Dan - there's a good, comprehensive article about SSD drives here: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3531 . Basically, they may be worthwhile for faster application speed. They should also help your battery last longer. However, Intel did just recall a batch of drives: http://www.h-online.com/security/Intel-X25-M-G2-SSD-defect-causes-data-corruption--/news/113863, so beware.
The main objection is price - it looks like you'll spend over $300 for 80GB. I was considering this when I bought a laptop a few months ago but didn't do it. I'd be interested in hearing your experience if you go this route. I did get a light (5 pounds) Lenovo laptop w/3GB RAM, 250GB HD, 15'' screen for about $600 at J&R (without MS Office, etc.) I grabbed it because it had XP on it, which is getting increasingly hard to get pre-installed. The screen isn't as good as my old laptop - some pixel patchiness watching videos - but it seems faster over all (even though the clock speed is lower). However, my most important considerations were weight and normal-sized keyboard, so it satisfied these. I backup religiously but haven't had hard-drive problems (yet). One thing I'm careful about is not to move the laptop when the drives are spinning - I put it in hibernate before moving it around. I think this is a good practice, though some would disagree. Good luck, Devon On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 10:01 AM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote: > Forum, > > My HDD died a couple weeks back. So this is a good opportunity to get a > new desktop. Does anyone have specific recommendations or good > experiences with particular pieces of hardware? > > I'm leaning towards a 64 bit system, dual or quad core, I will run Windows > (likely XP or Vista), and probably going to load up on memory because a > responsive (snappy) UI is important to me. I'm budgeting ~$1K. > > Other than that, my needs are simple, and mostly revolve around the > internet. The only heavy calculations I run are in J, and that's > infrequent. I watch some youtube and netflix movies online, and I play > music in iTunes, but other than that my medium is text. I don't play > games or edit video, etc. > > One feature I'd like to focus on is reliability, particularly in the HDD. > I'm not disciplined about backup. Maybe it makes sense to allocate more > funds to a mini RAID array than to Hz? Are SSDs more reliable these days > than spinning disks? Are they worth the extra cash? > > Since I have all the peripherals (a good monitor, keyboard, mouse, speaker > system, etc), all I need is recommendations on the PC itself. > > -Dan > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
