Thetownend.com

Guys, just need a bit of advice and pointing in the right direction.  I have an old Dell computer running Windows XP, now I know Microsoft will be no longer supporting this in a couple of months time and as the price of coal is going up so much I can hardly afford to keep throwing lumps of said mineral on it to raise steam!!  It's getting very slow, keeps telling my a script has stopped running and now my printer is knackered I find that I cannot have a wi-fi new one and would still need a cable - all well and good but I feel it is time to upgrade.  Although I do have a laptop as well I really do prefer my old traditional computer.  I visited the little computer shop in Gorse Hill yesterday to discuss it with them and they told me they would build me a new tower for about £280-£300 depending on the spec I required.  One thing that has confused me is that he said it would be better to install Windows 7 on it although Windows 8 is available if I want it!  Is there a valid reason for this and would you consider that to be a fair price for building me one?  Please do not confuse me too much with an answer as I am - as far as computers go - technically illiterate. :hmmm: :doh:

I suppose the main reason he's encouraged you towards 7 is because it's practically a 'finished' operating system and therefore generally more stable (I do say generally here, doubtless another TEF nerd will come and correct me). Microsoft still update it, but it's little things here and there as opposed to the massive updates to fix any flaws found in their new OS Windows 8- recently for example they updated 8 so you could boot to the normal desktop without having to go through that weird touch-screen style menu.

There's also less of a leap learning how to use 7 from XP than there is 8 to XP, and 99% of the time 7 is also (importantly) cheaper than 8.

Hard to say whether £280-300 is a reasonable price without any information regarding the gubbins he'd put in it, did he give you any specs to take home regarding what he'd build for you for that?

I have PM'd you Ronnie.

Vast majority of people I have spoken to say they prefer 7 to 8.

7 is a vastly superior version of XP.

8 is an attempt to make your desktop look and act like a touchscreen phone.

8 is therefore pretty Marmite

I feel your pain Ronnie  :) When my original 90's tower, which cost about £700 at the time went west, I replaced it with a reconstructed machine my kid got from a nerd at work for £50.

All I wanted was a machine which does the basic job of running the internet/e-mail and can play the Town goals from SSN.

I always think of 7 as what Microsoft produced after looking at vista and telling their engineers to go away and do it properly.

I recently had the same thing as you Ronnie. I'm techinally illiterate and I went from a slow, noisy XP relic to a refurbed windows 7 Dell from this guy.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/recycling-group/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from=

He's whacked his prices up by £20 as they were selling so well but i'd still still buy one again at the price he charges now. Mine runs like a dream and is piss easy to use. Quiet and very quick. No doubt others more clued up than myself will say its dated etc, but for someone like me who just wants to go on the internet and print documents etc it does the job very well indeed. Came with everything all ready to go, Usb keyboard, mouse, wifi etc.
Had it nearly 4 months now and i've had no trouble from it at all.

Windows 7 is mint. Best Windows OS ever. Win8 is shite. Avoid.

This.

I'm not sure what's worse - Vista or Win8!

:)

Close call but its 8 for me because of its interface, even though you can change it to get a start menu back etc it is still massively user unfriendly......Vista just didnt work properly.

Windows 8 will go the way of Windows ME

Windows 9 is out next April 14.

Supposed to look like this:
(http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/cwdn/BeA9xjZCEAA7bMs.jpg)

ha. Should have just said illiterate.  :doh:

Owned by 4D.

Haha. You've been waiting to do that I'm sure.  ;)
The ultimate humiliation, I know.
In my defence I can spell it but typed quickly on my phone and didn't check it first. Honest....

I blame my phone a lot too  :D













It changes words on it's own  :(

:D

Windows 7 with a facelift.

Thanks guys, it looks like it is Windows 7 for me then.  Any further advice gratefully received.



Pleased to see I am not the only thick one when it comes to computers . . . just born 40 years too early I guess. :-[

I bloody hope you can turn off all that social media shit!

Forgive me but what can a £300 desktop do that a tablet can't?

(http://i.imgur.com/uuT3LUi.gif)

Mega lolz

(http://www.reactiongifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/get-out.gif)

Tried adding a gif but ended up just pasting a link. Disgrace

I use my laptop (Windows 7) almost all the time (when wife is not on it) but I have still got XP on a tower system and hardly use as so slow. Apparently Microsoft have extended their XP assistance cut-off date until next year so will wait and upgrade then as 8 is not user friendly as said elsewhere. Hopefully Windows 9 will be the answer but it begs the question how can Microsoft get it so wrong?

 :hmmm:

Because pretty much bar XP and Win 7, they always have.

3.11 for workgroups was a class OS. Literally ground-breaking at the time.

TBF Windows 3.0 was good, 3.11 as Jayo says groundbreaking for networking, 95 and 98 both excellent at the time, ME 2000 and Vista were crap, XP good, Win 7 brilliant...Win 8 crap again.

Out of curiosity what is it about WIN 8 people don't like?

Currently looking at upgrades and need a Motherboard + CPU+ RAM. Saw a decent bundle which includes an i5-4760k for £350 with some free games and other stuff but I'm not sure I'd play the games.

