What's your daily driver/battle station?

[Afasoas]

Just curious really, have read about Polar Bar's requirement for a new discombobulator.

My daily use is mixed between 3/4 PCs.

The majority of home use is on a Gigabyte Brix which sports a Celeron N2807 CPU, 4GB RAM and a 32GB SSD. Primarly because I like to leave my desktop switched on when I'm on-call and it draws a meagre 5-7W. Of course it runs Debian - I think trying to do anything under Windows would prove frustrating for even me!

At work I've a Dell Optiplex that sports a an i7-7700T, 16GB RAM and an M2 SSD. Which is absolute overkill.

I've a recycled Dell Lattitude Laptop of some vintage for mobile discombobulating, which is built like a tank and I think it will be some years before I kill it. And it also runs Debian.

For photo editing there's a Lenovo IdeaCentre which sports an i7-3770. I've neutered it somewhat by removing the graphics card, removing the Wi-Fi card, disconnecting the optical drives and now it's idle power draw is 31W. I might rebuild it into a different case and onto a different motherboard as it's too noisy and Lenovo UEFI BIOS plays havok with dual boot.

[Kim]

Dunno, it's a BLACK one.

*tapity-tap*

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz.  16GB RAM.  Reasonably high-spec motherboard, with a view to RAM upgradability in future.  Some kind of passively-cooled Nvidia graphics card with dual DVI outputs.  An SSD (of a size so unimportant I've forgotten what it is) as a boot drive, gigabit Ethernet for everything else.  I've gone to some effort to make the fans big and slow, and to ventilate with positive pressure as a dust-control strategy.

Debian Stretch.  My usual desktop is MATE.  Hardly breaks a sweat unless I spool up a VM with Windows in it.


It's been a while since I owned a laptop that was worthy of Proper Computer status.  I've got an old EeePC that occasionally comes out for network fettling.

[Afasoas]

Dunno, it's a BLACK one.

That's largely how I feel. Reading back my inital post sounds like a humble brag, but I was generally curious in terms of the recommendations people make for new computers versus what the majority forummers actually use.

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz.  16GB RAM.  Reasonably high-spec motherboard, with a view to RAM upgradability in future.  Some kind of passively-cooled Nvidia graphics card with dual DVI outputs.  An SSD (of a size so unimportant I've forgotten what it is) as a boot drive, gigabit Ethernet for everything else.  I've gone to some effort to make the fans big and slow, and to ventilate with positive pressure as a dust-control strategy.

That's quite a beast. I'm with you all the way on big/slow fans and positive pressure for dust control.

Debian Stretch.  My usual desktop is MATE.  Hardly breaks a sweat unless I spool up a VM with Windows in it.

I installed XFCE as a desktop on the Brix (because it's gutless) and to be honest, I don't get along with it that well. I run Cinamon quite happily on the laptop and the i7 - it works well with minimum of customisations.

It's been a while since I owned a laptop that was worthy of Proper Computer status.  I've got an old EeePC that occasionally comes out for network fettling.

I'm actually a big fan of the netbook format. I used one extensively until I found myself dealing with user interfaces that wouldn't rescale leaving the buttons disappeared off the bottom of the display area. I bought an Asus slightly-larger-than-a-netbook which lasted 18 months before the power socket gave out. I recently attempted to solder on a replacement but gave it up as a bad job when I bodged it. With generous applications of flux, heat and desoldering braid I couldn't get the remnants of broken power socket off the board and I'm quite certain I damaged the surrounding components in the attempt. Spudgering the flimsy case a part with the greatest of patience and care still resulted in breaking half the clips that held it together. Add to that the sprung/expanding ethernet port was broken due to another flimsy plastic fail, I gave up and binned it.

[tonycollinet]

Correct me if Im wrong, but doesn't positive pressure require at least *one* inlet fan

[tonycollinet]

Correct me if Im wrong, but doesn't positive pressure require at least *one* inlet fan

WRT OP, my home machine is a 4yo 8GB Core I7 Macbook air which seems to do the job. Though I'm hankering after building a high spec hackintosh.

[Kim]

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz.  16GB RAM.  Reasonably high-spec motherboard, with a view to RAM upgradability in future.  Some kind of passively-cooled Nvidia graphics card with dual DVI outputs.  An SSD (of a size so unimportant I've forgotten what it is) as a boot drive, gigabit Ethernet for everything else.  I've gone to some effort to make the fans big and slow, and to ventilate with positive pressure as a dust-control strategy.

That's quite a beast. I'm with you all the way on big/slow fans and positive pressure for dust control.

It got a forklift mobo/CPU/RAM/SSD upgrade last year.  I expect to get a good 5 years out of it before it gets anything more substantial than new fans.  Maybe some extra RAM if I notice the price has bottomed out and started rising.

Previous incarnation (dual-core Pentium something or other, 4GB, spinning rust) achieved something similar, and most of the parts live on in our living room frankenputer.

[Kim]

Correct me if Im wrong, but doesn't positive pressure require at least *one* inlet fan

Yes, that's the idea:  Two big slow^[1] fans pushing filtered air into the case, which makes its own way out through holes where the exhaust fans aren't and various crevices around optical drive, IO ports, etc.

