Our Dell regional account manager brought in a latitude tablet with an Ivy Bridge CPU running a full blown version of Windows 8. Believe me from playing with it a real computer is not a necessity any-more, he says they already have Haswell versions around that are even better suited.
@supersonic Depends on the person. Some went back to laptops. Some got better smartphones. I ask around, and I don't know of anyone still using an iPad after a few months. They always become dust collectors. @grim SSDs are not custom parts. They are the norm now. If you are still running your OS on that spinning shit it's time to throw that crap in the trash and join the 21st century. My wife has a Latitude with an Ivy Bridge i5 from work where they stupidly opted for a mechanical HDD. The Core 2 machines we have in the house which all have been upgraded to SSDs are faster in actual use than the Ivy Bridge system. In fact, she frequently complains about how slow it is compared to her Core 2 based Vaio with an SSD, and she is not a computer literate person at all, so if she's seeing a speed difference, there's definitely a speed difference. Fact: the single biggest upgrade you can make to any modern computer is an SSD.
What your wife has or what you have done to a Core 2 duo at home isn't the point, the point here is that 99% of the population that have Core 2 duo systems at home are normal people who had them built with normal HDDs and they will be stupidly slow. They will have thought about upgrading these slow systems but they haven't and the PC market has suffered yet the tablet and smartphone markets are doing well. People are not buying new PC's because they are buying smaller more convenient devices. Maybe we should test your Core 2 with an SSD against an i5 I have with a 7200RPM HDD? I have a midrange Windows 8 pro 64-bit, Core i5-3470 (3.20Ghz base, 3.60Ghz Turbo, 4c), 6GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM system sitting around that I can use to run some benchmarks if you like. It only cost £374 ($577) so it can be considered a cheap system*. * 3 year next business day warranty is included so that added £70 to the price, so say it is worth about £300 ($463).
Sure, why not. What benchmarks do you want to run? Core 2 Quad Q6600, 8GB DDR2, GTX 460, 240GB Intel SSD Should destroy that computer in everything except CPU benchmarks. The Windows experience doesn't lie. If you are still running a mechanical HDD, everything else is for shit.
I think to keep it fair it should be benchmarks that focus on access times, CPU workload times and general loading times. The GPU doesn't really come into it as we are testing to see if a Core 2 can keep up with an i5 when it uses a superior drive. For reference Windows 8 is giving it a rating of CPU 7.7, RAM 8.1 and HDD 5.9. Edit: Currently downloading the free version of PCMark 7 as it is a standard sort of benchmark. PCMark 8 doesn't currently have a free version available but 1.40 says it runs in Win 8.
CPU/RAM 7.1, GPU 7.5, SSD 7.8, overall 7.1 Come up with some benchmarks and I'll run them later when I'm home.
Think if we start with PCMark 7 (Free), SiSoft Sandra (lite) and HD Tune it should give us a baseline.
The PCMark scores are back, I have taken the overall score for each category and copy and pasted it from the results page. It is far too long to print screen because it does 3 passes of everything. PCMark score 3432 Video playback and transcoding / Video playback 24.0 fps Video playback and transcoding / Video transcoding - downscaling 19624.2 kB/s System storage - gaming / System storage - gaming 4.33 MB/s Graphics - DirectX 9 / Graphics - DirectX 9 12.7 fps Image manipulation / Image manipulation 23.7 Mpx/s System storage - importing pictures / System storage - importing pictures 7.16 MB/s Web browsing and decrypting / Web browsing 15.7 pages/s Web browsing and decrypting / Data decrypting 195.1 MB/s System storage - Windows Defender / System storage - Windows Defender 1.54 MB/s
The Core 2 Quad with an SSD gets a higher overall score: PCMark score 3621 Video playback and transcoding / Video playback 23.8 fps Video playback and transcoding / Video transcoding - downscaling 2469.4 kB/s System storage - gaming / System storage - gaming 16.2 MB/s Graphics - DirectX 9 / Graphics - DirectX 9 43.3 fps Image manipulation / Image manipulation 10.6 Mpx/s System storage - importing pictures / System storage - importing pictures 23.8 MB/s Web browsing and decrypting / Web browsing 11.0 pages/s Web browsing and decrypting / Data decrypting 53.3 MB/s System storage - Windows Defender / System storage - Windows Defender 5.5 MB/s Full results here: http://www.3dmark.com/pcm7/650517 I'll say it again. The single biggest upgrade you can make to a modern computer is an SSD.