Considering I don't play games I think I may take the single threaded performance hit and go the AMD route  :eek:

Can you link that bundle please Si?

For me its the horrible front end thats been written with touch screens in mind and also it does some things for you behind the scenes that I want control of that Windows 7 allows you to but 8 does not, that said it seems to run most programs as well as 7 does.

Yes the start button has returned in 8.1 but you have to opt in to use it, it should be standard on install.

I don't think Win 8 is hated quite as much or is as bad as some people make out.

Main problem is its different, the interface has been pretty much the same in Windows for a long time and such a radicle change is hard for a lot of people to get their head round. So they just slag it off instead.

Other problem is its Microsoft and plenty of people are always queuing up to take cheap shots.

I like it, the interface is far better than Mac OS X which looks pre-historic in comparison now.

http://www.dabs.com/products/asus-4th-gen-gamer-bundle--inc-z87-k-motherboard--intel-core-i5-4670k---8gb-vengeance-pro-black--8Y8X.html?catid=15005&src=3

The bundle changed today so you lose one of the games which from memory was only Rome II Total War

AMD's are fine in single thread applications but still lag well behind an i5 or i7, especially in video encoding and heavy processing appications like winrar.

Thats not a bad deal for £350 Si if you play the games as on Ebuyer currently Z87 MSi mobo = £65, 4670k = £176, 8gb Corsair Vengence 2133mhz Ram = £80, coming to a total of £321.

HP disagree with you.

http://www.geek.com/microsoft/hp-flogs-windows-7-systems-because-people-hate-windows-8-so-much-1582615/

Rome 2 is fucking mint.

Awesome game.

The problem for me though is that I've played it a gzillion times already as it's basically just the original Rome game only with enhanced graphics.

The benchmarks I've seen show the FX-8320 to be ahead or an a par for those uses.

FX-8320 + Asus Motherboard + 8GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical RAM 1600mhz  = £245

I could spend the difference on a new case, cooling, another SSD or something less nerdy and slightly more fun :)

It was the cheapest and oldest of all the games and hardly the deal breaker is what I meant :)

Ha ha. You didn't actually bother reading that article did you. All it says is....

"Over the weekend HP’s marketing team unleashed a real humdinger of a campaign. They’re proudly trumpeting the availability of systems running Windows 7 just in case PC buyers can’t stand the thought of Windows 8."

This thread makes me want a new PC. My laptop handles the games I play fairly well, but there's always room for improvement.

same, only had my laptop 6 months and want another one already

I keep finding myself looking at triple monitor set ups and dreaming of having one.

Maybe after I move. A new NAS and properly networked house are already on the 'want' list.

Have you been drooling over /r/battlestations?

Indeed.

That is why I love OSX. No fluff, no frills, no excess animation or colours, absolute simplicity and everything's pretty much within 1 click. It's not far off the top of the list of reasons as to why I made the move in fact.

And I have a 256GB Crucial M4 SSD for sale if anyone's interested.

I suggest you replay the original. It hasn't aged particularly well. As soon as you realise every town is the same and you can only build one unit in each town a turn you'll switch it off again. Rome 2 is immeasurably better.

How much do you want for it? My SSD seems to have enough room so I’m not really interested but if anyone else is reading, an SSD is the best everyday performance upgrade you will get right now.

What happened to your surround sound receiver in the end?

I think £80 is a quite reasonable price.

The amp is sat in my ex's garage I think. That's presuming she hasn't already thrown it, which is sadly very likely.

Very reasonable, depending on the age and condition of the drive. Someone could grab a bargain here.


Oops, my bad.

Whilst I like it, Rome II for some reason isn't as time-wastingly brilliant as its predecessor or Medieval II was. I don't know what it is, but it just doesn't hook me the same way.

Plus for some reason no matter how high I turn the graphics it looks worse than it should.

I've got a dual campaign running with a mate and we play together as Egypt every monday night. Not managed to get a really good single player game going yet but we've played over 100 turns on the Egypt game.

I really, really like it.

It was new in October '12 I think and has only had normal use, no reformatting or anything. Put it in my laptop and that's it. It's now full and has been for ages, so I've bought a new one as I'm fed up with constantly removing shit. I think it's rated to 5000 write cycles, so practically new.


No worries. It was her amp anyway.

You posh git. Do you get a new car when the ashtrays are full too? :)

See maybe that's where I'm missing out as I haven't done a dual campaign yet. I generally just play and rate games on single player because I hate people and play video games to escape them.

Other than TF2 of course.

We are playing in single player mode... just playing as a collective.

I'm in the market for a new tower or a laptop. Thought about a 16GB iPad but the screen is small like the iPad I'm using now (company's) and I like some have said prefer the large screen setup.

Now my XP powered box has started playing up with scrip errors and slow down load speeds. Best place to buy? I tend to use the PC for Internet, email, bit of document work. Printing.

Ok geekies what's the SP?

Buy a tablet. Much faster and more powerful than any desktop PC or laptop.

Mac or Windows?