Facing the Inevitable New Laptop Purchase

[GaryR]

David,

Cloning is the main issue. I like to clone a copy of my OS, with all my installed software, so I can restore my system with no fuss. I tried to clone my 256gb m2 drive to an external 256gb regular ssd drive. I could boot from the cloned ssd drive, but when I cloned it back to the m2, I get the BSOD. I suppose it might work if I purchased another m2 and enclosure, but it's extra expense that's not needed.

 

NVMe M2 drives are incredibly fast, but they're too delicate to be handled. Unless you're building a super compact desktop, I don't see any point in using a m2 drive. SSD drive are plenty fast, and can handled easily. On my desktop I have a 4 bay ssd dock mounted in the front bay for easy access. I leave the clone drive off, until it's needed to restore a fresh copy of my OS, to my working ssd. All ssd's are hot-swappable.

 

The m2 is fine in a laptop, but I never store images or anything important on the C: drive. To image the C: drive on the P1, I use an old 2tb 3.5 mechanical drive in a USB hdd caddy, to store different versions of my imaged OS. That way I can restore Windows or Linux versions back to the internal m2 drive, with little effort.

-Gary

[GaryR]

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!

 

Thanks Andrea!

Everything is 64bit these days.

I went for the Xeon CPU with NVIDIA descrete graphics, then maxed out with aftermarket memory.

The only downside of a workstation laptop, is the heat and noise generated from the cooling fans, but that's to be expected.

I think it runs cooler with a Linux installation, but for now I just want everything to work.

Hope it lasts forever!

[dabateman]

Thanks Gary,

I like fresh installs off a USB recovery stick. Yes more work to get it back, but you clear a lot of bloated software that way. Also can get drivers to work better, sometimes.

 

In a comparison between my 3646 dell with spinning disc hard drive and my 3050 dell with M2 drive, both have exact same poor graphics and J1800 CPU and exact same 8Gb ram. Photoacute runs an image set in 25 minutes for super resolution on the 3050. Individual adjustments take 5 minutes. The 3646 takes overnight.

 

So I copy files to the c drive for rapid proccesing and copy back to storage drives. Helps evaluting things. I will have to go through all my software and see what is 32 bit and what is 64 bit. Then I may need an off line computer for 32 bit jobs. I see the end of 32bit comming soon.

[GaryR]

Thanks Gary,

I like fresh installs off a USB recovery stick. Yes more work to get it back, but you clear a lot of bloated software that way. Also can get drivers to work better, sometimes.

 

In a comparison between my 3646 dell with spinning disc hard drive and my 3050 dell with M2 drive, both have exact same poor graphics and J1800 CPU and exact same 8Gb ram. Photoacute runs an image set in 25 minutes for super resolution on the 3050. Individual adjustments take 5 minutes. The 3646 takes overnight.

 

So I copy files to the c drive for rapid proccesing and copy back to storage drives. Helps evaluting things. I will have to go through all my software and see what is 32 bit and what is 64 bit. Then I may need an off line computer for 32 bit jobs. I see the end of 32bit comming soon.

 

32bit apps aren't a problem on a 64bit machine, as long as they're compatible with the OS. Most new software auto-selects the 64bit installation, but 32bit also works fine. On my desktop, 64bit Topaz DeNoise AI, takes almost a full minute to process a single tif file, but only seconds on the laptop. Most of my radio programming apps are only 32bit, but they don't require the kind of CPU resources needed for CAD or graphics intensive software.

[dabateman]

Sorry for the confusion Gary. Yes currently on Windows 10 32-bit apps work fine. But in the not too distant future there is talk of killing all 32bit support and going full only 64bit. Apple may push this first, but its coming.

So I want a back up machine in that case. Currently only my old Topaz plugins are 32bit. So doesn't affect me as much as I thought.

[GaryR]

Sorry for the confusion Gary. Yes currently on Windows 10 32-bit apps work fine. But in the not too distant future there is talk of killing all 32bit support and going full only 64bit. Apple may push this first, but its coming.

So I want a back up machine in that case. Currently only my old Topaz plugins are 32bit. So doesn't affect me as much as I thought.

 

Apple obviously doesn't value legacy users. Windows will likely support 32bit apps for many years to come. By then, any software I currently use will likely have 64bit compatibility.