[Closed] Core i3, i5, i7 processors

Could hold off and wait for his student discount to kick in. If you son has Dyslexia or similar you can claim for a free Laptop or similar via the Disability assist people... (well you used to be able to) but that takes some time to kick in.

Apple Uni discount can offer you a Macbook at about £720 currently offering a free ipod touch?!

With regards to the chips they're the newest generation which does mean old core duo chipped computers are selling alot less then they were this time last year. Windows 7 is relatively new so shouldn't be out of date by the time he graduates and that runs fine on core duo chips as does word so no reason to get anything more unless you want to keep it future proof or to play games.

Get your office software from softwareforstudents - save a fortune.

As for I3 - I've been running a core 2 duo 1.6ghz for about 4 years now and it's done me fine.

You don't need anything more than a Core 2 Duo for most things now.

My desktop has a core 2 duo and 4gb ram and it's more than enough, I'm selling it now as it just isn't needed for that anything other than games or specialist stuff.

I've been running office 2007 on a dual core 2.8ghz (the old 32bit ones as opposed to core2 and i procesors which are 64bit) which is even older, no problems, as for 'photos' are we talking photoshop of just "upload 200 pic of last night".

Unless he particulalry needs the extra power, maybe look at netbooks, my brother has one after he broke his dell (students detroy laptops, its a mixture of carelessness, beer, and using them everywhere, nearly everyone I know with laptops was reduced to some sort of mechanical bodge within 2 years to keep it working). Anyway, back to netbooks, they do everything a PC from 3 years ago could do, but have 10hour battery lives and cost £200 and fit in a (big) pocket. He has itunes (with an external HD), and photos, and any game over about 5 years old on his, even ones that my PC can't run.

netbooks are fine the but the folks that I know that use them don't find the screens big enough for writing full reports although they are good for reading stuff and a bit of web. 15in screen seems to be a good compromise at the mo

specialist stuff.

😉

As said, nice to have, but core 2 duos are fine. 2GB of RAM will be fine for normal student office/itunes/web/photos/downloading-porn duties, but 4GB doesn't add a lot to the price really.

If he'll be carting it around every day then there are some nice CULV ones with 12" screens now at sensible prices - eg. http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/lenovo-ideapad-u450p-05306979-pdt.html . Not as quick but light and less battery-hungry.

If it will effectively be a desktop that can be folded up and moved if necessary, worth looking at the 17" ones like http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/hp-g72-110sa-04897035-pdt.html (which is an i3 anyway).

Above all - get it set up with some kind of online backup before he goes away. Mozy, Crashplan, Carbonite, Dropbox, etc - usually around £40 a year, backs up automatically whenever it's online, can be an utter lifesaver if something goes wrong. If you don't want to pay, dropbox gives you 2GB free, and that should be plenty for uni coursework.

Is this computer going to need to last him 3 years, or just get him through the first year perhaps?

I'd suggest it's probably likely to be 3 years or more, in which case, DO NOT scrimp and save £100 or so just because something will do now. The new Core i3 laptop processors really are a big step on from the Core 2 Duo's. So what does that matter you may think? Well... Core 2 Duo's are still fine for most people, but in say 2-3 years most software is likely to run slowly on them. The new core i3's are more likely to be much more useful in 3-4 years time.

I'm sat here typing this on my 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo laptop that is now 3 1/2 years old. It was practically top of the range when new, but it's starting to show its age. It's still quick enough, but my new work laptop which has a base model Core i3 330M processor can eat it for breakfast! So spending an extra £100 now will get you something likely to last another couple of years at least...

Also, I'd bypass PC World unless you absolutely must go there... You're likely to get a better deal elsewhere, and the £100 they might give you for your old laptop, well you're likely to get almost that much by selling it on ebay even if it's a load of old crap!

Spec wise, well you don't need an i5 or an i7, the i3 really is a big enough step forward... RAM wise, well 3 or 4 gig is nice, but 2Gig will do for now (it's easily upgradeable in the future for cheap, so somewhere you can happily save a few quid right now). You will want a 15" screen with a decent resolution if it's actually to be used for doing work on, preferably even bigger.

