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Going desktop-less?

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A laptop is all well and fine, but its an all in one design. One thing breaks, its all borked. Keyboards and screens are low life devices, as keyboards are great at sucking in little pieces of everything. And if anything breaks and needs repair, you have to send it back to the factory and use proprietary parts. Not to mention the facts battery life is often limited to two hours and laptops are easily stolen. But if a keyboard, screen, and most other parts break on a desktop, many do it your self types can go to a local store and be back in business in jig time.

As this thread shows, many people are switching to smaller smart phone devices for travel, but the keyboards are too small to be productive. As for me, I have a desktop and a lap top, but when at home, I always use a desktop by preference.
 
vi edit said:
You've never used an Air then. They are stupid fast for basic computing needs. The SSD response is just insane for application loading, clicking on things, navigating around ect. And in 8 months of use, I don't think I've ever heard the fan on mine.

It's a shame that the thunderbolt storage options are so criminally expensive. A thunderbolt display, MBA, and a couple TB NAS hooked up to it is almost the perfect combo.
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I've got a ultraportable with a faster cpu and better SSD then the Air and while I don't mind working on it and am very happy with the performance I would have a hard time replacing my quad core, dual SSD, triple monitor desktop with it. The extra real estate you get from a multi monitor desktop is absolutely essential for some tasks and the superior performance is just icing on the cake.

Lemon law said:
A laptop is all well and fine, but its an all in one design. One thing breaks, its all borked. Keyboards and screens are low life devices, as keyboards are great at sucking in little pieces of everything. And if anything breaks and needs repair, you have to send it back to the factory and use proprietary parts. Not to mention the facts battery life is often limited to two hours and laptops are easily stolen. But if a keyboard, screen, and most other parts break on a desktop, many do it your self types can go to a local store and be back in business in jig time.

As this thread shows, many people are switching to smaller smart phone devices for travel, but the keyboards are too small to be productive. As for me, I have a desktop and a lap top, but when at home, I always use a desktop by preference.
Click to expand...

These days most laptops have no problem getting 3-4 hours of battery life and some can do much better than that. My laptop can manage ~10 hours of battery life with a Core i5 2410m which is pretty incredible considering the first generation of Atom netbooks didn't get that kind of battery life.
 
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I use my cell phone. MY laptop does nothing my phone doesn't and LTE is faster then my Wi-Fi.

Spelling can be an issue... but who cares
 
BurnItDwn said:
I have gamed quite a decent amount with a PC hooked up to a 106 inch projector with reclining seats and beer holders .... However, 1080p is kinda limiting IMO.

I prefer to do most of my gaming with my 3 x 21.5 inch screen eyefinity setup...
It does tax the CPU a bit to run at 5760x1080, but things tend to work pretty well with a pair of 6870s in crossfire...

I simply don't like the controllers for PS3 or Xbox .... I'm too dependent on mechanical keyboard + mouse
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I've always wondered, how do you manage to get multiple monitors to work in a game? Normally the game only opens on one. I don't know if I'd be able to stand the seams though...
 
Red Squirrel said:
I've always wondered, how do you manage to get multiple monitors to work in a game? Normally the game only opens on one. I don't know if I'd be able to stand the seams though...
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Not all games are compatible, however, the majority of them are.
With 3 monitors, the seams aren't too bad, especially since you can account for them to make things line up all proper.

With AMD/Ati video cards, the technology to do this is called Eyefinity.
I think Nvidia has something like that too.

Some games really really benefit from the peripheral vision ... flight sims, racing games, etc ....
Other games benefit from having more screen real estate ... for example Anno 2070 and Total War series.

Others the benefits are just slightly more immersion, or wider FOV, FPS games come to mind...
 
BurnItDwn said:
Not all games are compatible, however, the majority of them are.
With 3 monitors, the seams aren't too bad, especially since you can account for them to make things line up all proper.

With AMD/Ati video cards, the technology to do this is called Eyefinity.
I think Nvidia has something like that too.

Some games really really benefit from the peripheral vision ... flight sims, racing games, etc ....
Other games benefit from having more screen real estate ... for example Anno 2070 and Total War series.

Others the benefits are just slightly more immersion, or wider FOV, FPS games come to mind...
Click to expand...

Oh ok, so it's video card/driver thing? Definitely going to look into that next upgrade. I do want to go 3 monitors at some point. Sometimes I find 2 is not enough when I'm doing coding work.
 
Red Squirrel said:
Oh ok, so it's video card/driver thing? Definitely going to look into that next upgrade. I do want to go 3 monitors at some point. Sometimes I find 2 is not enough when I'm doing coding work.
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yea ... it's nice having all that screen real estate outside of games ... 🙂
I had a 24 inch IPS that croaked, and it was cheaper to buy 2 cheapo 21.5 inch 1920x1080 TN panels and a second video card vs 1 decent new IPS panel... so I went that route (already had a cheap 21.5 inch TN panel that I had been using as a secondary display.)
 
I have a seldom used htpc/tv and two 15" 1080p notebooks. One for gaming and one for general use/work. They're both sandybridge quadcore, discrete gpu with ssd and more than enough for my needs. I'm not missing desktops at all.
 
if this thread is any indicator, desktops are really through. i can only imagine how many non enthusiasts have gone laptop only. cmon you guys lets how a little more desktop love...
 
OBLAMA2009 said:
if this thread is any indicator, desktops are really through. i can only imagine how many non enthusiasts have gone laptop only. cmon you guys lets how a little more desktop love...
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Fleet of desktops at work because they're cheaper than laptops + docks.
 
I'm going the other route - ditching the laptop in favor of the desktop. I'm just so sick of laptops and their inherent flaws. Now that tablets have come a long way, I can use a more powerful desktop for most of my computing, and simply use a tablet when I want to browse the web from the couch. No need for a laptop anymore.
 
I can use two monitors with a desktop, can't do that with a laptop w/out defeating the purpose of it.
 
Not me. I've gone the other way. I ignored desktops for 5-6 years. I was all about laptops and netbooks. Then smartphones and tablets. Then I bought couple cheap Dell desktops. I rediscovered my love for desktops. Now it's desktop and smartphone/7" tablet for me. I'm still planning to get new laptop this year but it's to replace my 10" tablets. I found I don't like 10" tablets and if I'm going to use something that big and heavy, I rather use a cheaper laptop with a full keyboard.
 
Nope... love my near silent desktop with a stereo and 24" monitor. Thinking about getting a 27" or 30" Dell, or even a 27" Apple Cinema display, but I don't want to pay to run games off that. Could keep my 24" and run dual monitors, just have to figure out if/how that works.

Oh, and be willing to plunk down $1500.
 
halik said:
Hey guys,
has anyone jumped the ship to just having a laptop and a NAS for your computing needs? I haven't used my desktop in a couple of months and I'm thinking that one of the new macbook airs could actually replace the desktop entirely. Any thoughts?

Is should add I've got a decked out Mac Pro at work with 16gb ram, so hard computing stuff is only a vpn away.
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I've been desktop-less since 2004. Now, I'm going computer-less. I'm almost totally tablet now.
 
FiLeZz said:
Not gonna happen to replace my desktop.
When you can fit all this in a lasptop PM me.. I will switch.


I use a laptop for work and a desktop for everything eles.

photo1.JPG
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That has to be pretty noisy. Get those GPUs under water. Granted you'd need an external radiator for that madness 😛
 
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