Reply to: Any sub-£500 laptop better than Samsung NP300E5A-S01UK?

[VectraMan]

I hardly use physical CD or DVD nowadays, and in fact just managed 6 months without any spare writeable discs and only cracked and bought some because I had some installations coming up.

For my Macs I have an external Firewire DVD writer. For PCs I could probably get away with some mix of an external USB DVD drive and USB sticks.

Agreed. I'd much rather have an external DVD/CD drive and thinner/lighter laptop. But I think if you're looking around the £500 bracket, then manufacturers tend to assume it's for entertainment (certainly the XPS15 is) and so you want to play DVDs on it, and of course they tend to get carried away giving you as many features as possible.

In fact, half the reason I chose the Dell XPS15 was because it's one of the few 15" laptops without a stupid extra pointless numberpad keyboard.

[Sysman]

I hardly use the DVD/CDRW bay anyway, and mostly work with ISOs and MagicDisc whenever I need to access a DVD or CD.

I hardly use physical CD or DVD nowadays, and in fact just managed 6 months without any spare writeable discs and only cracked and bought some because I had some installations coming up.

For my Macs I have an external Firewire DVD writer. For PCs I could probably get away with some mix of an external USB DVD drive and USB sticks.

[Gentile]

These are the chaps you want

NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

They ship from the US but are pretty quick

I have posted this twice before

http://forums.contractoruk.com/techn...ml#post1231970

http://forums.contractoruk.com/techn...ml#post1477717

Nice one, Spacecadet. I'll consider doing that next time around, if I need the space on the existing drive and the small file writing efficiency of a platter device to run a huge SQL Server database or ten. It's nice having the quietness and build speed efficiency of a SSD for a development environment, but it's not the best solution for every single task, such as modifying an existing large database made up of millions of small data files. In the past, I've used an encrypted external high capacity drive when I've had to work with SQL Server, which has been an OK solution. And you do get hybrid drives now that are part traditional platter, and part SSD. However, your suggestion of actually having two separate drives that can be dedicated to their own specialised tasks hosted within the one laptop sounds even better. Next time around, I think I'll still rebuild the machine and install the operating system on a DVD bay -hosted SSD, but I'll make sure all the SQL Server stuff gets installed on the existing platter drive and leave it dedicated to that task. Like most people, I hardly use the DVD/CDRW bay anyway, and mostly work with ISOs and MagicDisc whenever I need to access a DVD or CD.

[VectraMan]

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

Confirmed that mine is using TRIM. No registry hacks required.

[Spacecadet]

However if you look on a popular video sharing internet site, there's a video of somebody fitting a second drive into a caddy and replacing the CD drive. Which is quite neat.

These are the chaps you want

NewmodeUS, Hard Drive Caddys for Notebooks

They ship from the US but are pretty quick

I have posted this twice before

http://forums.contractoruk.com/techn...ml#post1231970

http://forums.contractoruk.com/techn...ml#post1477717

[Gentile]

I'm so out of date when it comes to laptops and general hardware technology, gone are the days where I used to build Pc's to sell. Gentile, you seem quite clued up, for laptop SSD I'm looking for something where it may have a normal SATA disk, but has like an expansion slot where I can slot in SSD, not necessarily big say 128GB will do for me, I can then only keep pictures there and perhaps SQL databases too.

I also note that you are a .Net developer, I'm a complete novice looking at web technology using C#, any advice for me. I want to start out and already I have a lot of projects that I have lined up to do to test myself and learn. lol

Any advice.

I bought this model here about 18 months ago. At the time it cost ~£360, since it was a brand new device to the market and Crucial was the only manufacturer making SSDs in that size (which was the minimum I needed). The same model's now down to £160. Buying now, there appears to be plenty of other options available. Whichever one you choose, my advice is to make sure you check out some current reviews featuring bench tests showing comparative read/write speed and reliability, as not all SSDs with the same basic specs such as size and price point are the same in these regards. Also, one thing to be aware of is that, depending on the task you're doing, SSDs can actually perform less well than traditional platter drives. E.g., whilst they're typically better at tasks that involve reading from the disk and writing large files, if you're instead writing lots of small files frequently, SSDs are actually worse at that task than traditional drives. Since development involves lots of shifting files from permanent storage to in-memory processes during builds, SSDs perform well for that particular profile. They'd suck badly at running a live (as opposed to development) SQL Server, though, since writing lots of incoming data arriving in small packets is exactly what you need a live DBMS to be able to do efficiently.