Oh, and from experience, when it comes to cheaper laptops, there's only 2 brands I'd recommend as the rest usually have BIG faults... Those 2 being unsurprisingly, Dell and HP (well, Toshiba, Acer and Samsung are ok too, but generally not as good value as the other two, steer clear of Lenovo for sure, they're shite!)... Here's a few to have a look at for not too much money...

[url] http://www.ebuyer.com/product/194297 [/url]
[url] http://www.ebuyer.com/product/195973 [/url]
[url] http://www.pcworld.co.uk/gbuk/dell-inspiron-n5010-black-laptop-06684301-pdt.html [/url]

Hope that's helped a bit...

i just bought a new laptop. You don't need a new i3 etc, but given that the price is hardly a step up from one with a core 2 or whatever it is, then it's futureproofing it to a degree as they are a match for core 2's easily, and in most cases faster and more efficient (something to do with virtual quad-core hyperthreading or some other shite I don't understand but sounds good).

Anyways, you don't need an i5, all it offers is a slight boost when it gets really really processing intensive - not really a likely scenario unless there's some seriously quick and intensive gaming required. i7 even more so.

Get an i3, get min 3MB ram (that's plenty really), and a 300MB ish hard drive.

As it was, I went for an Acer, got it from John Lewis for £560 as came with a 2 year guarantee. Quite happy with it.

Get your office software from softwareforstudents - save a fortune.

get your office software from openoffice.org, save yourself even more 😉

hell, get all your software from ubuntu and the ubuntu software centre

linux isn't as powerhungry as windows so you can get a sensibly priced laptop as well

All good advice, apart from this:

steer clear of Lenovo for sure, they're shite!

... which is nonsense, and the entirety of the previous post as it completely disregards the reason you're buying it.

Everything else pretty much I'd agree with. Core 2 Duo as a minimum, i3 ideally if budget permits, 3Gb RAM or over, named brand (HP-Compaq / Toshiba / Dell / IBM). The exception to the last point would be Fujitsu, which in my experience have been awful.

Cougar + 1

Lenovo laptops are ace.

Oh and IBM no longer manufacture Thinkpads, sold to Lenovo years ago, same build quality IMO (I use one daily)

Lenovo make 2 lines of laptops. Their own name stuff, and then the Lenovo ThinkPad line. 2 fairly different beasts, and the Thinkpads are still very good machines.

As to the original poster ... you really need to be realistic about the needs of the laptop are ... and that may mean waiting a month or so to find out what the Uni are expecting ( if anything ) in terms of input from your boy and his computer.

If its general office style work ( docs, spreadsheets, browsing, printing etc ) then any new laptop with Windows 7 will do the deed just fine, and will continue to do so for 3 years. It'll also handle itunes no bother too.

To give you an example, I have in the lounge a 2003 ThinkPad T41, with 1Gb RAM running windows xp ... it still displays every webpage fine, runs office fine ( and open office ) and boots up quicker and feels just as nippy than my Core i7 desktop with 6Gb RAM.

A 2nd hand laptop, amd athlon 64 and 2gb ram will do fine on win xp or more than enough for ubuntu.

Around £150 for laptopp, plus free office software (openoffice) and avast for antivirus. More than enough

Running similar spec pc, bit old but use it for video conversion and decoding and games

Stay away from Dell, pc world and norton. Coming from a IT Technician

Wait til the student discount kicks in, 10% off most things afaik. I don't think there's much need for more than a dual core for normal student things, depends what course he's doing though. If it's anything video/graphics or audio based it'd be worth having the extra cpu power and ram.

fwiw my 4 year old dell with 1.73GHz processor runs internet/music/ms office and a bit of audio recording with no problems (apart from the audio when there are more than 5 channels with VSTs) so you don't even need a dual core really.

before you slag off PC world they are offering £100 part exchange

they are offering [b]up to[/b] £100 - you are more likely to be offered £20 (I overheard the manager on shop floor 'training' on this). If they are offering £100 then what you are trading in is likely to be quite new and good enough anyhow.

