Fifth Avenue Forum

Source of the post SSD's are the best, too.

A recent study showed that SSD's are great, but they're much more heat sensitive relative to their HDD counterparts. So if you're going to run SSD's on high end stuff, consider planning for keeping the SSD's at the right temperature. The nice thing is you can mount them anywhere, so in a desktop keeping them away from the graphics cards and CPU should be sufficient.

I am thinking of grabbing a Chromebook for use during work travel. My current laptop's battery is dead unless plugged in, and I can't guarantee I'll always have access to a plug. There's a sale item at Best Buy putting an Asus Chromebook at $129 from $279, and I feel like there's better value in buying this than a new battery for my current laptop for $75.

Thoughts on Chromebooks for basic web browsing, YouTube, Gmail use?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-13-3-c ... Id=8697009

Thoughts on that product in specific?

Chromebooks are fine if you are just doing websurfing and email etc. They work very well for that. Just don't expect to do any heavy lifting on them. Also that sale price you see there is because you are signing a 2 year contract with VZW because that chromebook has 4G LTE, so you would also have a data plan/line access tacked on to your VZW bill. If you go that route though I'd do it quick, cause VZW is doing away with contracts all together as of tomorrow(I think?), so the subsidies on phones/chromebooks/tablets etc will all be going away.

Also realize that you aren't installing Office or anything on there, you would use Google Docs or whatever google uses for word/powerpoint/excel etc. Or I think MS has office online that would be available through the google store.

I'm about as big of a google/android guy as one can get, but you just have to realize that a chromebook is not a laptop, it's designed to be one. It has a specific purpose and it does that very well. As long as you know that going in you should be fine.

I am thinking of grabbing a Chromebook for use during work travel. My current laptop's battery is dead unless plugged in, and I can't guarantee I'll always have access to a plug. There's a sale item at Best Buy putting an Asus Chromebook at $129 from $279, and I feel like there's better value in buying this than a new battery for my current laptop for $75.

Thoughts on Chromebooks for basic web browsing, YouTube, Gmail use?

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-13-3-c ... Id=8697009

Thoughts on that product in specific?

Chromebooks are fine if you are just doing websurfing and email etc. They work very well for that. Just don't expect to do any heavy lifting on them. Also that sale price you see there is because you are signing a 2 year contract with VZW because that chromebook has 4G LTE, so you would also have a data plan/line access tacked on to your VZW bill. If you go that route though I'd do it quick, cause VZW is doing away with contracts all together as of tomorrow(I think?), so the subsidies on phones/chromebooks/tablets etc will all be going away.

Also realize that you aren't installing Office or anything on there, you would use Google Docs or whatever google uses for word/powerpoint/excel etc. Or I think MS has office online that would be available through the google store.

I'm about as big of a google/android guy as one can get, but you just have to realize that a chromebook is not a laptop, it's designed to be one. It has a specific purpose and it does that very well. As long as you know that going in you should be fine.

I was considering a Chromebook when I bought my last laptop and decided against it. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to not have the resources of a laptop. But now, I still have the old laptop, which is fully useable so long as it's plugged in, so I am more willing to take the plunge.

I realized when I got home from work and went to place the order the the price was for two year contract signers. Unfortunately, I'm not in a place to pay the original price for that product.

Thanks for the advice!

Chromebooks are fine if you are just doing websurfing and email etc. They work very well for that. Just don't expect to do any heavy lifting on them. Also that sale price you see there is because you are signing a 2 year contract with VZW because that chromebook has 4G LTE, so you would also have a data plan/line access tacked on to your VZW bill. If you go that route though I'd do it quick, cause VZW is doing away with contracts all together as of tomorrow(I think?), so the subsidies on phones/chromebooks/tablets etc will all be going away.

Also realize that you aren't installing Office or anything on there, you would use Google Docs or whatever google uses for word/powerpoint/excel etc. Or I think MS has office online that would be available through the google store.

I'm about as big of a google/android guy as one can get, but you just have to realize that a chromebook is not a laptop, it's designed to be one. It has a specific purpose and it does that very well. As long as you know that going in you should be fine.

It almost sounds like Chromebooks were Google's 'plan B' if the tablet market didn't take root. They offer the same functionality as a tablet, but with a traditional PC/laptop form factor.

