When Buying Two Computers Is Cheaper Than Buying One | Hacker News Reader

When Buying Two Computers Is Cheaper Than Buying One

lifehacker.com

14 pointsCharles__L24 comments

I'll admit to making the gaming laptop mistake during my university years. I convinced myself the $1,300 price tag was justified because of the other high computing needs I'd be relying on it for. Turns out, I only ever did those things while I was sitting at my desk at home.

So a year or so after buying it, I now have a dated machine that has horrible battery life and is dysfunctional to use unless plugged in with a number of peripherals and I might as well just have bought a desktop with a notebook for the things I actually did while on the run.

For the average user (who the article is obviously targeting) they'd be hard pressed to justify the price tag of any "gaming" laptop anymore.

I feel you, my first laptop weighed close to 9 pounds with the power adapter. After that one, I picked either ultraportables or lightweight 14 & 15" models with a mid level graphics card. I bought a laptop for 1500 euros last month, and it isn't nearly in the ballpark of my 2 year old 600 euro desktop.

Except you'd have to maintain two computers and sync the data all the time.

I prefer notebook+external monitor at home. Although I admit to an extra gaming desktop PC, but who still uses those?

Keeping in sync is even more of a nightmare if you follow the advice to have a desktop Windows PC and a portable Mac.

The advice here could be summarized simply: "Buy what you need, when you need it." In the computer purchasing game, procrastination almost always pays dividends.

Unless you use the two computers for different tasks; then there's no syncing.

However, there is also what Henry Ford once said that if you need a machine and do not buy it, then you will ultimately find that you have paid for it but do not have it

SYncing data has become significantly easier than in the days of windows briefcase and other such abortions. Dropbox springs to mind.

Even if it is significantly easier than in the old days, it might not easy and reliable enough.

Are you personally using Dropbox to sync data between two machines you regularly use? (An answer to that would help me decide how much weight to give to your comment.)

I'm using a combination of Dropbox and SkyDrive (OneNote!) to synchronize between the three machines which I use daily.

The documents on SkyDrive are also shared with two colleagues.

It works well for everything except the TrueCrypt partition I have. Per-file encryption would be more effective, but I have yet to find a nice tool.

For me the solution to replace TrueCrypt was about finding encFS. Because I use Windows/OSX, I even bought BoxCryptor which is commercial implementation of encFS.

While I was at school I used dropbox to sync all my course materials, notes, papers etc between my home desktop and my laptop. It worked really well and I never had trouble with it. I mostly did it because, at home, I preferred working with the larger screen and more comfortable keyboard that I had with my desktop.

When working collaboratively with small teams and shared folders it was more problematic, dealing with all the different document files that got created when there were conflicts was problematic. We ended up just going with Google docs for collaborative papers.

Of course. I use it for 5 machines. Plus game club members = another 2 dozen - share an art folder.

I use no USB thumbdrives any more, no disks, no media of any kind. Haven't for two years now. Dropbox is enough. NOt great, but enough.

Rather than syncing, you can just treat the laptop as a dumb terminal. tmux & Emacs tramp make editing remote files just about as easy as editing local files. Run an ssh on port 443 so that it's usable where port 22 is blocked.

I use Emacs all day every day, and I wouldn't call Tramp easy or reliable.

As someone who recently started using 2 machines on a daily basis Dropbox and git repos for code are more than enough to solve this for me. Anything I need I have on either machine. It's perfect.

My computing setup is the same in spirit as the one described in the article. In my experience, the maintenance overhead is quite small and syncing is a non-issue with a nix tool called unison. It's basically a bi-directional rsync.

Keeping my working directories in sync is as simple as running unison each time I boot my netbook only. This assumes that you have an internet accessible nix machine already in place for other purposes. Understandably, that may not always be the case.

> sync the data all the time

If you use them for different purposes then what is there really to sync?

Your e-mail is probably already device-independent, Chrome and Firefox provide their own mechanisms for syncing, and putting the "final products" -- edited photos, videos, game saves, docs and repositories -- somewhere online, on a home server, or an external drive will be enough.

Here is my system:

Mail is all IMAP. I don't bother using a client on the PC, usually usually the website on the Mac, sometimes postbox.

Files that need to be on both are on dropbox.

Contacts are in the cloud

Media is in the cloud (Dropbox or iTunes match)

Yeah, that's it.

Network drives, icloud, dropbox, carbonite, rsync, vnc, github, bitbucket, imap, gmail, lots of easy to use options today.

I upgraded my system a few months ago with a setup like this. Most of my heavy usage happens in my home office, while on the laptop I primarily write, browse the web, or at the most, SSH into my VPS for some reason or other.

To buy a laptop that matches the desktop system I purchased would have cost nearly twice as much and it would barely be portable. I find desktop computers to have a longer life expectancy. They're more viable to upgrading, and don't take the wear and tear of lugging around a laptop.

For portability I went with a used netbook for under $200. It's more than sufficient for most usage, even if not as fast as a real laptop. My old laptop had a 17" screen and weighed a ton. This I can toss into a shoulder bag, or easily pack into a larger backpack if I'm carrying other things. Its worth is so low that if it happened to be damaged or lost, it wouldn't be catastrophic.

There are so many options for syncing with today's software that it's hardly an issue. Even Chrome keeps the history, bookmarks, and apps in sync between the two.

Replace the iMac with a Hackintosh…

Installing a premium OS and not paying for it is one way to save money. Do they have a lifehacker on stealing toilet paper from restrooms too?

I'm assuming after a purchase of the OS. Is purchasing an OS and installing it on a computer it wasn't meant for akin to stealing toilet paper too?

You could try to purchase the OS, but I'm sure it would cost billions of dollars, dwarfing your savings.

You can buy a license for Apple built computers, but that isn't valid on a hackintosh and is part of the old business model anyway. Now Apple sells upgrades to existing licenses, which you get when you buy the Apple hardware.

If you could buy a copy of the OS to use as you wish, I'd have no problem with a hackintosh. Much like I can do whatever I wish with a hard drive or network card.

I suppose in the end, ethically, a hackintosh is the equivalent of a GPL violation. You haven't physically deprived anyone of a material possession, but you have benefitted by using their intellectual work against the license they have chosen.

(At least you aren't leaving some poor guy in a restroom with no toilet paper.)

As a iOS developer, I definitely go this route. However I share the 2560x1440 display between them.

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