I wouldn't buy anything less than an i3 / 4gb memory (probably an i5) at the moment.

I've got an Thinkpad X201i with the i3

I use office, surf the web, little photo use (picassa) and run Minitab (statistical software)

It's way more than I need, bit of overkill, so it's going last me quite a few years yet.

Ive got a medion akoya (aldi sell them cheaply)

I paid £299 a year ago, for a 4gb ram dual core 15" laptop, windows 7, hdmi outs

And its got a 3 year warranty, its on all day and the wife usrs it constantly it still looks like new.

Your son will want what ever loads porn the quickest. I'd like to know how PC World respond to that question.

If I know service departments, they'll probably have an extensive collection and several good leads.

Things that make a computer fast apart from processor:
- Fast OS i.e. Not windows
- Efficient apps i.e. Not Microsoft office.
- A good graphics processor - most of the internet stuff will benefit more from this than a fast main processor.
- Removing Nortons/Mcfee virus checker
- A fresh install of the OS - especially if running windows.

He does not need an i3 processor and anyone telling you as such is talking out of their arse. A current dual core intel processor is plenty fast.

Earl > funny, I break four out of those five tips, and my laptop screams along.

Any post that starts "things that make a computer fast apart from processor" without the next point being "1) RAM" earns my condescension.

Oh yes - definately RAM though most computers nowdays come with a min of 2gb RAM and that is plenty for most people.

Cougar - that processor do you have?

Earl, I think you make some very valid points. Many of the preinstalled windows setups (which include horribly virus checkers and tons of preinstalled junk) make even powerful computers work slowly.

Although Windows 7 had good reviews on release, I think that they have to be taken in context of the fact Vista was so bad, reality is, for everyday use, Win 7 still uses a lot more resource than XP.

Your son wants a MacBook really.

And by the time you've faffed around installing things, getting other things to work, uninstalling things, fiddling with arcane configuration screens for no apparent reason and untold other mysterious Windows nonsense, you'll want one too.

Another good reason to get a Mac for your son is [url= http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html ]Scrivener[/url]. If he's going to be writing essays, it will be much better for him than Word.

If I was carting a laptop around all day I would go macbook. After lunking my 15.4" HParound London for a week (3 miles+ of walking) I was cursing the damned thing 😆

I'd ask your son what he wants (It sounds simple but my dad used to think he knew best and waste money on the wrong things)

Cougar - that processor do you have?

Core 2 Duo.

Your son wants a MacBook really.

Depends on his course, probably got a point if he's an art student.

Depends on his course, probably got a point if he's an art student

…although when I was at Sun half the engineers used Macs. A lot of the software developers I come across seem to prefer them too.

Point is, my comedy stylings aside, there may be prerequisites depending on his course.

My mate ran a prog called [i]decrapifymycomputer[/i] on my new PC World machine and it killed off all the nasty bloatware which came pre-installed. You can download it free from c-net.

Worth doing for the genius name alone....

there may be prerequisites depending on his course.

Oh yeah. Hadn't thought of that. What course is it?

He does not need an i3 processor and anyone telling you as such is talking out of their arse. A current dual core intel processor is plenty fast.

For now... Yeah fair enough... Why buy an old technology when newer ones are available that are much faster (for barely any more money) and will last a lot longer?

My mate ran a prog called decrapifymycomputer on my new PC World machine and it killed off all the nasty bloatware which came pre-installed. You can download it free from c-net.

Or just go into "add/remove Programmes" and uninstall them all for yourself! Simple really... 😉

I bought a top of the range laptop in 2006 for £1400.

Its been fine and now showing its age but I do work on it, Office 2007, IE, 720p HD movies (1080 bit slow framerate) and I play older games from PS2/PSX which is rare.

Most laptops will beat it easily and only £500 and I'll never buy a top end again because it will be out of date easily.