The PSU fan lets the side down somewhat, but as long as the intake fans are pumping more air in than it's sucking out, and you clean the dust filter occasionally, you're not sucking fluff into the machine through random crevices.


_{[1] Thermostatic, so they will spin up to noise-making levels in the rare event that the machine starts doing some actual work.}

[ian]

Macbook Pro for work. Can't remember the specs, don't much care, it does pretty much all it needs with aplomb. And a 27 inch 5K, 27 inch iMac. Says its a 3.2 GHz Intel Core i5 with 24 GB of memory. It's fast, silent, looks great, and is beautiful to use. Which is all I care about. Computers to me are a means to an end.

[phantasmagoriana]

An Asus Chromebook.

[Ham]

Quad core i5 @ 3.5ghz, 16Gb RAM, 250Gb SSD, built in July 14, still reasonable balanced performance for most things (I run VM inside VirtualBox for Work apps, office stuff, photoshop, media server, oh and Teh Internets, obv)

[Kim]

Computers to me are a means to an end.

Quite.  Willy-waving about desktop computers got dull around about the time the Amiga became irrelevant.  I'll occasionally be impressed by how much functionality you can cram in a dirt cheap microcontroller.

Except when the first 1GHz CPUs came out, which I had a longstanding agreement with myself to own on general principle.

Some of the high-end Macs have been quite shiny.  But powerful computers are either there to do a computer-intensive job (which is boring by default), play games, or to avoid having to waste time upgrading your computer for a while.

[Afasoas]

Computers to me are a means to an end.

Quite.  Willy-waving about desktop computers got dull around about the time the Amiga became irrelevant.  I'll occasionally be impressed by how much functionality you can cram in a dirt cheap microcontroller.

I kind of agree.
I have a bit of an obsession though with energy efficiency and I'm always impressed with what you can does these days with something as small and 'mediocre' as a RaspPi or a programmable microcontroller, a soldering iron and some odds and ends.

Might be more helpful to humour me and treat this as a survey. I've never understood the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest silicon and I'm intrigued as to what people actually use versus the recommendations etc. that are made.

[Jaded]

2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 16GB 1TB

[Kim]

Might be more helpful to humour me and treat this as a survey. I've never understood the need to upgrade to the latest and greatest silicon and I'm intrigued as to what people actually use versus the recommendations etc. that are made.

To me it's certainly felt like Gates's Law has been slowing down for the last decade or so; computers are taking longer to become obsolete.

If you're just doing standard desktop stuff, then anything that can play HD video competently is more-or-less usable for at least 90% of what most people need these days.  Computers with "Designed for Windows Vista" stickers are still usable if you give them a decent amount of RAM and install a less horrible OS.  Even older ones can still be useful in less demanding applications (I forget what my router actually is, but it's some low-power VIA thing with 512MB of RAM that still uses a 20-pin ATX connector).

The last big jump was the move from spinning rust to SSD, and that's an easy retrofit to pretty much anything.

The old computers I've sent for recycling in recent memory have either been archaeologically old, otherwise serviceable machines crippled by lack of RAM upgradability (typically laptops), or have suffered some hardware failure that makes them uneconomical to repair.  On that basis, I think the most important thing to look for in a new machine is the ability to take fuckloads of RAM, even if you don't need it yet.

[Jaded]

Up until about 8 years ago a new computer added noticeable speed increases, I updated every three years or so. Now it is hardly noticeable. I render HD footage fast, compared with letting a DV clip render overnight 20 years ago, or 10 years ago an HD clip taking 10 mins per min of play to render. I suppose if I was doing loads of 4K additional power would be good, but I’d have run out of disk space. 4K seems to be useful for panning in an HD output.

[Beardy]

A Lenovo T440 with spinning rust, A boring 3yo Corporate Workhorse, which I rarely stretch, though BIG spreadsheets¹ do cause it to slow down.
At home I usually use my large iPad Pro or my slightly less large iPad Air, though we’ve got an iMac 27” which I cause to struggle whenever I’m feeling I’ve enough tuits to do some photo editing. The RAW files from my Nikon 810 take a bit of number crunching when I try to create HDR images from 3 or more photos.

_{1. You know the sort that are multiple worksheets and thousands of lines that should really have been created as a database but the author was either too challenged or CBA to do the job properly.}

[Mr Larrington]

Adam Boyle over there ^^^^ AMD A8 3.1GHz, 16GB RAM, 500GB SSD, 1TB HDD, NVIDIA GT730.  And he's lying about that Excel file been locked by another user.

Bruiser McHuge in the Estate Office Intel Core i7 4390 4Ghz, 32GB RAM, 2x500GB SSD, 120GB SSD, 2TB HDD, NVIDIA GTX1080.  Slight overkill on the disk front but they were lying around so it'd have been Wrong not to.

Slow Dempsey the laptop-ette AMD A4, 4GB RAM, 500GB SSD.  Actually quite spritely if you disable Windows Update.

