Facing the Inevitable New Laptop Purchase

[Andrea B.]

I think my MacBook Pro graphics card is starting to fail. I get this weird checkered area when the machine has been in use for awhile. On occasion the monitor has frozen with the checkery pattern. The board is the Intel HD Graphics 4000 512 MB.

 

This MacBook Pro Retina is from Mid 2012, had the 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM. I can say that I have gotten a very good 7 years use out of this MacBook. I had only one problem in that 7 years. That was when my trackpad failed. It was replaced under warranty, failed again and replaced again. (Apple must have had a run of bad trackpads, lol.) The Book been fine ever since. Never had any other problems. Still on the original battery.

 

But now I think it's time to get a new laptop!! I never used Big Subscription Photoshop, so the 16 GB has been quite enough. However files are getting larger, and I think I'm seeing some slower processing. So there's a good enough reason alone to move to a new Book even if the graphics card weren't failing. And the processors are better now too.

 

I have been still running the ancient Mountain Lion on this old Book. I know it is very silly that I have wanted to keep Capture NX2 so badly that I am several versions behind on op sys upgrade. I have apps which I can no longer upgrade because of Mountain Lion.

 

NX2 was just such an easy way to process files. Even with Photo Ninja, I usually finished up in NX2 for local edits & tweaks. I cannot begin to tell you how much I'm going to miss NX2 when I give up this Book. I'm going to have to learn a new processing app! I'm not frightened of that because I learn apps easily. It is just that I don't want to do this. I have other things to do. Grumble, grumble. :lol:

 

OK, thanks for listening!!

Wish me luck or something while I go search for a new laptop. I'll probably just get the latest and greatest and hope for another 7 years use of it.

 

EDIT: I changed the title because the original sounded kind of grim.

[enricosavazzi]

Just a guess, but sometimes dust and fluff are clogging the cooling fan and/or the heatsink. Vacuuming the foreign stuff away is often enough to restore an acceptable performance and stability. Besides, it is summer now in the northern hemisphere, which means ambient temperatures are higher than average and more likely to cause overheating.

 

Unfortunately I have no idea how to open up a MacBook for cleaning it up.

[Andy Perrin]

Seven years ago, I think they still mostly just unscrewed. It’s only recently that they’ve started gluing things.

[Andrea B.]

I completely took apart my MacBook Air which was ruined by a cup of Christmas eggnog. So they are not difficult to take apart. I cleaned and cleaned, but that Air was not restorable. So I put it all back together again - minus its flash memory - and sent it to recycling.

 

You do need a set of all those cool little screwdrivers outside the usual Phillips and slot style and you need those spodger* Ribbon Latch Unlocker for flipping the ribbon holders. A pair of coated tweezers is also useful for resetting ribbons. I got my tools from IFixit. But they are available elsewhere.

 

I also took apart an old portable hard drive. It is very interesting to see the little fringed arm thingie. Those metal pointy things are so incredibly delicate. And I found the tiniest screw I have ever ever seen in that hard drive. Nothing in my kit even came close to being able to unscrew it. I could barely see it!

 

 

*spodger? sploger? spudger?

Ribbon Latch Unlocker

[Andy Perrin]

Definitely not splodger, which means something indelicate that I'm not going to link to!

[Andrea B.]

oh la! who knew?

[Andrea B.]

OK, we will call it a Ribbon Latch Unlocker. :lol:

[Mark Jones]

2012, 2.7 GHz Intel Core i7 processor vs latest 8th generation i7 cpu = hardly any noticible difference if you ask me. unelss you batch process photos or do video editing on the thing

I always buy a year or 2 older cpu, save a lot of cash IMHO, good luck.

[nfoto]

I still use pretty old machinery. Just max out the RAM and update the SSD to [at least] twice the capacity when the need arises and the box will continue to do perfectly for some time still. Also beneficial to add a second SSD for scratch and temporary files for PS and other software. My Lenovo boxes are easy to deal with as most parts can be tinkered with using only simple tools. Once in a while I replace the keyboard which in practice is what wears out most rapidly.

 

I have dedicated "nodes" (machines) to do all the heavy batch processing. With my current photo project (aquatic plants) there is a massive need for processing and stacking. I just put these nodes in an empty slot somewhere and let them run unattended, then pull the outcome from them over the LAN. Most of these run under Linux thus they are very cost effective. Photo Ninja runs under Linux without any problem and Zerene Stacker is a native Linux application.

[Andrea B.]