The idea when you're swapping out your laptop's hard drive is to completely replace the main 2.5" SATA that comes with the machine. That's a fairly simple task: just take off the bottom cover off of your lappy, slide out the existing drive, and slide the new one into place; no soldering required. As somebody else suggested, it's a good option to buy a hard drive caddy to hold the drive you're taking out, enabling you to use it as an extra drive afterwards. Also, when you're rebuilding your machine, I advise not to reformat the drive you take out until you've got all of the hardware drivers you need off of it, which you can access by simply plugging your drive-in-a-caddy into a USB port once you've installed the operating system onto the SSD. Any hardware that's misbehaving after you rebuild the machine (e.g. display driver, etc), just plug in your caddy drive, and use Device Manager to search for a better driver, by pointing it at X:\Windows\System32 (where X: is your caddy drive) and telling it to search. Laptops often come with manufacturer-specific hardware, and you'll find the drivers for that custom hardware all in that one handy place. You can also of course just download any drivers you need off the internet, but that can be both time consuming, and problematic if one of the things you discover is misbehaving after you rebuild is your wireless LAN.

When you use an SSD as your main drive (as opposed to using it as additional external storage), you can install the operating system directly on to it, and gain all the performance advantages that entails. E.g., average startup time for Windows 7 hosted on an SSD is 5-10 seconds from a cold start. Shut down times are equally impressive. The biggest saving as a developer, though, comes in terms of build time. If you're compiling a big project >100 times a day as you make incremental changes to it, whether it takes 2 seconds or 15 seconds each time to build makes a big, big difference to your flow and productivity.

As for .Net development, as I mentioned in your other thread Visual Studio is really indispensable as a tool for professional development in that stack. I've worked in places that have asked me to evaluate cheaper (in terms of initial outlay) alternatives, such as Sharp Develop or Visual Studio Express. Whilst they may look superficially the same, they're not the same animal at all: it's not just the IDE itself, you also need the project templates, code snippets, debugging tools, and other in-environment contextual help that the full version of Visual Studio provides to really be productive with .Net as a professional. I use VS 2010 Ultimate at present, and will probably move up to VS 2012 Ultimate soon. For learners, the Release Candidate for Visual Studio Express 2012 (the free version) is now available for download here.

The thing to know about .Net is that rather than being one discrete technology like VB6, InterDev and other preceding tools once were, by contrast .Net is a concept that covers a big, big set of related types of development. E.g., you can use it to build Console Applications, Windows Services, Web Services, WCF Services, WPF Apps, Windows Forms Apps, ClickOnce Applications, ASP.Net, ASP.Net MVC, Silverlight, and many more related but distinct things that all fall under that one '.Net' umbrella. Those different types of development do have common threads running though them – such as the use of C# and (less commonly these days) VB – but they're each distinct in their own right, and having skills in one doesn't de facto mean a developer will know how to develop in the others without some learning curve being involved. If you're a complete newbie to the stack, and it's web development with .Net that you're interested in, I recommend starting with these titles: Professional C# 4.0 and .NET 4, and Beginning ASP.NET 4.

HTH, and good luck.

[BoredBloke]

Cleverly I bought an Intel 330 128GB SSD for £109, which seemed like a bargain at the time, but they're getting ever cheaper (a DABS I had yesterday email listed the Crucial 128GB as only £55).


I took apart the case (not too hard) to replace the existing drive, and then put the existing drive into a USB3 enclosure to use as an external. However if you look on a popular video sharing internet site, there's a video of somebody fitting a second drive into a caddy and replacing the CD drive. Which is quite neat.

It's certainly faster, though to be honest I haven't been gobsmacked by the performance increase. I think the original drive must have been a pretty decent one. But it is now eerily quiet, at least until the processor fan cuts in.

The second drive in place of the DVD sounds like an idea. I already have an external DVD writer that I could use in place on the rare occasion that I need use the DVD drive. Sounds like a little geeky project to look into.

Cheers

[VectraMan]

I have one of these also, hence my earlier posting and is the same spec as yours. On the SSD front, how much did you pay for it and how big is it?. Presumably you had to remove the old drive as they can't take 2 can they? Do you notice much of a benefit? I suppose I could put the HDD into my PS3 or something

Cleverly I bought an Intel 330 128GB SSD for £109, which seemed like a bargain at the time, but they're getting ever cheaper (a DABS I had yesterday email listed the Crucial 128GB as only £55).