If you want your son to do work - buy any dual core laptop with HD graphics and a built in cam to save space and play the odd movie and webcam home/porn sites.

If you want him to play games-get him PS3 or Xbox360 or £1400 laptop.

I would set a budget and stick to it.

It will last him 3-4 years easily if he doesn't drop it.

If he is doing engineering then yes he might need i5 but if its just essays then you could get away with anything in PC world.

In September I'm getting a £400 netbook that will play HD movies online, dual core and decent graphics and games on low settings with USB 3.
Its not powerful, but its portable and if something else comes out then I won't cry too much and buy something else in 2 yrs.

BTW student discount 10% of laptops? Where!!!

Besides Unis have tons of PCs dotted around normally.

You can get a rather good laptop for £500 or less nowadays.

Just saw this one at Curry/Dixon/PC world and the specs are good for what you pay. HP is good but not as flash as some other brands so unless you want some Ferrari red etc then go for this one.

[b]£399.97[/b]
[b]HP G62-107SA[/b]

Intel® Core™ i3-330M (2.13 GHz), Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 2048 MB , Hard drive: 250 Gb, DVD-RW DL rewriter with Lightscribe, Designer shell, 15.6 Widescreen

Note: Please check if the above is Windows 7 32bits or 64bits operating system. For 32bits Windows 7 the maximum RAM is 3GB so I would add another 1GB. For 64bits I would go for 4GB as the minimum but then 3GB should be enough for him.

[url= http://www.dixons.co.uk/gbuk/hp-g62-107sa-04753071-pdt.html?srcid=369&xtor=AL-63#tab-tech-specs ]You can get it here.[/url]

Since your son is going to Uni you might as well invest in a [b]FULL Microsoft Office 2010 Package[/b] for him at a massively knock down price at this site. This is a perfectly legitimate site. If you are concerned about security go to WH Smith to buy some of the 3V Gift Card and then buy the Office Package online. You can only buy ONE copy and the site would need to verify him via his University Email. Then you can download a copy from the website and later the site will send you a Microsoft Office backup CD.

[b]Buy your Office Package (Complete set) for £49.99 from here.[/b]

[url= http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/ ]Office Package for student/education only[/url]

Some laptop reviews here:

[url= http://www.laptopreviews.org.uk/ ]Laptop review [/url]

🙂

For 32bits Windows 7 the maximum RAM is 3GB

Eh? 2^32 = 4Gb. (Further proof, I'm looking at it right now.)

For 64bits I would go for 4GB as the minimum

For x64, I'd agree that 4Gb is a minimum, it's utterly pointless otherwise (and arguably pointless at 4Gb unless you've a specific reason for moving to 64 bit, and ZOMG SOME OF MY RAMS ARE TEH MISSINGS! is not good enough.)

£399.97
HP G62-107SA

Intel® Core™ i3-330M (2.13 GHz), Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 2048 MB , Hard drive: 250 Gb, DVD-RW DL rewriter with Lightscribe, Designer shell, 15.6 Widescreen

That's a hell of a good find chewk. Beats any of my suggestions by about £50!

It's only 2GB of RAM, but to be honest, that'll be fine to start with. Plenty enough for any emails, MS office use, internet browsing etc. You'd only really need more for any RAM hungry applications, but the RAM can be upgraded cheaply in the future anyway if necessary.

If I was carting a laptop around all day I would go macbook.

[b]For 32bits Windows 7 the maximum RAM is 3GB[/b]
Eh? 2^32 = 4Gb. (Further proof, I'm looking at it right now.)

BTW I'm currently typing on an Athlon XP 2200+ with 1GB of RAM whilst my C2D laptop is out of action. Actually works just fine for almost everything, though I do have to be a bit careful how many tabs I open in Chrome with that little memory.

My home desktop is a 4 year old celeron chip with 2gb of ram. 4 years ago when i first built it - it flew.
Has slowed down over time. I figured it was all the videos on every web page (including this one) so I stuck in a £25 video card. It hums along again.

But then I do rebuild it every so often, defrag it/ clean it with winaso.

