copy, if it detects (possibly falsely) that something is not right it will purposefully degrade performance
It's sold on a $1=£1 basis for no good reason except we're total mugs.
And a litany of other little bugs and privacy, incompatibility and security issues. Add on to that an operating system shouldn't need a top of the range machine to run it cos at the end of the day its just a damn operating system.
Sure it's got a gee-whiz-neato window selector but it's still a steaming pile of crap.

The only reason anyone should need a top of the range pc is to either play games or run NASA from the OP it look like what's needed is a laptop that can play some poker, surf the net, send emails and possibly a few other things that aren't going to be to taxing on the machine, why pay top dollar just on Microsofts say-so.

I turned DRM off in the first 10 minutres of having vista.

$1 = £1.... more reason to get it bundled with your PC then?

Incompatibility, mostly harware issues (the serious ones anyway), not likely with a new PC (still possible of course).

Bugs. All seems sorted for me. It has an incredibly good feature which identifies (most of the time) whatever caused a crash or mishap and shows you how to resolve it.

Now the rest of it doesn't hold any weight at all... Yes you shouldn't necessarily need a top end PC just for your OS. Well, you don't, it OPTIONAL. If you are getting a new PC anyway that is more than capable of running it then you can't say there is no point getting that OS becuase your PC shouldn't need to be that good  >:? Regards to what computing power it needed for just poker, you should be critisising the PC choice not the OS choise if anything.

PS, I am mainly doing all this so that you (ImMrChip) aren't turned off to Vista automatically by everyone saying 'go for XP'. Vista isn't that bad (some might even say it's good if they wouldn't be thought an idiot ) and chances are you are only going to have to buy a seperate copy and reinstall your OS at some stage in the future.

Please tell me you work for micro$soft please ? The original post was 100% correct and true.

I've only been programming since ms-dos 1.00 and Vista is a serious disaster which could be the straw that breaks the behomeths back.

Dougie

[KarmaDope]

If you're gonna buy online, use a cashback service like quidco.

[goldfoxdom]

If you're gonna buy online, use a cashback service like quidco.

what does this mean?

[OatFedGoat]

Any tips on how to get PC World to reduce the price

Not from me.
I tried to get a bag thrown in or a discount at the weekend for buying 2 laptops at the same time and had no joy.

I'm no expert but I think that one you linked to has a Intel Pentium Dual Core processor. It is my understanding that the INTEL CORE 2 DUO are considered quite a bit better than the standard dual cores. I'm sure a more technical person could offer more informed input for you.

[Kaiser Soze]

I turned DRM off in the first 10 minutres of having vista.

I thought Ionescu's hack was proved to be rubbish? No? Do you have a link?

[KarmaDope]

If you're gonna buy online, use a cashback service like quidco.

what does this mean?

Basically, you sign up to quidco or other sites like it, and purchase your goods through an affiliate link they provide. They track the purchase, and give you a percentage of your money back.

MSE.com

This link (non-affiliated) should have more information on it, and other ways to save whilst shopping online.

[bone1986]

If you're gonna buy online, use a cashback service like quidco.

what does this mean?

http://www.quidco.com/

You could look on here for any discount codes,

http://www.hotukdeals.com/main.html

I hope this helps.

[RichEO]

Problems with copying, moving and deleting files because DRM is checking every byte to make sure you have a licensed copy, if it detects (possibly falsely) that something is not right it will purposefully degrade performance
It's sold on a $1=£1 basis for no good reason except we're total mugs.
And a litany of other little bugs and privacy, incompatibility and security issues. Add on to that an operating system shouldn't need a top of the range machine to run it cos at the end of the day its just a damn operating system.
Sure it's got a gee-whiz-neato window selector but it's still a steaming pile of crap.

The only reason anyone should need a top of the range pc is to either play games or run NASA from the OP it look like what's needed is a laptop that can play some poker, surf the net, send emails and possibly a few other things that aren't going to be to taxing on the machine, why pay top dollar just on Microsofts say-so.

I turned DRM off in the first 10 minutres of having vista.

$1 = £1.... more reason to get it bundled with your PC then?

Incompatibility, mostly harware issues (the serious ones anyway), not likely with a new PC (still possible of course).

Bugs. All seems sorted for me. It has an incredibly good feature which identifies (most of the time) whatever caused a crash or mishap and shows you how to resolve it.

Now the rest of it doesn't hold any weight at all... Yes you shouldn't necessarily need a top end PC just for your OS. Well, you don't, it OPTIONAL. If you are getting a new PC anyway that is more than capable of running it then you can't say there is no point getting that OS becuase your PC shouldn't need to be that good  >:? Regards to what computing power it needed for just poker, you should be critisising the PC choice not the OS choise if anything.

PS, I am mainly doing all this so that you (ImMrChip) aren't turned off to Vista automatically by everyone saying 'go for XP'. Vista isn't that bad (some might even say it's good if they wouldn't be thought an idiot ) and chances are you are only going to have to buy a seperate copy and reinstall your OS at some stage in the future.

Please tell me you work for micro$soft please ? The original post was 100% correct and true.

I've only been programming since ms-dos 1.00 and Vista is a serious disaster which could be the straw that breaks the behomeths back.

Dougie

Vista is working fine and dandy for me on my main PC. I do have a few PCs and OSes to fall back on if I had problems, but I haven't had many.

For the average user, who will in the not so distant future probably have to pay and take the time to upgrade to vista, I don't think it's that great a decision to go for XP. Maybe still 50/50 but there are plenty of people saying go for XP (all well and good advice) and if you want XP got for it. I'm just giving the other side of it, works fine for me, some nice additions over XP that I like and I'm happy with it. I'm sure there are 1 or 2 others that are happy with vista and are just scared of getting flamed.

How many of you have tried it out medium term? And what was your reason for not sticking with it? Hardware compatibility?? That doesn't count

[kinboshi]

http://www.aldi-stores.co.uk/special_buys/special_buys_pid_56680.html

Don't know if this is any good or not, but seems to have a decent spec.