Engineering Laptop Needed

For that price range, I would go for a mobile AMD like on the ferrari, at 6.6 pounds it's not bad to lug around. You're really going to be overpaying for a 2.0M right now, also.

I understand the tech support angle, that's a great thing to have. But the 1712 is a huge brick, and the 8006 series seems a bit on the pricey side, unless you don't mind paying for it to take advantage of your school's support.

I'd prefer the Sager 3760 for mobile laptops, with the 1.7, add on more storage and ram, even though it only carries the 9600 64mb card. It will cost almost 1000 less even with 1gb ram and 80gb hard drive, or the fast 60gb.

The Sager 4080v is a little heavier at 7.5 pounds, but has the 3.2ghz processor, and with 1gb ram and the 7200rpm 60gb and wireless, is only $1980. A little more suited to gaming and such with the 9600 128mb card.

I think your idea of Pentium M is good. I am going for engineering also. Check out the Compal CL56. Also known as Powernotebooks.com Power Pro M 5:4, Hypersonic CX5, etc. Mine is from Hypersonic. http://www.hypersonic-pc.com. I have a Pentium M 1.8GHz, 1GB RAM, 60GB 7200RPM Hard drive, Radeon 9700 128MB etc. Nice system that is 6.25lbs and 1.3" thin. Also 4+ hours battery life. Check it out, feel free to ask any questions.

Aaron

i really doubt you'll need more than 1 Gb of RAM. what kind of engineering apps do you plan to run?

the 7200 rpm is helpful, but may not be worth the price increase (depends on who you ask). at more than $100, i don't think so. see for yourself (i posted this in another thread):

http://www20.tomshardware.com/mobil...1031/index.html
take in comparison, for example, the XP boot up times between a hitachi 7k60 (7200) and a seagate momentus (5400). there is only a 1 second differential between the two according to THG (23 to 24). this difference is much more significant in the case of 7200 to 4200 (23 to 28).

if you take their numbers for digital encoding times, the 7k60 (7200) holds a 2.5% speed advantage over the momentus (5400). that's about 7 seconds advantage in a ~5 min test. kind of small peas compared to the 53 second differential between the 4200 drive and the 7k60.

looking at the other benches they provide later, you realize that while the speed advantage from a 4200 to a 7200 is about 15% max, from a 5400 to a 7200 it's only about 5-10% (sysmark 2002, mobilemark 2003).

so, while these still represent relatively significant numbers, i would venture to say that you won't notice too much of a difference if you just grab the 5400 rpm drive. it's probably worth the extra $80-100, but if you don't want to wait a month for the drive, these are some things you can consider.

the AMD 64bit 3400+ / P4 3.2 ghz are a different class of chip than the P-M. for what you want to do (cart it to school everyday) i'm thinking you'll want good battery life in your laptop, which the P-M will easily give you, and is still a very fast processor. a comparable processor is the a64 2800+ low voltage, which is better than the first two chips i mentioned but still behind the P-M in terms of battery efficiency.

the high-end a64s / P4s are better in terms of maximum performance, but they suck up power like mad. you'll only be able to get a few hours out of your laptop before you have to retreat to an outlet. if you think you'll only ever need a few hours at a time, then this might be the laptop for you. if you'd like to see 4-5 hours battery life, then choose a P-M, the performance sacrifice is not actually that bad. you'll definitely be able to play stuff like counterstrike and starcraft. even the latest games probably for a while will run fine so long as you get a good graphics card to accompany your P-M system (like a mobility radeon 9700)