The Most Wanted Upgrade

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Most Wanted Upgrade

  • Really good (easy to use) music notation/sequencing software, high end sound card and interfaces to my digital piano.  Plus a tutor/mentor to teach me to use it properly.

  • Definitely need a RAM upgrade on the home PC, it only has 8GB, and I'd be happy with it having 16GB. I have considered upgrading the storage, but I find that, actually the 60GB SSD it has does me fine, as I use the Network storage for any files I need, etc. Plus, it's a real pain upgrading storage sometimes when you have to move and resize all the disk partitions. :sick:

    Thom~

    Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
    Larnu.uk

  • iMac Pro with everything maxed out*.

    * A bit like the buyer's credit card will be afterwards, but whatever...! 😀

  • I think that, at five years old, my laptop doesn't so much need upgrading as replacing.

    The problem is that it was a beast of a thing when I bought it, and it's getting tricky to find a laptop with a storage upgrade over the existing pair of 500GB HDDs and "more RAM than a field of sheep" (I maxed out the laptop a few months after I bought it - I figured that that's the easiest upgrade to do, so I could spread the cost a little...)

    Suggestions welcome, though.  🙂

    Thomas Rushton
    blog: https://thelonedba.wordpress.com

  • I'm a screen real estate junkie.

    Give me a mid-range PC with maybe 8-16GB of RAM, a fast LAN and Internet connection, BUT I covet one of those triple 4K displays (and the graphics cards to run them, natch.) All 3 monitors 38+ inches, naturally. 😉

    Right now I've got a single 28" 4K and since my eyes aren't that good anymore (approaching the slippery side of 60 here...) I had to crank the screen magnification to 150% and increase the default font size from 8 to 12 points, thus losing most of the extra real estate. Sigh...

  • David.Poole - Friday, November 24, 2017 1:32 AM

    Really good (easy to use) music notation/sequencing software, high end sound card and interfaces to my digital piano.  Plus a tutor/mentor to teach me to use it properly.

    I loved cakewalk with a midi interface, and it worked with windows generic sound card drivers. They're still around http://www.cakewalk.com/ but I haven't used them lately because I'm a bit short of Microsoft ready computers at home any more.

  • roger.plowman - Friday, November 24, 2017 6:56 AM


    Right now I've got a single 28" 4K and since my eyes aren't that good anymore (approaching the slippery side of 60 here...) I had to crank the screen magnification to 150% and increase the default font size from 8 to 12 points, thus losing most of the extra real estate. Sigh...

    That's me. 2 24" landscape, one 28" portrait and I'm back where I was with 2 21"s and better eyes.

  • OK, here we go again with the 'mine's bigger than yours' discussion. https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Skins/Classic/Images/EmotIcons/Smile.gif
    As I have commented before, I think more important than the number and size of your equipment is the value of your data.  While multiple systems and monitors may help a bit with multitasking, the human mind still has only one active thread at a time as far as I know.  So, in theory, until brain transplants are mastered, all that extra equipment is still limited by our attention span.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • skeleton567 - Friday, November 24, 2017 11:39 AM

    OK, here we go again with the 'mine's bigger than yours' discussion. https://www.sqlservercentral.com/Forums/Skins/Classic/Images/EmotIcons/Smile.gif
    As I have commented before, I think more important than the number and size of your equipment is the value of your data.  While multiple systems and monitors may help a bit with multitasking, the human mind still has only one active thread at a time as far as I know.  So, in theory, until brain transplants are mastered, all that extra equipment is still limited by our attention span.

    Nah, it's not that. Two monitors let you put the menu pallets on one screen and devote the other to full screen of whatever you're actually working on. A triple 4k setup would let me do that with two programs at a time, rather than having to Alt-tab between them--which is particularly annoying on a dual monitor setup. Say ModelRight and Visual Studio, with the third monitor being used for pallets.

    Unfortunately my 4k monitor takes both the DVI and HTML ports to run the one monitor. Sigh...I miss that second monitor, but I will say the crispness of 4k is very nice, even with the need for raising font size.

  • David.Poole - Friday, November 24, 2017 1:32 AM

    Really good (easy to use) music notation/sequencing software, high end sound card and interfaces to my digital piano.  Plus a tutor/mentor to teach me to use it properly.

    David, if you are referencing software to add and edit tags in digital music files, look at MP3Tag, a free program that does a great job.  So far it's only available in a 32-bit version, but I've cleaned up tag data in about 69,000 MP3 and WMA files in my collection.  I don't know what may be available if you are referring to handling sheet music in document files.  Never tried that, but I'm guessing it's out there.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • Thanks to Sony/VAIO deciding to kick me to the curb on a 2 year old VAIO laptop (they refused to make the necessary changes so I could upgrade to Windows 10), I have to get a new laptop. (I do Windows 10 development, which means I need a Windows 10 machine.) So, I've gotten an HP Spectre laptop.

     Will never own another Sony/VAIO laptop.

    Rod

  • Wow, sorry to hear that.  We had two for probably close to ten years, and I just trashed one this past summer because we cracked the screen frame on it.  The other is still functional so I haven't thrown it away yet.  They gave good service, never had any problems, but were only 11"  screens.   I don't think we have even replaced batteries in either of them.  Our three latest machines are Asus ROG series machines, and are very good systems.  I run SQL Server  2012 on an x64 8gb 2.4ghz version and it performs very well, single user, of course.  Have run Win 7, 8, 8.1 on them, and would recommend you look at this ROG machine.

    Rick
    Disaster Recovery = Backup ( Backup ( Your Backup ) )

  • I tried to find a $500 laptop that had a HD screen, a SSD drive and at least 8GB of RAM without success. I got an HD Screen phone instead.

    I think my next desktop will just be a shell to run VMs.

    412-977-3526 call/text

  • $1500 (adjust accordingly to local currency) gets you quite a powerful machine, if you already have an old machine. I kept the box (a sturdy, well-built Coolermaster that I bought 15 years' ago), the PSU, DVD-burner, card-reader), NAS, dual 1600x1200 monitors (one portrait, one landscape).
    I upgraded our home machine earlier this year: new motherboard (Asus Z700), 64GB RAM, 4GHz Quad core processor, 2x 256GB SSDs, Icy Dock front 4x 2½ bay and a few PCIe cards (video card, firewire card) and Windows 10 Pro licence. My wife does video-editing on her drive, I learn and practice SQL on mine and the children play games on the communal drive (although they'll want a better graphics card in the near future). Except for the fact that Windows 10 gives me BSoD every now and then, I am happy with it. I had planned to get a new mac but Mac OS X annoys me more and more with each release and when comparing a new mac mini with a build-your-own machine, the mac didn't fair well.

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