Thinking now more in terms of an actual laptop. Any suggestions on make etc? Touch screen would be nice - or would it? Anyone have experience with one? Something preferably relatively light, with a good easy-to-see screen, decent battery life, a few USB slots and maybe a CD drive is the kind of thing I'm looking for. And obviously a sturdy and responsive keyboard. Probably 4GB RAM and maybe 500 gig to 1 tb HDD.

FYIIAC (FYI If Anyone Cares) looking at this one at the moment:

https://www.lifewire.com/best-touchs...aptops-4134190
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....1zODI7JCDL.jpg

^Solid choice.

Yeah? I'm really thinking about pulling the trigger, though I might wait for Amazon Prime day. Only a week away now...

Any newer dell latop will pretty much do whatever you need it to do. Especially if you're just a simple computer user. So yeah, I'd say go for it if you can get it on sale too.

GOOD ADVICE: Go bigger on RAM! Windows 10 OS eats up 2 GB of RAM itself just to operate. And only like 3.45 of that 4 GB is actually usable [like storage space on a hard drive, they always fuck you.]. So 4 GB of RAM while running Windows 10 is really like having 1.5 GB :eek: This is life.

Yeah I'm going for an 8 gb model, definitely. And 1tb hdd space. To hell with SSD and their ****ing tiny storage: I need a proper hard disk.

SSD for boot drive / main programs is an incredible performance increase over HDD btw. Might want to consider having both.

Yep I am. But too many of these come with ONLY SSD and that's no good to this guy. Also want touchscreen (as opposed to what I originally wrote, which was torchscreen!) as those bloody inbuilt trackpads drive me mad.

When I bought a computer a few weeks ago, I had the choice of 1TB regular hard drive or 250GB SSD. I went with the SSD because I know that I'll find a way around the space limits.

I've been copying my music library and such to the new computer and, currently, I've got ~80GB left. Not a lot, but I know that the last 40-60GB are gonna last me a long, long time. I don't save movies and such, and I only keep the music I actually have on disc, so my storage needs are limited. I also have a large external HDD for backups.

I doubt I'll regret my choice (blink-of-an-eye computer boot times are still blowing my mind!), but of course it depends hugely on personal habits.

Cool. But at the moment my music library on its own (and it's not completely transferred over to the new folder yet) stands at just under 700 gig, so, you can see how I would need a whole lot more space. Mind you, that's on my PC, and I could obviously use less space on the new laptop, but if I'm going for one I may as well go for the best I can get, within reason, as I'm not paying for it, of course.

HDD for storage is pretty essential IMO.

:beer:
I don't wanna be thinking oh noes, not enough space to store this massive porn stash - er, I mean, discography of albums....
:shycouch:

Perhaps it's a bit unusual for a music nerd to have as little music as I do, but I feel like I can only realistically listen to probably not a lot more than what I have now (600-700 albums), so I prune my collection all the time. I think my limit is 1000 albums or less. More than that, and it seems like most of it will collect dust/sit around in forgotten hard drive sectors.

That's just me of course.

If I delete my music then how will I one day have an encyclopedic archive of hate music that will be admitted to the Library of Congress under heavy national protest?

Good point. It's probably of historical interest. To the wrong kind of people at least.

Most of the stuff I delete will be available on Spotify anyway, so I can always come back to it. I basically only keep the music that I feel a stronger connection to. I don't want to give shelf space or disk space to just anything.

You've done quite the mental gymnastics to justify only a SSD for storage. I can appreciate that.

There is no category in which HDD beats SSD, except for price.

If I don't really need the storage (I don't: It's only slightly smaller than the HDD of my old laptop, which I never filled out entirely), then it's better for me for sure.

Capacity

Ridiculous. What's the biggest SSD now? 250 gig? Meanwhile HDDs are up to 8, sometimes 12 TB! You fail.

Or, you know, what Eric said.

It very much depends on priorities. For gaming, software development* and various other things, an SSD can be amazing. It's not going to buy you much of an advantage if you're just going to read things, watch Netflix and listen to music, so it's all about what one needs to do with it.

*Loading a Unity project on a standard HDD takes forever, for example, but this is of course not exactly something that concerns your average computer user.

