Teensy plastic shields are the big new thing in 2018's laptop crop

Re: Horses for courses?

Yeah, my feeling exactly - btw. I looked at the memory usage on my work machine (32GB). The actual work (some rather computationally expensive stats stuff) uses 6GB (using all but two threads). Firefox uses... a ton, WTF? I guess that this is sort of machine-dependent (and htop might be confused about the forked childs - three dozen or so - WTF?!), but this is by far the most memory hungry process on this machine. I also have a massive figure for a paper open in Inkscape - which seems written quite well, so the memory usage does not explode into my face.

Bottom line: I could likely get away with 8GB RAM, or even less, if my data analysis stuff would be running on a dedicated workstation (instead of my desktop). On a laptop I clearly do not need that much memory if it is not my main work machine (it is not - it is to do some stuff while on the road, but not the heavy lifting, and I want it to be small enough to be able to work on a plane or the train, and the data analysis stuff runs a few days, continously). I do need a ton of HDD (also on the laptop), the datasets I work with are a few GB each. And there are a number of those... (no, downloading them over a crappy conference, airport lounge or hotel wlan is not what I want).

Actually, my old Samsung netbook was close to a perfect match for my needs: method development worked ok, long battery life (10hrs), small (10"). An updated version (more threads / cores, bit more RAM, bit more HDD, say 1TB) would have been great - alas, they don't make stuff like that any more...

Re: Horses for courses?

What seems like a ludicrously low spec to you, as a power user / developer / gamer / whatever, may be a perfectly usable spec for someone who just wants something portable that they can write a few documents on, check emails, a bit of YouTube time, etc.

It's a bit like saying that my local Ford dealer has new cars with a 1.6 litre engines good for 120mp/h...what a throwback - Ferrari, Lamborghni and the rest routinely build cars with 5 litre, 200mp/h engines.

>1 spec because >1 use case.

Re: @Lee D

Nothing to do with that.

Did you know games are 64-bit only and demanding 16Gb+ RAM nowadays? That's not the top-end gamers only, but just to RUN the game on Steam.

As you can see from my post, I deploy 8Gb by default to ALL USERS, and I work in a prep school. That means primary-aged children, and staff who run nothing more demanding that Word, Outlook and Chrome. Because 4Gb vastly increases their performance (and coupled with an SSD for some staff makes ancient Lenovo desktop machines that they don't make any more FLY). I'm sitting on a ThinkCenter E72 in work, it's hardly a power-user machine.

As people have noted above, a browser can suck up Gigabytes (and, sure, some of that is page caching, but by far not all). The latest series of phones have 3Gb or more, what makes you think that they are doing more than people's desktops?

Yes, I have VMWare. But none of my client computers in work do (or HyperV, that's for servers). Chrome tabs? Gosh, why would any unexperienced user open 30 tabs at the time (something I could do back in the Opera 3.6 days without ANY HASSLE AT ALL on a machine with way less RAM)... because they're users who click everything and don't even realise they have other tabs open half the time. Windows 7, 8 and 10 all RUN with 4Gb. Fine? I wouldn't say that. That's WHY I upgraded... when I started at this workplace that's what they had (P.S. that was 5 years ago, and it was considered a "cheap" solution even then). User's complained that the machines were slow. So the upgradeable ones got 8Gb, the others got SSDs (note: All machine running 64-bit Windows, but some motherboards aren't built to cope with >4Gb RAM but some of these clients are models that are 10 years old, so hardly surprising). Both provide an ENORMOUS boost to the system.

It's about being sensible... the cost of 4Gb extra RAM is pitiful for the performance improvement. It also drastically reduces swapping, especially important if you are using an SSD. I have actually seen 4Gb machines with no swap just run out of memory (hint: I have Outlook and Vivaldi loaded, with Sophos and some TINY utilities in the background, on the WORST machine in my worklpace - always eat your own dogfood. It's left running all the time. Once a week, I get a "we've closed this program because we were running out of memory"... and that's on a machine with 4Gb and swapfile on SSD [which is slowly killing the drive but it's surviving nicely]).

I'm not just making this stuff up. Go buy a cheap laptop and put an extra 4Gb in it. The value is way above a more expensive laptop with only 4Gb.

Your disk must be swapping all day long with only 4Gb on a modern OS running even basic Office and Chrome for any significant working day.

Re: @Lee D

he was just (small) willy-waving - he's obviously got a machine he thinks is GREAT and good for him !

but if he needs 4Gb to boot - he's doing something very, very wrong indeed..

Re: Memory

"The nicest addition would be to slap Linux Mint on there instad of Windows. This would reduce the memory requirements considerably and increase the PCs lifespan."

But would lower the battery life and reduce the performance.

> Windows 10 runs quite happily in 2GB of RAM

Windows 10 itself runs in 2Gb, but none of the stuff you need to do work does. At a minimum I need Outlook, Chrome and Skype for Business, and 2Gb RAM on an HP Pavilion x2 isn't enough. It spends it's life swapping bits in and out.

4Gb is enough though, just. I briefly used a Celeron-based Acer with 4Gb, and that was happy.

most 'normal' computer users (normal people) don't care as long as it works.

Cheapest 1050ti I have seen so far is about £150 which is only £10 less than a RX560 (though that is on preorder with amazon, but it now is closer to £190 or £200).

How do you know

That the camera cannot do IR video, and the plastic is only visually transparent. ;)

I use a piece of a post-it note when I feel a bout of paranoia coming on.

Does anyone offer soundproof covers for the microphone? (And speakers, too, maybe: I recall reading a while back that some of the sound chips can be "adjusted" to operate in reverse and use the speakers as microphones).

I'd like a laptop with no built in camera, wifi, bluetooth, or speaker. All of those can be bought as peripherals

Don't give Apple more ideas about what to leave out and then sell you extra adapters for

Damn, I typed, "Am I one of the few who does care about my laptop being thin and shining?" and meant to type, "Am I one of the few who does not care about my laptop being thin and shining?"

Sorry about that all.

I discovered last year that the mic on my laptop had been dead since I got it.

Unfortunately I found out when away from the office and trying to join a videoconference...

Turns out to be really easy to unplug on a Dell. Though it seems it sometimes also pulls the socket off the motherboard.