[Nottingham] Buying advice sought

[Jason Irwin]

On 06/02/13 12:36, Matthew Sackman wrote:
> If you do go down the self build route, I'd recommend paying attention
> to http://silentpcreview.com/. IME, finding a heat-friendly-enough GPU
> is often the biggest issue.
Liquid cooling - although this will probably bump the price up a bit. 
Could audio get pushed through a GPU for processing?  Make use of all 
that parallel grunt?

I picked up a 1GB nvidia GT240 a while back.  More than enough to push 
full HD, low voltage and quiet (relative to what it replaced).

http://pcspecialist.co.uk/ seem OK.  They will let you buy sans-OS and I 
am quite interested in their laptops.  Might take a trip up there to 
look at them.

As for Dell - no.  Avoid.  I have one (Dimension 9200).  PSU is 
underspec'd, expansion is crap, case rattles (all efforts to find the 
source have so far failed), USB fails, a general reputation for other 
low-quality parts (e.g capacitors) etc.  Their monitors are pretty 
decent for some reason.

If you want guaranteed GNU/Linux support you are looking at importing 
(which means paying duty and freight) from the likes of System76.  I 
don't know if there are any builders in the UK who support GNU/Linux on 
their devices.

On 06/02/13 12:26, Martin wrote:
>> I boot into Linux 99% of the time but there are occasions when I need to use
>> Windows for example updating my satnav so I need to boot off of two separate
>> hard drives (as I do at the moment).
> We've got a virtual machine expert in the group to solve such woes ;-)
I think John only gets the digest - you could ask him tonight Graham, if 
you can make the meeting.

Also consider PlayOnLinux (a wrapper for WINE) as that might be better 
than a full VM (USB can be a pain in the neck).  You can see if your 
SatNav or other software is supported (P.O.L. will let you manage 
multiple WINE versions if needs be).  http://appdb.winehq.org/
The SatNav may even have an unnofficial GNU/Linux client.

> For a 'desktop' system, we are all 64bit now (32bit is sooo last decade
> ;-) ) and 4GB+ RAM and SSD.
Deffo SSD, maybe a spinning platter for audio data?  Dunno how big they 
get or what the budget is.

J.