-----Original Message-----
From: Hampshire <hampshire-bounces@???> On Behalf Of Owain via Hampshire
Sent: 26 January 2021 14:53
To: Hampshire@???
Cc: Owain <simbobo@???>
Subject: [Hampshire] Laptop
>So where is a good place to go to have knowledgeable but non-patronising service? He wants a ?>Windows machine, but I am hoping to inherit the old one myself, and install a grown-up operating >system on it.
F2f service I can't help with but I've always thought Scan and Novatech were quite good over the phone. They will (or at least they did) also supply machines without an OS installed so you can get Windows without the utter rubbish some "mainstream" laptops come with: mostly games.
On the subject of specification, I'm a statistician by trade and I deal with some huge datasets - mostly in R. To be fair, my work are setup with servers so (like the old days of mainframes) we login and have a super specced server do the hard work. That said, for local big data processing, it's all about the RAM. Our machines (SP4s-SP7s) have 16Gb of RAM and, while they're not perfect (especially in terms of heat), they do seem to handle most things ok. For anything "chunky", I'd always prefer: desktop, laptop, tablet (in that order) purely because of the heat. I'm no Chemist so I can't say for sure whether this will work - but for big datasets - it's all about RAM in my experience.
Cheers
R
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