When ever I install a prog that i know Im not going to use all them time I install it into a virtual machine. Even the VM hums along.

Has slowed down over time. I figured it was all the videos on every web page (including this one)

My 10 yr old Dell Inspiron with max RAM 512MB is still doing well but a bit slow by comparison to my new first self build temperamental box 😡 . Paying for the lesson of self build for now and hope to rely less on others in future.

Just get a MacBook Pro...with AppleCare. 13" for portability. 15" for luxury. 17" is just too big. Lenovo - I'm sure they make some tasty machines. My experience says steer clear unless someone else is buying and you don't have to moan at yourself for spending money on it. I'd go for i5 or i7 just out of sheer cussedness. Core2Duo works fine for most everything today but who can say 'no' to more speed? If i were buying a new machine today I'd go for a 15" Mac Book Pro i5 with 4GB (although 8GB is tempting). Not as shockingly expensive as i7 but a bit swifter than C2D and i3. I'd avoid PC world too. They sometimes have some nice deals but...

I agree with the posts that say 'wait until the student discount kicks in'. Absolutely. The savings/'free' iPod Touch etc make it worth it. Let alone the 'buy office for £99' or whatever today's student price is for £400 of MS software.

@Earl

But then I do rebuild it every so often, defrag it/ clean it with winaso

Exactly the reason I stick with a mac. I got so tired of cleaning/reinstalling on my windows box that I thought I'd give Mac a go. I'm not going back. 3 simple OS upgrades (Tiger, Leopard then Snow Leopard) on the same machine and it still runs fine.

 

[url= http://www.trustedreviews.com/laptops/review/2010/08/23/Best-Student-Laptops-Guide/p1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TRV+%28TrustedReviews+Site-wide+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader ]Trusted Reviews guide to Student Laptops[/url]

Sorted

If you've got 4GB ram you'll not be able to use much more than 3GB of it due to memory mapping of the display and other stuff

Yep, true. I can talk about this at some length if you like, but I'll bore the spokes off you. (-:

The useable RAM varies between systems, but 3.5Gb is typical. The reason I queried it is that going from 3Gb to 4Gb is probably going to cost about ten quid and will be 2x2Gb sticks running dual-channel. 3Gb will be 1x2Gb and 1x1Gb, meaning it won't run dual-channel, or 2x1Gb and 2x512Mb, which will probably be more expensive (and unlikely in a laptop).

In short, whilst you lose some of the available RAM at 4Gb, if you're going up from 2Gb it's usually more sensible to go straight to 4Gb rather than faffing about at 3, which is more trouble than it's worth. Saying the maximum is 3Gb is misleading.

I believe windows 32-bit can only access 3Gb?

FWIW of the laptops I've had:

Toshiba - good, some software to disable
HP - good, free software didn't need disabling but isn't that good
Sony - tons of free software to disable, but not bad otherwise
Dell - coudn't disable free software and was badly made to the point where its design flaws caused its demise 🙁 Also my Dad's had cheapo battery that didn't last long at all

When I say free software, I mean the crap they install for you - extra access buttons, stupid utilities to 'help' you access config, sort music and photos, use your webcam etc etc etc etc - it can (and should) all be removed. Windows does all that stuff itself and is much less sh*t.

I've got an Thinkpad X201i with the i3

I have an X201 Thinkpad with an i5, no complaints here at all, it's super-fast and will last me a while.

I believe windows 32-bit can only access 3Gb?

Nope. It's theoretically 4Gb, however as aracer says, you lose some of it due to archicture limitations. The exact amount varies, but it's beween 3Gb and 4Gb. Mine here shows 3.5Gb useable.

Completely agree with you on the shovelware though - laptops are particularly afflicted by this. You can usually remove most of it, though some is necessary sometimes for supporting non-standard features like 'media' keys.

So this is what happened,

PC world took up much of my Sunday thanks to the volume of people in there (recession what recession?)

