The computer thread

Just another Moderator
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Interesting! We always complain that we get the "Australia Tax"* as compared to say the US our prices are (not always) relatively high. Market size I guess is one of the main drivers for price. Those prices I posted include our 10% GST.

It seems we are not so bad off afterall!

Tony.

*Because we are isolated from the rest of the world it has traditionally not been practical to buy elsewhere, so vendors were able to charge a premium price, but online buying I think has been changing that.
 
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Just another Moderator
Joined 2003
Paid Member
Yes lots of variable when it comes to comparing taxes. If you just take the tax at face value though then the price difference only comes to about 5%.

Oh and I was mistaken this laptop has four cores, not eight, 8 logical cores, I guess hyperthreading.... It's a hp zbook studio G3 and seems ok so far :) Definitely a MUCH better screen that my old levovo.

Tony.
 
Started moving data to my new 10TB drives.
The old drives hit a transfer rate of about 85MB/s steadily, with large files it goes to 129MB/s for a bit, and on densily packed small files it goes down rather low, blame it on the antivirus software working hard.

Wintermute, I did purchase a Pro license for win10 for 14 USD from an online shop a little while ago, seeing as the 14$ license was paid using Paypal, I thought the risk was worth it. Last time I bought a license from a vendor here it was about the same price you got. The expensive, original Microsoft labeled thumb drive that I got stopped working after a year when I really needed it. Had to download and build a new install drive.
 
Just another Moderator
Joined 2003
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They are pretty good speeds for a spinning drive KaffiMann. Small files always kill the performance! The online price I found was $60 but they had both home and pro at the same price which was a bit sus. It was when I saw them advertising an office 365 perpetual licence (it is an annual subscription) for $60 that I decided to give them a miss!

Tony.
 
Dave, I am not so sure I understand the first part of your question but I thought I could provide the answer to the second part. :)
 

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As long as you do not need to connect to the internet you can use WINDOWS for a music computer without paying anything.

I have a machine I use for REW using Windows 8 and other than the occasional prompt to register it works just fine. Never loses any information.

I would think one would not want a music computer to connect to the internet but I am old fashioned.
 
They are pretty good speeds for a spinning drive ...

Yeah I guess, but I am looking forward to trying the transfer rate when I'm starting to sync my two 10TB drives. Hoping to get closer to 200MB/s steady.

As a side note my Samsung 860 goes between 330-430MB/s, the brand new 1TB nvme drive goes steady at over 1000MB/s, if and when I can feed it, mostly happens if I test with a ram drive...
 
Against my wishes not to buy an hdd ever again , a couple of months ago I got one 4tb Wd black, but this is it, no more , SSD only! They got very cheap. I remember 10+ years ago I got my first Intel x25 40gb ssd for 200$. Since then I had 12-15 more ssd (intel, plextor, crucial , Samsung and....hp 920 series 1tb), but the biggest wow factor was the first one, the little 40gb intel.
 
I got a really bad track record on SSD's. They are not suitable for reliable long term storage.
Have had several SSD's lose data through format sector faults after long term intensive use, gone on a vacation for 3 weeks, come back happy and restored, fire up the system and...
It get's old after 1 time, after 2 times with 2 different drives/systems, well. Let's just call it "trust issues".

Luckily I did not lose everything, because of previous incidents I really like to have redundancy, but losing a little can be more than enough. At least when you've experienced losing everything before.
 
My first was a 15 megabyte I got from Xerox used on a IBM AT by seagate. It also had 2 360 K double sided floppies, half height. I also worked on a RCA Spectra 70 / 55 64 bit at MacAuto with 512K of ram. It had a multi platter disk drive from IBM that it booted from with 2 megabytes of storage. 1967ish.
 
I also worked on a RCA Spectra 70 / 55

I vaguely remember touring an RCA computer manufacturing (or maybe systems integration) facility in Florida in the late 60's. It was somewhere on the east coast south of Cape Canaveral, Riviera Beach maybe.

My first "computer" (1975) was a SWTPC (Tiger Amps) 6800 system with 2 K of static RAM and a tape drive. At its largest it ram an overclocked 6809 chip, filled a whole bench, used an old reel to reel tape deck for mas storage, and dimmed the room lights when turned on. By the late 80's a mid range 68HC11 chip with a RAM, ROM, and monitor EPROM, on a small board would kick it's butt, so I gave it away. Still have the DIY 68HC11 boards I built though.
 

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