Spencer The Halfwit: old eeePC with an Intel Atom, hasn't been switched on for two years so has probably succumbed to droid rot.

[ScumOfTheRoad]

My daily driver is an HP Spectre laptop.  It is thin, light and very portable.

It folds back on itself for tent mode which is great on aeroplanes, or completely back to make a tablet.
Top of the range (sorry to boast) with 4K screen, touch screen, 16 gigs of RAM and a 1Tbbte SSD.


Dual boot into Windows 10 or Fedora Linux.  All in all an excellent machine.

[Greenbank]

Work desktop: Random old ThinkCentre black thing. Linux (RHES). Dual core i5-3550 @ 3.3GHz, 16GB, 500GB HDD and a 120GB SSD. Currently driving 3 monitors (two 17" 4:3 and one widescreen 23", would prefer two just 23" widescreen monitors).

Work laptop: T440, 16GB. 500GB HDD. Win 7. Sits at home the vast majority of the time. Two Dell Ultrasharp 23" monitors (don't use the screen on the laptop itself).

Home server: Quad core 7-4820 @ 3.7GHz, 32GB RAM, 2 x 1TB HDD, 2 x 128GB SSD, runs VMWare ESXi to run a whole host of Linux VMs,

Home laptop: Some old Dell thing i3-mumble, recently upgraded to 6GB RAM.

[matthew]

Except when the first 1GHz CPUs came out, which I had a longstanding agreement with myself to own on general principle.

So you had a Dec Alpha in the mid 90's then  very nice too.

In answer to the OP:

Work provide a Dell Latitude E7470 laptop i5 16GB Ram and 240GB SSD. It drives the necessary Windows / Office and copes with my level of CAD without a problem.

The home desktop is and AMD from ~ 6 years ago and I will have to update this later. It is running SUSE which is overdue an update and still has a SCSI tape drive and scanner hanging from it.

I also have an ASUS AnspireOne which is almost 10 years old but the power connection is failing and the SSD is too small to update the Lubuntu as it can't store the update download any more.



To me the biggest driver to the machine is the number of monitors that I can drive. I got used to two sensible monitors at work and my 15 year old 4:3 LED monitor on the desktop is just too small now.

[Kim]

To me the biggest driver to the machine is the number of monitors that I can drive. I got used to two sensible monitors at work and my 15 year old 4:3 LED monitor on the desktop is just too small now.

Absolutely this.  I find a single 4:3ish monitor restrictive for anything more than general spodding, and a single laptop-sized widescreen monitor even more so.  Large widescreen monitors are an acceptable substitute for a decent pair of 4:3s.  Every now and then I think a third might be useful.

I've just inherited some reasonable Iiyama 19" 5:4 monitors from barakta (she can't stand the ~270Hz PWM backlight, or the glare of running them at full brightness for a 100% duty cycle).  Nothing special resolution-wise, but they have the all-important matte screen.  We can't all live in the perfectly lit design studios they build Apple displays for.

[pcolbeck]

A Lenovo W540 Thinkpad. i7 with 8 cores, 32GB RAM, 250Gb SSD and a 1TB spinning rust drive.

Its  a beast and for a laptop weighs a ton. It runs Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (will upgrade to 18.04 LTS next week probably. Runs Windows as a VM for my work stuff (mainly for Word, Visio and Excel). The reason the mother ship[ bought me the thing though was so I can run a lot of virtualisation. Things like GNS3 with a load of Cisco router images or virtual F5 load balancer appliances.

[fuaran]

A Shuttle XPC cube. So a small box, fits under my desk, and fairly quiet.
With AMD Athlon II, 8GB RAM, 2TB hard drive etc.

Its now about 6 years old, still works fine, though can be a bit slow for some things. eg photo or video editing. Or just general browsing, where the browser likes to eat all of the memory if you have dozens of tabs open...

I might upgrade it sometime, with more RAM and SSD. Or replace it with a new box, so I can give the old one to my dad.

[TheLurker]

Work:  Some standard corporate POS laptop.  Don't know the spec. and I'm not that interested.  As long as it can cope with 3 or 4 instances of Visual Studio, at least one of SQL Manager, Sublime, npm as well as a few command line and file explorer windows then, coupled with a large monitor, it's good enough.

Home: An ancient Acer Extensa 5230E running Win7 Pro x32. Think it's got 4GB of RAM, but haven't checked recently. It can run Eclipse, Visual Studio and SQL Manager and an instance of MS SQL Server when I need it to.  No deadlines at home so can live with intermittently sluggish performance and no need for an additonal monitor.  Perfectly good enough to run Opera or any other browser, Open Office and Inkscape at a decent speed.  Was going to replace it this year, but there will be other heavy, unexpected and unwanted calls on joint savings soon.

[Morat]

Work. Dell XPS15 which came with a 1Tb of spinning rust but had the slot for an M2 SSD so it now boots from one of those. It gets lugged around all over the place and does really well, although the lack of a internal NIC is a bit of a pain.
Play. DinoPCs built me a computer with a watercooled 4790k @4.5Ghz 16Gb of RAM and a 980 Strix. I'd just had some good news from a PPI payout.