Simmytu

Crash Day together with Red Alert 2 were my first PC games but all of my childhood hours, at least a huge chunk of them, were spent on a PSP with GTA Liberty and Vice City Stories (that I still play time to time).

The i5 4690K is what you need to look at :-)

What type of gaming experience do you expect your brother dealing with? Browser games or more of puzzle type of games or (worst case scenario) first person shooters like Battlefield and CoD.

Acer low budget line shares the same so called "you get what you pay for" products, just like HP. And besides browser games and really low requirement games from 2000's/ 2005, I personally don't expect much from gaming because of their Intel HD onboard graphics. (The Intel HD 3000 wil do better at gaming then what this Acer has to offer).

But generally I don't recommend laptops with Celerons and Pentiums (AMD's Essential series and A4 APU's included) because they are way too slow for any modern usage except for maybe dedicated email/ school devices.

Well a $200 laptop is definitely not sounding great especially from a company (Tbh almost every laptop that's under $600 has had some terrible compromises to be made) that's famous for it's "you get for what you pay for". What I personally think about is that HP and/ or Microsoft want to compete within the price range of Chromebooks, which is great for students like me and a lot of you guys :-D

But I still have some trust issues with the words laptop and cheap. Hopefully HP doesn't "screw" that much up and deliver something that isn't disposable after 1 year of usage, true story happened to our teacher year or two ago

 

Since this topic is going a bit off topic, as usual:

Haha no this is just pulling it in and out of his backpack and using the CD drive vigorously. Maybe one drop too. The lid problem happened when it got stuck. He tried to open it but the hinge jammed it self. When he finally pried it open the bottom part of the bezel just snapped clean off and stayed attached in the stuck position.

Wow, that's one of the weirdest story that I've read today about HP (and laptops in general). My aunt has bought a HP Pavilion laptop with an A8 with dual graphics and such (it was decent spec'd laptop for it's price) and it has been running for about a year and a half now. The only thing I think that HP has screwed some big time here is it's preloaded Windows 8 image. Oh my.. I've never seen such unstable OS in quite a while. Issues like the scaling doesn't work or that one security update made the entire device unusable was actually the worst yet and I had to fix it .

Even worse then the term android cable - "Samsung cable".

You wouldn't want to know how often I get that answer when I asked my science teacher for a micro usb cable. "I'm sorry (insert a name here) but I'm not quite sure if that Samsung cable is going to fit in your Android phone". Yes, this was her actual reply to my question

Later on that day when the bell rang and our science class hour ended I've walked to her and explained to her that most modern smartphones uses micro usb cables and the term Samsung cable shouldn't be used, since they aren't the same thing.

Laugh all you want. My post was in regard to reference coolers pre GTX 700 era. At the time they were the best people could get for stock cards. Anyone old enough to have experienced the 295 and 480 launch hype would know this. That being said, yes there were somewhat better looking aftermarket designs or water blocks, but compared to stock reference coolers, they were the better looking at the time.

Yeah I have to agree with that. Each card had it's own unique styling and that helped us remember each generation of cards even better. I'm personally found of the stock design of the current gen GTX 770+ series (The 690 and Titan included). I mean Nvidia did put effort in their cards in terms of cooling and appearance.

They have to leave room for their board partners to improve on with their custom designed and engineers coolers and PCBs otherwise why would I buy a MSI Twinfrozr GTX 770 if the stock card reaches the same acoustic levels while maintaining acceptable temperatures.

Anyway I went quite off topic there.

 

Woohoo that's why I love competition! Price reductions are always great for customers and now they made their cards even more appealing to some more people around here :lol: 

My family always bought Packard Bell desktops and laptops, severally the iMedia, iXtreme and Easynote line of products. My first (and last OEM) purchase was a Samsung Chronos 17 770Z7E notebook.

Couldn't you simply have extracted your data directly from the HDD. Or if concerned about warranty made the store do it for you?

Nope, I didn't select any extra warranty service on that laptop, just the standard 2 year warranty that came with the laptop. I couldn't extract the HDD because the back cover was factory sealed if I opened it it would void the warranty entirely and I wouldn't have any RMA rights.

-snip-

I definitely know how this would feel, because I've been in the same type of situation.

 

Here is my story,

I was terrified as **** when my previous Samsung Chronos laptop decided to give up its life and die with all of my important school documents and reports that I've been working on for the past 4 months (some 3 40 page fully written documents about fire hazard and fire prevention). 