Chromebooks offer less functionality than most tablets because it's very difficult to run Android apps on them. Hopefully that will change but the only upside to a chromebook is very low power consumption which means you can do basic things for a long time without needing to charge. But even with google apps like docs and sheets they still can't match the functionality of full office and Office 365 won't run on it in a way that works well.

My wife has an HP with cellular on our T-Mobile account so she uses it to work while outside the house responding to emails and making website updates via wordpress, for those tasks they are great. But she has to wait to edit presentations done in various Office apps until she gets home on her Win10 laptop.

So I'm going back to school next month and I'm thinking about getting a tablet.

Any suggestions? I'm not a huge Apple fan.

Samsung Galaxy Tab S2. Game changer. Did you ever get one, @mikey?

I wanted one for a while... ended up winning an Ipad 2 mini at the company christmas party. I'm really enjoying it.

Sure did. Use it every day. Awesome second screen for me, throw a hockey game on there when I'm on the go, podcasts, netflix, whatever...much more portable than a laptop, battery life has been terrific (I also turned off the cell radio thing). I also can use it as a whiteboard for coaching, which is helpful. I haven't even fully unlocked its potential probably, as I'm a pretty single-focus user, but for $240 (50% black friday) or whatever I paid, it's been a great investment...

And, too, when the Pens play on Thursday and that awful NFL game is on at the same time, now that I have tablet, I can watch two hockey games and zero NFL games instead of my previous ratio of 1 to 0...

Awesome, glad it worked out (better than that SFF PC ).

Which is also still going strong and serving its purpose...

So I'm going back to school next month and I'm thinking about getting a tablet.

Any suggestions? I'm not a huge Apple fan.

Surface pro 4's are incredible. No 3G though. You'd have to hot spot your phone.

thanks guys

I regard c/net highly and trust their reviews. They currently rank the Google Pxiel C as the best Android tablet available today. If I were after a new tab, that would be at the top of the list.

So you're opinion is simply a paraphrase, then?

I think what currently has me excited about apple stuff is that I've had my current phone for four years (Iphone5) and it hasn't slowed at all. Seems like it's just as fast as it was when I first bought it. My droid x was a brick after two years... couldn't do anything with it. Has android caught up in that regard?

I think what currently has me excited about apple stuff is that I've had my current phone for four years (Iphone5) and it hasn't slowed at all. Seems like it's just as fast as it was when I first bought it. My droid x was a brick after two years... couldn't do anything with it. Has android caught up in that regard?

my s6 edge + is just as fast now as the day I got it, if not faster tbh

So you're opinion is simply a paraphrase, then?

In summary; more or less.

I'm using a Note 3 I bought on launch day in 2013 and it's been great. I had a Note 7 for about a week (lulz) and I was unimpressed in part because it didn't do much more than my Note 3 did, other than biometrics.

There are bad tablets though. I bought and returned a Slate. It was terrible. Click a browser icon, 7-8 seconds later it pops open. It couldn't effectively do tabbed browsing, etc. The SGTS2 is like a big version of what my Note 7 was. It does nearly everything I ask and has the fingerprint reader.

So you're opinion is simply a paraphrase, then?

In summary; more or less.

reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I think what currently has me excited about apple stuff is that I've had my current phone for four years (Iphone5) and it hasn't slowed at all. Seems like it's just as fast as it was when I first bought it. My droid x was a brick after two years... couldn't do anything with it. Has android caught up in that regard?

my s6 edge + is just as fast now as the day I got it, if not faster tbh

Cool... that's really all that has tied me to Iproduct, so if there are droid phones/tablets that have caught up, I might up grade to something new. The pixel has caught my eye, for sure.

My first Iphone was the 4, and two years later I got the 5 (when the 6 came out). The four was worthless, the 5 was ok, except the GPS didn't work. We went phone shopping when the 5 contracts ran out and I was going to look at other phones, but the deal they had on the 7 made it worth it to just stick with them. We got two 7's for 500.

My M-in-L purchased for me the new Kindle Fire 8HD and am looking for cases.

Anyone here have this?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MSLRPY0/re ... 1368S?th=1

I'm super impressed with my new Amazon Fire HD 8. Has more oomph than any Kindle I had before and the resolution is spectacular.

All the kindles and android tablets I've had in the past really struggled with the large pdf files I read and would nearly always start moving like sludge and lock up after a while. Zero problems like that with this tablet.

So think I broke my charging port on my Sammy Galaxy Tab. Are those expensive to repair?