Saturday 26 November 2016

Novabench on my elderly mac book air

Just for fun, after I upgraded my five (nearly six) year old Air to Sierra, I ran NovaBench on it and got a score of 296 - a bit better than the score I obtained on my old iMac, but not remarkably so.

Which of course brings me back to one of my old hobby horses, just how much computing is needed for day to day computer use ?

Sunday 13 November 2016

MacBook Airs and the opposition

I like Macs. They're nice machines and well made, so much so that when I retired I bought myself a refurbished MacBook Air to take travelling.

And I'm pretty pleased with it, a good lightweight machine, but other than Textwrangler, there's no application that I use regularly that is Mac only - Chrome, Libre Office, Thunderbird and Focuswriter are all available for windows and work well.

And, since I upgraded to Windows 10, I've had a pretty positive experience with windows. But there's also been the clunk factor - ever since netbooks went out of style windows laptops have tended to be a bit bigger and clunkier than their Mac equivalents.

So, when I caught the train earlier this week, and saw the guys on the train working on small Dell ultrabooks, I got to thinking, would a small windows machine make a viable alternative?

So I did a little bit of research on the usual suspects' (Dell, HP, Lenovo) websites. I couldn't identify the model of Dell ultrabook I saw being used on the train, but you could certainly put together a nicely specified Dell Inspiron for travel for around half the cost of a new MacBook Air, and also get a couple of USB ports and an SDcard slot as well.

Perhaps not quite as sleek or stylish, but definitely practicable. There is of course the option of  two in one device if that suits you better.

I'm certainly not planning on replacing my Air anytime soon, but if I had to, it might not be with a fruit themed device ....