Result -

1x Toshiba Core I5, 15.6 widescreen, 4GB Ram, 320gb hard disk, HDMI connection,without software package (this was a serious error they told me) £499.00

plus

1x Microsoft Office Professional Plus (Software4students) £38.95

equals

1x V Happy Son

Incidentally they only gave me £20 trade in on the old laptop as predicted earlier in the thread.

Thanks for the help.

Nick.

due to archicture limitations

I know the address space of a 32 bit CPU is 4Gb, but I thought there was a Windows limitation aside from graphics card shared ram...

NJA - sounds like an ideal purchase.

Now bear in mind the laptop itself won't "wear out", "get tired" or "get slow". It'll work just as fast in three years as it does now. When you see it starting to run slower, it's cos it's clogged up with dreck.. which can and should be cleaned out.

I thought there was a Windows limitation

It's a long and boring explanation, and one that's got more misunderstanding and nonsense on the Internet than just about anything else. It's called Memory-Mapped I/O. In a nutshell, some hardware ties up memory addresses. Graphics cards are the big one but PCI devices do it as well.

A 32-bit OS can deal with 2^32 = 4Gb of addresses. In addition to main memory, graphics cards (and other devices) also have memory, which for the PC to be able to 'see' it has to reside within this 4Gb address space.

Historically, graphics memory has been mapped to addresses at the end of the 4Gb memory space. With say 2Gb of RAM and 512Mb of video memory, this is fine. However with modern PCs having 4Gb installed, you've got an overlap. Bottom line, the video memory takes precedence and 'covers up' main memory.

Moving to 64-bit can alleviate this problem, assuming the PC's chipset supports the ability to remap the hardware beyond 4Gb. However, moving to 64-bit doubles the width of memory addresses used (for anything natively 64-bit), and if you make something twice as wide without adding anything, it becomes half as deep. This is why the "use Windows 64-bit to recover your lost RAM" argument is bogus; sure, the numbers look better, but you use up more memory in the process so you're not really gaining anything.

Clear as mud? (-:

When you see it starting to run slower, it's cos it's clogged up with [s]dreck[/s] [b]porn[/b]

Fixed that for you.

Oh, forgot to add -

With the limitations above, Vista artificially cripples the available RAM at 3.15Gb, for reasons best known to itself. XP and Windows 7 don't have this issue, to my knowledge (I'd have to check to be sure though).

Porn doesn't make your system run slow..!

It's a long and boring explanation

I just googled it.. I know about MMIO from way way back when I used to understand computer hardware (circa 1985) 🙂 I didn't know it was that simple 🙂

1x Toshiba Core I5, 15.6 widescreen, 4GB Ram, 320gb hard disk, HDMI connection,without software package (this was a serious error they told me) £499.00

Sounds like a good buy...

Regarding the software that PC World try to sell you, you did VERY wisely... There are better FREE alternatives to download from the internet...

May I recommend [url= http://www.filehippo.com/download_comodo/ ]Comodo[/url] for an all in one internet security package (though there is always AVG Free, though I prefer Comodo), and use [url= http://www.filehippo.com/download_malwarebytes_anti_malware/ ]Malwarebytes[/url] for an anti Malware Package...

There are all sorts of other free useful bits of software out there too, such as CCleaner, Defraggler, Recuva, and gods knows how many other bits... ALL AVAILABLE FOR FREE!

Check [url] http://www.filehippo.com/ [/url] for more of the same...

With the limitations above, Vista artificially cripples the available RAM at 3.15Gb, for reasons best known to itself. XP and Windows 7 don't have this issue, to my knowledge (I'd have to check to be sure though).

My installation of 32 bit XP Pro on my desktop only shows 3.25GB of RAM despite having 4GB installed. Bit of a shame, but I'll live with it, though I would like a 64 bit OS. Trouble is, for some software I use, XP is the only option, and XP64 is very poorly supported by a lot of drivers.

have you got any AV or Firewall software?

it costs but KAspersky Internet Security is the business

have you got any AV or Firewall software?

it costs but KAspersky Internet Security is the business

See my post above...

