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by truenamenofame 1823 days ago
I am kind of fascinated how people without computers end up at a coding school. Are they paying to attend?

That said, I have an elitebook 8470p and assuming they have ssds and enough ram, they should be fine considering the situation. If the 8460p is like the 8470p, the CPU is even a socketed one, so there's room for upgrades too, assuming they aren't already maxed out. Learning to make do with older, limited hardware can be a very educational and even enlightening experience.
1 comments
hnthrow12345 1823 days ago
No, unfortunately no SSD. I think that's the main problem actually.

The courses are government funded, so people without programming background.

> Learning to make do with older, limited hardware can be a very educational and even enlightening experience.

I'm not sure about that. I think for beginners, there's so much complexity already... it's going to be very tough for them.

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chmod775 1823 days ago
> No, unfortunately no SSD. I think that's the main problem actually.

So since these things have 16GB RAM...

If you're on Linux and can get by on 8GB RAM for running IntelliJ/Docker (probably fine?), then you can use the other 8GB as a ramdisk into which you load your stuff your on boot. Try a ramdisk + unionfs that you populate on boot for instance.

That'll be faster than a SSD.

But:

- Increased risk of data loss depending on your strategy for syncing it with the physical partition

- Your software has to fit on a ~8GB partition (that'll be cutting it close if you want to store docker containers on there too)

- It'll add a minute or so to boot time - when you're copying the physical partition to the ramdisk

- It's hacky as fuck

- The OS will have less space for caches, which will bite you if you're still using the HDD for any other data

But at least you won't be waiting for HDD seeks during auto complete. Don't forget to disable swap, which likes to cause disk access during autocomplete too and would be very counterproductive with this setup.

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hnthrow12345 1823 days ago
This is actually a pretty cool idea. Unfortunately they only have 8 gigs RAM, not sure why, maybe there are multiple configs.
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