I took apart the case (not too hard) to replace the existing drive, and then put the existing drive into a USB3 enclosure to use as an external. However if you look on a popular video sharing internet site, there's a video of somebody fitting a second drive into a caddy and replacing the CD drive. Which is quite neat.

It's certainly faster, though to be honest I haven't been gobsmacked by the performance increase. I think the original drive must have been a pretty decent one. But it is now eerily quiet, at least until the processor fan cuts in.

[BoredBloke]

I bought an XPS15 for £500 a couple of months ago, and that's a quad core i7, 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD. And I've since spent another £100 on an SSD.

I was dreading the shiny screen, but to be honest now I've had it a while I don't mind at all.

I have one of these also, hence my earlier posting and is the same spec as yours. On the SSD front, how much did you pay for it and how big is it?. Presumably you had to remove the old drive as they can't take 2 can they? Do you notice much of a benefit? I suppose I could put the HDD into my PS3 or something

[platforminc]

No registry hacks required. If you want to check if your SSD has TRIM enabled (which it should do if you're using Windows 7, Linux or Windows Server 2008 Release 2), just run the Command Prompt "as an Administrator", and type the following command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If it returns "0" (and you're using an SSD), then TRIM commands (which enable efficient use of the SSD by notifying the device which blocks have been deleted and can be reused) will be sent to your SSD. NB: if you're *not* using an SSD, you may still get "0" returned by the command above, since it's only an indicator of whether TRIM commands will be sent to your hard drive, not whether they will be understood or acted upon; what the device does with TRIM instructions is down to its own internal management firmware.

If TRIM isn't enabled, and you think it should be, you can enable it with the following command:

fsutil behavior set disablenotify 0

*IAAGBFTIAYOR







* I Am A Geek, But Follow These Instructions At Your Own Risk.

I'm so out of date when it comes to laptops and general hardware technology, gone are the days where I used to build Pc's to sell. Gentile, you seem quite clued up, for laptop SSD I'm looking for something where it may have a normal SATA disk, but has like an expansion slot where I can slot in SSD, not necessarily big say 128GB will do for me, I can then only keep pictures there and perhaps SQL databases too.

I also note that you are a .Net developer, I'm a complete novice looking at web technology using C#, any advice for me. I want to start out and already I have a lot of projects that I have lined up to do to test myself and learn. lol

Any advice.

[Gentile]

You guys who are swapping out HDD for SDD know that you have to faff in the registry to switch on TRIM ?

No registry hacks required. If you want to check if your SSD has TRIM enabled (which it should do if you're using Windows 7, Linux or Windows Server 2008 Release 2), just run the Command Prompt "as an Administrator", and type the following command:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If it returns "0" (and you're using an SSD), then TRIM commands (which enable efficient use of the SSD by notifying the device which blocks have been deleted and can be reused) will be sent to your SSD. NB: if you're *not* using an SSD, you may still get "0" returned by the command above, since it's only an indicator of whether TRIM commands will be sent to your hard drive, not whether they will be understood or acted upon; what the device does with TRIM instructions is down to its own internal management firmware.

If TRIM isn't enabled, and you think it should be, you can enable it with the following command:

fsutil behavior set disablenotify 0

*IAAGBFTIAYOR







* I Am A Geek, But Follow These Instructions At Your Own Risk.

[VectraMan]

You guys who are swapping out HDD for SDD know that you have to faff in the registry to switch on TRIM ?

Not according to the internet you don't.

[Platypus]

You guys who are swapping out HDD for SDD know that you have to faff in the registry to switch on TRIM ?

[platforminc]

Looking at a laptop myself, key things are that its not too big, my current laptop is 17" laptop, also SSD is very important too as I do development.

Any ideas guys ? Below £500 mark, dont mind buying SSD seperately to swap out the hard drive. 250GB is fine for me.

[VectraMan]

I got my laptop from the dell outlet.

Dell Factory Outlet: Error

That one has an i7quad core processor. They come with a 12 month warranty.

I bought an XPS15 for £500 a couple of months ago, and that's a quad core i7, 6GB RAM, 750GB HDD. And I've since spent another £100 on an SSD.

I was dreading the shiny screen, but to be honest now I've had it a while I don't mind at all.