New Toy

[Matthew J Poes]

so I let myself get to a point where all I had for a personal computer was a Mac mini and my work laptops. I use the Mac mini as a music source and was using an old work laptop for REW and Dirac. Well the Black Friday deals were too good to pass up so I got a new HP Pavillion 15" from Costco for writing, measurement, Dirac, etc. Going to discontinue the Mac Mini for now as it's getting old.

15" 1080p touch screen
Nvidea 940mx 4gb ram
16gb ram
I7 8th gen processor
Windows 10 pro

I think it will be perfect for what I'm planning to use it for. I needed to stay away from most of the slim new laptops because I needed a lot of ports. I also was afraid to buy a jewel like 2 in 1 (as much as I was tempted) as I worried I would break it taking it in on jobs and such.

 

[tripplej]

Very nice. Can you add more ram? Would 16gb be enough?

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Well I hope 16gb is enough ram to hold me over.

It has 2 DIMM's of DDR4 ram and is accessible easily. Unlike a lot of the slick new laptops it's easily upgraded cheaply. The laptop can also handle two harddrives. I may add a solid state hard drive for music. I currently have an external one on my network so I don't now that it adds much value.

I don't game at all. I haven't played a video game in well over a decade. I need this purely for utility purposes. Music, measurement, typing, searching the web, chatting around here.

 

[tripplej]

Great. Sounds like you have a winner. Expanding is the best part of this new PC.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Yeah. It's not the greatest laptop on the market by any means but I'm just excited to have a laptop again. My last few laptops were fairly expensive esoteric devices that did not last. One of them died 3 months after the warranty expired. After that I bought a bunch of Mac stuff. Bought an iPhone 4s (back when that was new), ipad, and iMac. Then I bought the Mac Mini for music. The iMac is no more, I now have a new iPhone 7 plus, but I never bought a new computer. I've had good work laptops that we can use for personal use for some time, but a recent policy change made it so I needed to get my own laptop again. I read a lot of good things about the new 8th gen processors, most of the tests seemed to suggest it was the biggest performance upgrade in some generations and worth hunting for.

I need to have a PC and can't get away with Linux or Mac exclusively since a lot of my software only runs on a PC. So far this thing has been pretty nice. I ran through some REW measurements and setup DIRAC. It's all much faster than with my old work laptop and very reliable.

 

[tripplej]

Cool. Let us know how the laptop performs as things move along.

 

[mechman]

Why would you need more than 16gb of RAM? Is/Are Windows/Apps accessing beyond what you have? I’ve been out of the pc loop for a few years but I recently built one with my son and I never thought to go beyond 16gb.

 

[Mark C Flick]

I dunno, 640K ought to be enough for anybody... amiright?

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Why would you need more than 16gb of RAM? Is/Are Windows/Apps accessing beyond what you have? I’ve been out of the pc loop for a few years but I recently built one with my son and I never thought to go beyond 16gb.

Yeah I msotky agree. A lot of new music apps are buffering a lot to memory. Also some measurement software uses a bit during the measurement. If you want to measure multiple mics and impulses at once then it needs to have the resources to operate multiple iterations of the program at once. I still think 16 is enough for all that.

Beyond that I can't imagine a reason other than games or such.

I started playing with BEM modeling which is a bit resource intensive so time will tell if I decide more ram is needed. I do feel that 8 is not enough in todays windows 10. Throw in basic operation resources, virus software, whatever program you are using and suddenly you are using a good 75% of your ram all the time. My work laptop is like that. If I try to open power point, start a webinar, video conference, whatever and I may actually lock it up. It seems like a lot of computers start to act up once you get into the 75% of ram used range.

 

[mechman]

I dunno, 640K ought to be enough for anybody... amiright?

You kill me!