One of the reasons I have looooovvvvvved the MacBook is the underlying Linux.

I can so easily write shells to "do stuff". :D

 

I am going to check the fan for dust when I get home as per Enrico's suggestion. But I'm pretty sure that isn't the problem. I'm pretty sure the graphics card is slowly failing. Of course most failure is slow up until the time it's not when everything goes kablooey.

[Andy Perrin]

It’s really BSD, not Linux under there. I WISH it was Linux, but that’s not what we have.

[Andrea B.]

Yes, I should have been more precise. I'm always using "Linux" generically which is not accurate.

 

It is enough for me to be able to use ksh, awk and sed to write scripts. These days I don't really require the deeper aspects of either Linux or the Berk or whatever Unix/OS flavor is available. :)

 

Over the years I had accumulated a *lot* of UV signature files which I had not always been careful about naming. So I wrote scripts to go through the folders and rename the files with a uniform naming structure. It was a lot of fun for me to return temporarily to my Unix days at the Labs. I had forgotten some stuff, but a lot of it came right back once I started coding -- as though the memory was in my fingers not my brain. B)

---

 

Mark, yes, that is always a good way to save a few $$$ by going to last year's model! GOod buys like that can often be found here: https://macsales.com

That's the place which friend Lloyd Chambers over at Diglloyd recommends.

[As usual, UVP has no affiliation, etc, etc, etc.]

[dabateman]

I am still mostly living off a $100 computer I set up. The Dell 3646.

I find it funny that we can spend thousands on cameras and lenses. But then cheap out on a computer. At least I have. But with the lack of tightening in software, I will have to buy a newer more powerful chip. At least get a video card.

The 3646 can encode video at 20 fps, surprisingly not bad.

Before that my computer was the same one I bought in March 2003. I still use it, even today to test out a IP camera for UV. Its a Toshiba satellite 2.8GHz single core, with 1 GB ram and 120GB hard drive. Was my work horse for all graduate and postdoc image editing. It also has a dvd burner, something rare back in the day.

I never liked macs, have only gotten along with PCs. Dates back to our XT I had as a kid flipping out 5 and a quarter discs. I still have some of thouse too and my old undergrad computer with a 5 1/4 drive, 3.5 drive and a CD drive. Worked well to get some software off an old disc in grad school. I think I also installed a zip drive on it. But not sure if I kept that. Thats on a Pentium 200, running Win 98 SE.

Oh the classics.

 

The OS I have liked were Win 98SE, Win Xp and now win 10.

I can't remember my favorite linux, but was a fedora core version. My Toshiba I had set up with CoLinux. You had linux inside windows. I set it up so my mouse was white in Windows and yellow in linux so I knew where I was when moved my mouse.

The laptop had a SD slot that max size was 1GB. So I could set that up to move files in and out of Windows Xp or fedora.

What a great way to work.

[Andrea B.]

Good old stuff, all of it. It's great that you can still use some of it. B)

 

We started packing up our stuff for the move and I found some old floppies, an old Zip Drive and a bunch of old CDs/DVDs. Strange how quickly all that was here and then gone. Made me wonder if in a few years days, will all my SSDs be obsolete? Probably.

 

I learned to code on an old Commodore 64 hooked up to the TV. I wrote a little silly game for the "sprites" and coded up a 1040 Tax program. It was all so fun.

 

Even if I get a new 8-core MacBook I will only be on that cutting edge for about 30 seconds. Obsolete is not tomorrow, it is now.

[Andy Perrin]

Nah, Moore’s law is over. The fact that things have barely improved since the mid 2000s shows that. The days when things moved really fast are gone now. There are no true exponentials in nature.

[dabateman]

Nah, Moore’s law is over. The fact that things have barely improved since the mid 2000s shows that. The days when things moved really fast are gone now. There are no true exponentials in nature.

 

Kind of like bacterial growth. You reach a peak and then slops off. The room doesn't fill with microorganisms. I think we are now at the same for computers. Would need quantum computing to break to really get the next increase.

But I will probably buy a Zen 2 processor and 2080 video card or what ever AMD has thats better and cheaper, next year. Almost about time to get a real computer.

 

[Andrea B.]

Nah, Moore’s law is over

Kind of like bacterial growth. You reach a peak and then slops off

 

You both know, of course, that those are "famous last words".

Like when What's-His-Name said "Oh, 640K RAM ought to be enough for anybody."

 

Heh-heh-heh.

 

 

There will be cake.