I wholly misspoke. I'm under the influence of a controlled substance. Thank you all for the corrections :beer: What I MEANT TO SAY was that a SSD has a much faster write speed, isn't affected by magnets and has no moving parts, making it ideal for most solutions, albeit expensive compared to traditional HDD's.

SSD's actually go up to 2TB! Around $500 for that.

Didn't know that. I assumed they were small but fast. Mind you, a 4 tb HDD will set you back a mere 100 Euro or so, so still the HDD option for me with regard to storage.

Get this to store your MB posts.. It holds 20TB

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....L._SL1500_.jpg

Also, for someone like you I'd spend the money on the extra storage instead of the speed. I don't see you taking advantage of the SSD.

I'll take two.

You're right of course. No matter how much storage I get it will never be enough, and speed for me will always end up being a secondary priority.

Under my DNS Servers in OSX I Have one listed that looks like hexadecimal separated by colons with the first set separated by two colons. Is this a valid format for a DNS server?

ie.

nnnn::nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn

Never buy a Dell computer. I bought an xps 13 laptop less than two years about because according to the reviews, it was supposed to be one of the best. And indeed, it is beautiful and performed very well. For about a year and a half. Now, less than two years after buying it, the battery is croaking and deforming the keyboard. Possibly related (or maybe another hardware failure), it's starting to freeze every now and then so I have to manually turn it off.

And of course, the warranty is one year.

Lesson learned, stick with the Asians.

The battery on my Chromebook is clearly busted. I can't use it without the power chord plugged in or it immediately shuts down, and my keyboard is warped and sometimes a key sticks for like ten seconds and I just have to wait for it to stop. Really annoying when it's the ****ing backspace key.

Have you considered repairing it?

To me? There's a bubble in my keyboard that means I have to prop it up to keep it from rattling around while I type. I don't know about fixing it when it might very well be cheaper to buy a new one. And how do you fix a bubble of warped plastic?

What's you chromebook model? Some models are really, really easy to change keyboards on and a replacement keyboard can be quite cheap.

That seems like an IPV6 address. Basically it's the successor to IPV4. Version 6 gives you a lot more addressing possibilities because it's 128 bits rather than 32.
The two colons just means that zeros were omitted. It's called Zero Compression (can only occur once in an address) and it's used to simplify the address while still meaning the same thing in binary. In your example, I can see that 3 successive sets of hex were all zeros, so your example could have looked like this in reality:

nnnn:0000:0000:0000:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn:nnnn

The compression of zeros makes the address less verbose, as the Zero Compression can imply what's in those three groups by looking at the remaining number of groups and knowing only one Zero Compression can occur in the address, given that there will always be 8 groups of hex.

As to whether the particular IPV6 address is valid for a DNS server, that depends on two things:

1. Is the DNS server it's referencing assigned the IPV6 address and listening to requests on it?
2. Can your computer communicate via IPV6 to receive a response from the DNS server with an IPV6 address?

You can find that out by performing a ping from the client, using the IPV6 address. If it responds, then it's just as valid as an IPV4 address. The DNS protocol itself is irrelevant of that.

IPV6 still isn't ubiquitous as we have a lot of IPV4 addresses out there, but I've noticed over the past few years that some ISPs are beginning to assign IPV6 addresses to routers, and depending on your router and its configuration, it may be doing the same for the auto configuration of devices within the network, which would be relevant if you're not statically setting your own DNS servers on your network card with something like Google's 8.8.8.8, etc.

Thanks Freebase, very comprehensive :)

So, my computer f*cked up out of nowhere. I'm running Windows 10. Walked into the room to find a blue screen had popped up, saying that it was collecting data to restart because the OS crashed or quit working. When it re-booted, the HDD wouldn't boot at all. Ran all of the diagnostics that I could and it sounds like the OS was trying to update itself and errored out somehow, then committed suicide. Luckily, I have some live Linux distros so that I can at least get online. Here is what was diagnosed:

I am dreading having to wipe and re-install. But that may be a best case scenario. May need a new HDD. Any ideas?

What can you do without computer.

He just wants to be diffeeent.