There are better FREE alternatives to Kaspersky and Norton... The internet, and in particular [url= http://www.filehippo.com/ ]Filehippo[/url] is your friend...

I'd just like to disagree with everything Mboy just said. (-:

1x Toshiba Core I5, 15.6 widescreen, 4GB Ram, 320gb hard disk, HDMI connection,without software package (this was a serious error they told me) £499.00

agree that sounds pretty decent and should see him through the Uni.

user-removed - Member
My mate ran a prog called decrapifymycomputer on my new PC World machine and it killed off all the nasty bloatware which came pre-installed. You can download it free from c-net.

Worth doing for the genius name alone....

Posted 1 day ago #

mboy - Member

Or just go into "add/remove Programmes" and uninstall them all for yourself! Simple really...

Posted 1 day ago #

Well, that's kind of the point smartypants! This software ^^^ gets rid of all the daft floating toolbars, unhelpful 'help' functions, horrible wee preloaded photo and video stuff and screeds of other stuff, much of which is buried in the program files and which doesn't appear in control panel's 'Add or remove software' option. And it does it all in one big lump rather than have to wade about and find it individually - obviously you're given the choice of which cr@p to remove before giving it the go ahead...

mboy - why is AVG free or Avast better than Kaspersky?

It's less intrusive (IMveryHO). Slows everything down much less and doesn't poke its big electronic nose into everything you do before saying, "Hmmm, OK, I suppooose it's alright for you to do that.."

Yes and no. If you've got 4GB ram you'll not be able to use much more than 3GB of it due to memory mapping of the display and other stuff (so it's not quite true that 3GB is the max, but that's closer than 4GB

Well given that reasoning, wouldn't 3gb just mean you have even less after the "memory mapping"? It's the per process address mapping that's the limit:

[url= http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx ]http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx[/url]

Bit of a waste of cash getting over 3gb on Win 32 though I do agree! Given a lot of Core 2 systems are DDR memory though 3gb is a bit of a bizarre number.

On the antivirus front, everyone at work seems to swear by ESET NOD32, http://www.eset.co.uk/ - Things like AVG used to be good but don't seem to actually catch a lot of new things. I'd definitely avoid the likes of Norton and McAfee though, both sell on name alone.

1) Firewall - Windows 7 own firewall (free).
2) Anti-virus - Microsoft Security Essential (free).
3) Anti-malware - Malwarebytes (one time payment - highly recommended).
4) Spywareblaster (by Javacool)- it's preventing malwares to install but does not remove - (free)
5) Sandboxie - (free or pay depending on what you like)

Then whatever you feel you need to add on ... too many ...

🙂

Well given that reasoning, wouldn't 3gb just mean you have even less after the "memory mapping"?

No - the memory mapping things mean that certain addresses are mapped directly to some other device, regardless of whether or not there's a real byte behind that address. If there is, then it'll never get used since the address is mapped to the device instead.

Clever mobo tricks notwithstanding of course.

I read around, Kaspersky is meant to have a low impact on system performance is it not? It's also free from my online bank.

Kaspersky is the best of the paid-for AV solutions, yes. System impact is (relatively) minimal.

I've never heard of Sandboxie but other than that, what Chewkw said. I don't see much point in paying for Malwarebytes either, it's the best starting point for a malware cleanup but for prevention, meh. TBH, best prevention is safe browsing practices. (-:

(in my opinion, yadda yadda)

Cougar - Member

I've never heard of Sandboxie ...

Well, it's free if you want to use it with certain features off or pay for the full version and I think it's one time payment as well.

I don't see much point in paying for Malwarebytes either, it's the best starting point for a malware cleanup but for prevention, meh. TBH, best prevention is safe browsing practices. (-:

Malwarebytes is one time payment of £20 plus only and it comes with more features in the paid version. I think life time license use for £20 is very reasonable.

🙂

Sandboxie - yes, but I've still never heard of it. I'll look it up tomorrow.

MBAM - I've used it so often now that I should probably buy a licence just out of fairness. I could justify that a lot easier than paying for it to get the extra features.