Firstly I told to myself it was just a random blue screen and everything should be working normally after I restart my laptop. Everything was normal, just like what I've expected but then another blue screen came along with a very high pitched screech sound coming from the main speakers after just 3 minutes of runtime.

I've panicked because of the sound. Then I realized my laptop is dying after 5 months of ownership.

What could I do, told I to myself. I couldn't just open it since it would void the warranty and have a 3 kg slab of aluminum stuck forever.

I turned it back on and plugged a thumb drive in it and started to save as much as possible and after 4 attempts I had recovered most of the important data in that laptop. (I did lose couple of folders full of family pictures unfortunately ).

Later on that same week, I RMA'd the laptop to the shop and they gave me full refund of the product after they fully verified that I didn't cause anything by myself.

 

Since then I've learned my lesson and now I'm always backing up my files at Onedrive cloud storage, school server and at home to prevent myself stuck again with this nasty situation.

I find that Dell and HP workstation grade systems do have quite some quality behind them (They got quite some severe abuse at schools and still function quite well). I would buy a Dell Precision M2800 if I had the money to buy

What are you planning to do with the card. For pure gaming the R9 290X will serve you quite well.

I'm impressed with Zalman this time

That's pity to see, I looked forward for this event

Never done that on personal systems, unless it's an OEM PC bloated with crapware or Windows hated it self and decided to give up (Happened quite often at my aunts PC) 

When I said that I stopped acting childish, there was no relation to me not playing video games, I stopped playing them to put forth more effort to my studies and I stopped acting childish as in I changed my personality. No relation exists between the two. Sorry if anybody was offended.

EDIT: my parents never let me play decent games (they think that it will turn me into some sort of emo psychopath/murderer) so I can't really comment on the topic, although I would like to play said games once the overload of studies are over.

No problem mate, I was being sarcastic but having sarcasm hidden in text and using emoticons doesn't cut it, unfortunately. :unsure:

Agreed. Heck, October will mark 2 years since I stopped playing video games and stopped acting like a selfish, screaming, annoying 4-year-old.

My mom finally gave in and my dad installed IE Killer and AdBlock on my mom's laptop, thank the lords.

 

-snip-

I feel offended now, thanks a lot WinNut...

 

Hooray! No more viruses on your mom's laptop

Well they are right about it freezing when you run too many programs (kinda) - My computer gets pretty sluggish and unresponsive then I'm using 8GB/8GB RAM (due to running a virtual machine), and when I close it, my computer becomes practically unusable while it saves the state and exits. Although it's not really a normal use case.

I don't fully remember what I've did in the past but the term "multi tasking" was completely out of order, because of that slowdown they fought that I started "harming" the computer. I do understand that from one particular reason, we've returned so many PC's in the past because of overheating and or any malfunctions which made my mother and my family in general inconvenient with the entire "build your own PC" thing which I started looking at in 2011.

 

Edit: grammar error

It's totally not bad for what they're asking for. Decent deal is what I can say all about

The laptop is beyond repair. It's like a car that's been totaled. It's also really disgusting, there's weird brown crust on the edge of the trackpad.

Why don't people actually care for their electronics or appliances in general? For example: if they trash their car, they will lose a lot of money on repairs or spending their savings on a new vehicle. I just don't get certain types of people. :mellow:

 

I don't know what to say. What's with the 'ooh it's a magic box and if you even look at it the wrong way you'll displease the gods, cause it to catch on fire and disgrace the family name'? At a hardware level it's no different to working on a car. Opening the bonnet too many times won't suddenly cause it to explode.....

-snip-

I fully agree with that, I've heard so many times in the past "don't run too much programs otherwise the computer freezes or son, don't play (insert game title with awesome physics mechanics here) otherwise the computer crashes and it's all your fault.

(That's what my mother said to me 7+ years ago when I was playing Crashday, a racing game). <_<

L85A2 FTW

SCAR-H FTW

Team Bravo since it has got room for players.

 

My Battlelog ID is Simmytu,

http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/soldier/Simmytu/stats/781982737/pc/

 

This is quite nice to see, more efficient soc's is one awesome advancement in mobile industry.

Sounds promising, I can join any team that needs one more player in them. I live in the Netherlands.

The good old Pentium E series.

shame you cant do the same for intel motherboards

Actually you can fix bent socket pins with using precision tools and having quite steady hands.

This awesome guy over at DIY Perks has done this video showing how to straighten bent CPU socket pins.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhOYEQ65a94&list=UUUQo7nzH1sXVpzL92VesANw