There was a service centre near my house so it was o.k. for the one problem I had (turned out it was a bad wi-fi router and not the computer). I'll take your word it might be bad for someone who isn't close to one.

Never buy the cheapest laptops. They are cheaply made with plastic, cheaper parts, etc. Acer is just that. Always get at least the mid-level.

SSD is probably the better options for 90% of people. If you plan to store a lot, maybe not so much. Even if you store a lot, there are other options. Otherwise, the battery life and performance improvements of an SSD make it the better choice.

Isn't Dell XPS supposed to be premium? Very disappointed with this.

That may be true in the past. But now? XPS has gone very worse, based on the premium on top of Inspiron.

wow HDD vs SSD reminds me of Beta vs VHS
 

Its 2020 this battle of SSD versus HDD is over. The next question should be SSD vs. NvMe, you will find significant improvements in performance again. Especially those devices that have adopted the NvMe protocol. And after that it will be NvMe vs SCM (storage class memory) still too expensive for even high end laptops.
HDD = Beta Tapes
SSD = VHS tapes
NvMe = DVD's

Each had their time and their place, even if their time was short. I can see a very large HDD for eternal backups of many machines, but for single it is best to continue using SSD externally (IMO).

I don't believe this is a correct characterization at all.

Beta and VHS were competitors of each others. But HDD and SSD are not exactly in such relationship. NVMe is considered a form of SSD.

+1

WIth SSD and NVMe, the difference is the interface. The SATA interface(even SATA3) is the bottleneck that NVMe eliminates. You can get housings to use NVMe drives in SATA bays. I guess handy if you want to use data or whatever in a computer that doesn;t have NVMe.

Thought not nearly as disparate in speed, I'd put the comparison as:

HDD = FDD
SSD = ODD
NVMe = HDD

I amazed some people in another website when I posed a question about the 3.5" FDD in my HTPC grinding randomly (supposed the anti-virus working). AT least it is a 5.25" or even an 8" floppy (were there 12/13" ones?)

thanks for add ing the bits I left out
 

You are correct about the protocol now being the bottleneck and there are some additional things like dual ported NvMe drives and the queue without SATA is 64k versus 1. SO thanks for adding the parts I left out and there are more.

But I guess my reference was out of place since I am old and lived the BETA (Sony better) versus VHS (everyone else cheaper) war. And it just seemed like that all over again. IN this case SSD is superior to HDD in all aspects for the internal drive of a laptop (once again my opinion). And as another has stated here like them I changed out a HDD to a SSD in a buddies machine and then he did not need to buy a new machine it was faster then new.

Bought this thinkpad:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops...0/p/20SC0009US

Not a format war at all. Just stuff that people don't know about. I'd compare it to people who are booting their PCs with old HDDs, or an even worse case, FDD (someone must remember running DOS and Win 2.X from floppies), and just not knowing any better (or knowing of better/faster alternatives). Just like some people have no idea what RAM is or what more can do/does.

I can't imagine there's anyone left on the planet who starts up an operating system from a floppy disk - the obvious implication is that a floppy disk computer would be so behind in specs that it wouldn't even access the net.

Still plenty of people using hard disks, though, and plenty of new laptops and desktops still coming with HDDs instead of SSDs.

How about those who don't want to use DOSBox or those who enjoy Jobs' early Apple era Macintosh :p?

Those four people in a population of 7 billion are essentially zero. :D :D :D

You'd be shocked at how many embedded systems running ancient hardware and software are still out there. Win 3.11, OS/2, DOS, Windows NT, and a bunch of weird orphans are still alive and kicking out there. A large facility in the city I'm in now is running both Win 3.11 and MS-DOS 5.0.

I still support 3.5", 5.25", and ZIP disks at my office. We don't use floppies ourselves at this point, but we still have clients who do. Our office VoIP PBX is from ~2002 or so, running on CentOS 6, with 24 year old parts inside the box. Actually ordering its replacement this week.

That may all be true, yet it doesn't invalidate my previous post.