LangaList readers are sending in questions about some of the details in the recent three-part series on spec’ing, buying, and setting up a new Optane-equipped PC.
Quick recap: In Part One, Taking the plunge with a new PC (AskWoody Plus newsletter 2019-06-03), you saw how I used Windows’ built-in performance tools to identify system bottlenecks, weighed the options for upgrading, and ultimately decided that a whole new PC was the best solution.
In Part Two, Test-driving Intel’s Optane in a new PC (AskWoody Plus 2019-06-10), you saw the initial rough specs for my new PC. I also noted how a vendor’s sale pricing sent me in an unexpected but interesting direction. In place of my planned solid-state drive (SSD), the sale essentially offered a free, enhanced drive system: a 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard drive combined with a 16GB Intel Optane drive accelerator. I bought it — and it was awful!
In Part Three, Optane disappointment leads to a ‘Plan B’ (AskWoody Plus 2019-06-24), you saw how I got back on track with a hardware/software combination that’s blazingly quick on both hard-drive reads and writes!
But myriad details didn’t fit into the original article, leading to questions like this:
Hi, Fred. Would you share with us the specs of your latest laptop search and purchase? It appears you ended up with an HP but tell us more, even though you already said our requirements and yours would be different and specs would change all the time. Thanks! — Ed Scheer
Sure! I omitted brand info to avoid any appearance of endorsement. (I buy my hardware and software the same way you do; and pay out of my own pocket.) My choices simply reflect the options that were available to me at the time.
The new PC is basically a 17″ HP Envy 17t-bw000 — a fully-current business/office-oriented desktop replacement class of laptop running an Intel i7-8550U CPU (4 Cores, 8 Logical Processors) on an HP mainboard.
The original spec sheet appears below, with some personal data greyed out.
At the time I was shopping, HP was running a “$150 off” sale that included 16GB of RAM, a 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD, and a 16GB Optane board. But as you saw in the AskWoody articles, the PC now has 32GB of RAM (up from 16GB) and a 1TB Crucial MX500 SSD in place of the HDD.
The original HDD is now sitting on my desk; the Optane board is still in the PC, but disabled (Windows sees it as a generic 14GB disk.) I’ll remove the Optane board next time I open up the laptop.
The other maybe-weird part of this purchase is the DVD-writer included in the bundle. I hardly ever use DVDs or CDs any more, but the PC wasn’t offered without the optical drive. Still, it’ll be good to have a DVD option if/when USB-based recovery tools fail.
In all, with Optane out of the picture, this laptop is a solid performer (see PassMark scores, below). I’m reasonably confident that the this laptop should provide adequate performance for the next several years.
Again, none of this is an endorsement. My choices in this purchase simply reflect the options that were available — including the very weird “free Optane” sale — at that time.
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At the 3rd part of your new-PC-journey you should replace the Fig.7 picture with the correct one.
Right now it’s identical to the Fig.6
And thanks for the Optane vs SSD tests!
Sorry: I don’t have editing access. But the correct image appears in the lounge comments.