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$412.80 Laptop – Core 2 Duo 4GB 320GB 16” Win7

Posted by on May 13, 2010 in Price Alerts | 0 comments

This is a very good deal on a refurbished laptop. MSI is not well known but most of the personal computers I have built have MSI motherboards in them. This is a great laptop for the price. I can hardly keep from purchasing it for myself.

Core 2 Duo T6600 2.2GHz 4GB 320GB DVD?RW DL 16” Windows 7 Home Premium w/Webcam

BUY.COM Laptop Deal

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Brian Haines recommends Windows 7

Posted by on Feb 17, 2010 in Computers | 0 comments

I knew we would all move to Windows 7 eventually, but I didn’t know that I would be this happy about it. Really.

Not only has Windows 7 performed well on my 2 year old laptop with only 2GB of RAM, I have enjoyed using it and find that some of the new features are welcomed improvements.

I was very critical of Windows Vista because of the very poor performance, more than glitches and bugs, of which there were some. The vast majority of computers that were sold with Windows Vista performed horridly mainly because they lacked the memory capacity needed to run the operating system effectively. Computers like my HP Pavilion dv6000 came with the memory maxed out at 2GB, but even those with 3GB or 4GB were barely able to run Vista and still have enough memory to run larger applications like Photoshop, and forget it if you needed to run more than a few applications at a time.

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Interesting Laptop Deal $599.99

Posted by on Dec 8, 2009 in Price Alerts | 0 comments

Here is an interesting deal on an HP Notebook computer at TigerDirect:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=5406500&sku=H24-15024

I have mixed feelings about it based on several review sources.

The good:
Core 2 Duo CPU
Takes up to 8GB of RAM
Comes with Windows XP Preinstalled.

The bad:
The speakers are not very good
You have to pull the whole bottom panel off to get to any upgrades (11 screws).

So, if sound quality is not that important to you and would usually have me do a memory upgrade when needed this is a pretty good machine. It comes with Windows 7 also, but I have to believe that it is a 32 bit version. When you are ready to upgrade to Windows 7 you will want the 64 bit version to take advantage of the 8GB of ram you can upgrade to.

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Internet Explorer is really slow

Posted by on Nov 9, 2009 in Computers | 0 comments

Internet Explorer 8 is really slow on Windows 7. Microsoft is aware of the issue and blames it on add-ons. I’m sorry, but it is your browser that allows the add-ons in the first place. Firefox seems to work fine even with dozens of add-ons. My installation has Java and Flash only and it is still slow enough that I don’t feel I can use it.

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Windows 7, Day 1

Posted by on Oct 23, 2009 in Computers | 1 comment

If you have been paying attention to my blog then you know I don’t recommend Windows 7. I am sure it is an improvement over Vista, but I also suspect it still won’t perform as well as Windows XP.

If you know me at all you also know that I had to try it. So here goes… I loaded Windows 7 Professional on my Laptop today and am in the midst of loading all my software and files etc…

Here is the preliminary boot after some updates – basically fresh after install.

Once I have everything I need running on my laptop again then I will report on my experience and let you know how it performed. Since Windows XP is still loaded on my other drive I can always compare.

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