[Andy Perrin]

Andrea, I really don't think so? We could start another round of speedups if we had a fundamental breakthrough in a NEW technology like in quantum computing, but the problems they are having with silicon are that we are nearly at the level of individual atoms and there's nowhere smaller to *go*. Once you're at the nanoscale, the whole concept of matter having a well-defined location gets iffy. (That whole uncertainty principle thing.) Electrons don't want to stay in their wires anymore when they can tunnel to the adjacent one. We can still spread outward by having more cores and more parallelism, which is what's been happening in recent years. But the problem with that is that many tasks can't be done in parallel. The reason Moore's Law existed in the first place was that the basic methods of semiconductor fabrication stayed the same when you made things smaller. There were problems, but they were relatively easy ones, like moving to shorter wavelengths of light for lithography. That's all over now, which is why I'm so pessimistic.

[dabateman]

Nah, Moore’s law is over

Kind of like bacterial growth. You reach a peak and then slops off

 

You both know, of course, that those are "famous last words".

Like when What's-His-Name said "Oh, 640K RAM ought to be enough for anybody."

 

Heh-heh-heh.

 

 

There will be cake.

 

Wait you mean that 8Mb SD card I have is not enough?

No joke I have one and a 256MB SD card. There huge, should last forever.

 

As I said, waiting for quantum or crystalline computing.

[Andrea B.]

Like years and years ago I was guilty for months because I spent about $400 for one of the first 1GB CF cards. Similar to what I mentioned about two posts ago: I was cutting edge for about 30 seconds, tops. B)

 

You all might enjoy this: Museum of Obsolete Media. It has lots of fun pages.

 

I was looking in particular at Media Stability Ratings where I learned that a lot of the old stuff I found recently (while packing up for a move) like the Zip Drive/Discs have reaced the end of their expected life span. But the cool thing was that 12" LPs are still considered stable into the foreseeable future. I do wonder why sometimes we ever gave those up. Too much trouble I suppose. Too easy to scratch. But good for forever with care.

[nfoto]

--- But the cool thing was that 12" LPs are still considered stable into the foreseeable future. I do wonder why sometimes we ever gave those up. Too much trouble I suppose. Too easy to scratch. But good for forever with care.

 

They'll last as long as they aren't played with a physical needle, and stored at medium-low temperatures. Which kind of defeats their musical purpose :)

[dabateman]

Yep,

Don't store them in an attic. It seems to have affected mine. Did that for 12 months, when I moved into a smaller space.

 

$400 for a 1GB card is great. I only paided $120 for mine in 2005. I needed the extra space for a trip to the UK. Over my 256MB cards at the time.

 

[GaryR]

Hi Andrea,

I also decided to buy the latest and greatest this summer...

 

As I found out the hard way, software apps can be a big issue when upgrading to a new computer. I decided to deactivate my copy of PS CS6 on my old desktop, and reinstall it on my brand new, blazing fast, Thinkpad P1 laptop with 4k display.

 

I discovered that CS6 does not adapt well to a HD display. The scaling on task bars and text became so microscopic, that you'd need jewelers glasses to see it. Lowering the resolution, messed up the scaling on every other program....so CS6 is back where it belongs, on old reliable.

 

Lots of horsepower on the P1 for Windows and Linux OS, but I do miss the old days when you easily remove or swap out hdd's. Lots of issues with new MVMe ssd drives, which are not as easy to clone as standard ssd's, so I've switched to 'imaging' software on the P1.

 

Hope you find something that works for you.

-Gary

[dabateman]

Gary,

What issues are you having with M2 drives?

I am looking at specing out a new max system that hopefully will last me 10 years or more. The 128Gb M2 drive I have on my compact dell 3050 has been ok, but I haven't used it much. I typically use my Dell 3646 more, which came with spinning 500Gb drive. This time I am going to build a PC myself like the old days with a new Amd zen 2 chip. With that I can use a PCIe 4 M2 drive.

 

So I am interested in what problems you have had.

 

The Dell 3050 and 3646 were both bought under $100 and upgraded with 8Gb ram. The 3050 also upgraded from 32Gb M2 to 128Gb M2. The 1TB drive alone I am looking at for my new system would cost more than what I paid each for these.

[Andrea B.]

Gary, that Thinkpad sounds rockin'. Congrats!

 

Seems like we're going to lose more apps as the move is made towards 64-bits

and newer apps make better use of multi-core processing.

Tech moves forward whether we want to or not!