Thinking of a new Laptop, what do you all think?

Cymbal Man Freq said:

Does Win 7 have Skype? I don't know what Skype is, but HP gave it to me. Also Blio and Cyberlink YouCam.

I'm impressed with this laptop, specs wise. Looks like it's got a $250 discount now that Win 8 is in favor and desktops and laptops are going the way of the Dodo bird this month.

Yes, everything from iOS, Android, Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8, even all Windows Mobile has Skype, it is a free program as well, I use Skype on the phone all the time.

The price listed is actually about a $300 discount.

gregrocker said:

Let us know which drivers are still missing after WIn7 and all WIndows Updates are installed.

Will do, a buddy of mine just bought his, going to attempt the downgrade on his tomorrow, will keep you updated Gregrocker.

Cymbal Man Freq said:

One thing I miss on mine is there's no firewire. I have a firewire camcorder, so this will be an issue without another computer to fall back on to get that footage off of tape. I didn't expect my XP computer with firewire to die weeks later. I can still use my parents' computer to get the DV footage onto USB and bring it home.

I do worry about all this XP software that I paid for long ago that needs new expensive upgrades to be put on Win 7.

I use Compatibility Mode, 97% of the time it works. If a disclaimer about not being compatible pops up, I just click to go ahead and try running the application, you will be surprised at how much stuff will run that they say won't.

Cymbal Man Freq said:

One other thing, 32 bit is no good for my browsing habits. Browsers use up all of my RAM on XP and they crash several times a day this year. I wanted 64 bit to get past that 4 GB RAM limit. Win 7 has ReadyBoost, but maybe it's only good for up to 4 GB more on a USB 3.0 flash drive.

I would first look into the crashing of your browsers, my wife's old computer that she still uses has XP, and her browsers do not crash at all, she has used everything from Opera, IE, Firefox, and Chrome.

Cymbal Man Freq said:

It's clearly using up the last little bit of available RAM that is crashing my browsers. I typically have 2 dozen tabs open all day. The longer they're open, the more memory it hogs.

I was thinking about getting a tablet with 1 GB of RAM, but since Adobe abandoned Flash for Android this summer, I wonder if that pretty much disables the internet for hard-core internet surfers; and whether these low RAM devices with Win 8 even thought about memory hungry browsers.

PS: my computer is currently using 5.37 GB.

Something isn't right with your system, my wife's XP system only has 1GB of RAM, and both IE and Chrome work flawlessly on her system, I have had a dozen or so tabs open and watching netflix with no problems.