Tuesday, April 23

Geek

Sasami

Apart from the Windows 8 stuff - you shouldn't have to fight your operating system, much less your user interface - Sasami is pretty good for the price.  Definitely needs more memory - it ships with 2GB, and it has integrated graphics which eats a good chunk of that right away, about 400MB by default, and I'm running Chrome (which can easily eat over 1GB), PyCharm (which can use several hundred MB on even modest projects), and Xshell (which can also use several hundred MB if you have lots of sessions with lots of history).  So right away I'm using all the memory and then some.

So I'm thinking I'll add another 4GB, and give it the old SSD out of Lina (my Linux box; it has a 300GB Intel 320, but I have a new Samsung 840 Pro to replace that).

That should do for starters.

Also, according to the manual it does have USB 3, which is great news.  My experience with USB 3 thus far consists of plugging drives in and having them work perfectly at speeds well over 100MB/s.  That's not something you want to give up.  

Also also, the GPU apparently delivers 80GFLOPS, not 48.  Still a long way short of any decent desktop card, though - my faithful passively-cooled 4850 is my benchmark card, at exactly 1TFLOP, and my 7950 is nearly triple that.  It should be just fine for playing Terraria or Starbound, but forget KSP - that runs slow even on the 4850 when I launch a complex rocket.

Battery life looks to be in the 5 hour+ range for normal active use (neither leaving it idle nor pounding on it constantly), which is fine for such a cheap notebook.  The only essential upgrade then is the memory, which right now is kind of expensive - the DRAM spot market is going through one of its seasonal conniption fits, with prices up about 60% since the start of the year.  4GB of RAM will cost me nearly $40!  (I can remember paying $500 for 4MB of RAM, for my Amiga 3000.)

Oh, and it comes with a trial version of Norton Anti-virus.  I downloaded Start8 to give me back my start menu.  Norton deleted it.  I deleted Norton.  Problem solved.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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