Looking at it the higher score comes from the storage tests and the GPU test which I would guess is a big chunk of the score seeing as the difference is around 30FPS. General day to day things like video playback, web browsing and working with images are much stronger on the i5 even with an HDD, especially the video transcoding which has a score nearly 8 times higher. Swings and roundabouts. Accessing files and game FPS is faster on your system that you designed as a gaming system whereas the general office system performs the day to day stuff better. SiSoft Sandra is still going, around 90% now.
The point I'm trying to make is that if you have an older system, the best bang for your buck when upgrading is going to be an SSD if you don't already have one. $100-200 and you'll be smoking brand new systems with mechanical HDDs on a lot of things. Mechanical HDDs are the main thing preventing modern systems from living up to their potential.
As far as user experience goes, Monkey is dead right, SSD's make a hell of a lot more difference than CPU. My Q9550 at stock with a 240GB vertex 2 generally feels just as quick for daily tasks as a Ivy bridge i5. Sure, when it does something CPU intensive it's a bit slow, but that situation is hardly common, especially for general tasks. However, in reality, people buy complete PC's. They don't go a buy a hard drive and format it and re-install their copy of windows on it. That just doesn't happen and you can't expect it too, even if I agree that it's the best purchase they could make. My step dad has a core 2 duo T series laptop that is pretty. He's into running third party maintenance software and registry repairers but I really think the thing just has to be reformatted because of the amount of programs he's installed and uninstalled over the years. He's come to the conclusion that his Galaxy S3 is faster than his laptop - and it is, but faster than what his laptop should be, not really. More convenient for quick web searches and using apps, yes, depending on the situation. With his limited understanding of hardware he now thinks that modern phones have faster processors than 3+ year old laptops. I'd love to help him install an SSD and prove that his laptop isn't that bad and definitely worth it over using the phone for certain tasks, but really... is that a realistic thing for everyone to do? He still can't go without his laptop, but the thing is stupidly slow... he needs someone like me to point him in the direction and do the work for him. For content consumers, tablets and phones do make sense. They're not always great value for what you get IMO, but really, that is all these people want.
You think it's bland, people with a sense of design seem to love it. The functionality needs work for desktops and I agree that Ballmers approach has alienated the traditional markets that MS has relied on. Still, the design is definitely on the right track as far as creating a clean, balanced modern look is concerned. Your sense of taste is just dated.
Looking at this thread and ios7 thread, there are some people that are completely frightened of change, regardless of whether or not the changes are going to be beneficial to them.
I'm not terrified of change. I just think that in a lot of cases what we're seeing these days is change just for the sake of change, often to the detriment of functionality. The reason the start menu has lasted so long for instance is because it works very well. It didn't need to be discarded. And the start screen is a huge step back. It makes it clunkier and slower to accomplish the same tasks. I also despise the ribbon Microsoft is adding to everything. Everyone I've ever talked to preferred the words and descriptions in Office 2003 and prior to the vague, meaningless icons on the ribbon from Office 2007 on. The dudebro has a it right. Microsoft needs to stop trying to tell people what they think they should want, and listen to what they actually want.
It didn't last very long because it works well. It lasted that long because that was Microsoft's solution for the time being. There's always more effective solutions, and this new method is one of them. It's actually similar to how os x is handled for the user. You pin your most used applications to your taskbar/desktop (like os x) and you start the search application by starting to type it out (like in os x). I can guarantee you 100% of the time that I can find and open an application faster than you can in win7 with this new method. No more finding and mousing over categories. No more wondering if the publisher put itself in your start menu by its application name or by their own publisher name. All you need to remember is what the application is called and then start typing it out and windows does the rest for you. This method also lets you give troubleshooting for noobs with much more ease. The functionality of the ribbon is the same to me as it was prior. It's just a different layout so I have no complaints about it, or praise. Truthfully, I use it more in file explorer than I do in Office. But if you had already memorized what functions are in what categories, it shouldn't be too much of a change.
I agree. Monkey is a old man complaining about all the colors on the tv! I inadvertently prepped myself for Win8 by using the search feature on Win7 almost exclusively... I'm not sure when, but at some point I basically started launching all applications by hitting the WindowKey, then typing out the name of the application until it narrows down, then clicking Enter. It's faster than dealing with the whole, program files, folders nonsense. It is culture shock for a week or two, but I realized, I've been doing this all along anyway.
there still something strange:Is Microsoft redesigning XB One? I don't see any size specification yet ,nobody at M$ has taken pictures with the machine in their hands.....?? WHY?