So if you buy it outright you get no discount? Is that his this works? And I’m guessing that the loan has some sort of fixed term or amount or something. I wonder if you end up saving any money if you can afford to buy it outright.

Do you remember the bad old days when you’d go to someone’s house and their browser would be unusable because it had so many toolbars installed? That was often from legit sites bundling crap into installers for software they hosted.

That’s really cool. Are they held snug? Will they fall out?

Is it possible the hard drive is failing in the old one? I don’t know what the operating system would do if download speed surpassed write speed, but once it couldn’t hold it in ram any longer waiting to write I guess it would have to throttle it.

The bandwidth of a network card would generally outclass your internet connection by an order of magnitude.

Gigabits per second network cards have been standard for at least a decade.

And then there’s your wifi too, if applicable, but even that is much faster than your general internet connection, unless you’re far from your router. A new laptop might help you get a better wifi signal, if it had a newer wifi protocol or stronger radio, but that’s also going to depend on your router.

But in front of all of that is going to be your modem. Depending on the quality of your modem that might be a bottleneck.

A new laptop, even the best in the world, won’t make your downloads any faster.

I also back what everyone else is saying. Unless of course you can update your current laptop. What have you got? An extra stick of ram and an SSD can make an old laptop feel brand new, especially with an OS reinstall

Unfortunately this is about the first time, I’d (almost) disagree with you. If the US bans something on, or makes a law about, the internet it almost always affects the rest of the world. The only difference is the rest of the world has no say in the matter :(

The only thing I don’t like about that versioning system is the ambiguity that can sometimes arise due to different interpretations of what the numbers after the first dot mean.

You could either say: It’s a decimal system, therefore 3.4 is bigger (comes after) 3.13. (3.4 > 3.13) or, The numbers after each dot are independent, therefore 13 is bigger than 4, so 13 is the newer release.

It’s usually fairly obvious from changelings but every now and then I get tripped up.