Please help me decide what laptop to buy... - Page 2

I would say the Acer Travelmate 8104, it's fairly thin, has a very nice screen, a 2.0 ghz Dothan packs plenty of grunt for pretty much anything you could want, There is also a tasty looking 15.4" light weight Athlon 64 coming from armina with X700 graphics that looks very sweet and promises to offer good performance. The other nice thing about the 8104 is that it has High Def integrated audio.

Usually, the 17" WSXGA dimension is 15.5" x 11.75" x 1.95

Don't worry about the size of the text or images on the screen, that can all be adjusted through Windows utilities. For example, you can change the DPI under display properties to adjust the text size to whatever, however the standard is 96 or 120 DPI. If you have the choice, always get the higher resolution, which you can tune down to a lower resolution mode, but it cannot be done the other way.



Most of today's laptops are capable of running LCD and CRT simultaneously.

But neither one of these has a DVI port, so they will not be capable of running some external LCDs. But they will run an external CRT through the VGA port, and a TV through S-Video out. But there probably will be work arounds from VGA to DVI or something, or you can get an LCD that is compatible with VGA ports.

Yes, but one thing You will have to consider is that the Pentium 4 is a notoriously ineffective CPU in a laptop chassis, and generates way too much heat for it to run full throttle for a long periods of time with stability. Which means a) it will cause more errors and frequently disrupt your work or destroy any unsaved data, or more likely b) it will throttle down frequently so that it's overall performance in the long run will be much lower than advertised. That's why I usually recommend people against buying a P4 based laptop.

If you would like a thin and like book, get a PM based LT, if you would like a performance oriented LT, then certainly go with the A64, which has higher performance/price ratio than any other CPU line, and also runs reasonably cool, and also currently holds the performance crown with MA64 3700 among mobile processors.

The 2.0 Dothan will still pale in comparison to an A64 3700 by about 20% of the speed or so, and is also much less effective performance/price ratio wise. If you do not need thin and light, there is no reason to pay more for less.

Samantha, you say you checked out Dell. Did you take a look at the Inspiron 9200? It should be perfect for you. 17-inch widescreen. Fastest Centrino available. 60GB 7200RPM available. Nice sound, including an integrated subwoofer. Great battery life. Runs cool. Weighs under 8lbs.

THe 9200 has some nice features, the only thing is (correct me if I'm wrong) that it does not have Wide screen options, The lack of WSXGA/WUXGA is not that common for high end notebooks.

I'm not sure I understand the question, but the 9200 does have a widescreen display, and the res options are WUXGA and WXGA+. Dell doesn't offer a WSXGA+ option, which does seem to be a bit strange to me, but WUXGA is a perfect fit for 17-inches.

I stand corrected.

sager 9860 is a solid laptop, except it does get really hot i've heard

1. The P4 runs extremely hot, especially the P4E version in that LT, code named "prescott". I have friends who have trouble in keeping the P4Es cooled in a desktop chassis (which typically has much better cooling than laptops). I would be concerned in buying a P4E laptop that is clocked high ( > 3.0), which could lead to long term stability problems, and cause your otherwise good experience to become a major headache.

2. The 9860 with a 3.4 GHz P4 CPU costs 2420 USD, compared to the 4750 with an A64 3400 CPU costing 1795 USD. They will both perform about the same on most applications. (actually, the A64 3400 will perform slightly better according to most benchmarks) Why is the 9860 more expensive? -- because of the ATI Mobility Radeon X800, which is a brand new laptop graphics card, that is optimized for gaming, and not for graphic design. Unless you play late games or run software that does large 3-D real time rendering, this card is not going to give you much if any performance gain over the ATI 9700 on the 4750, but you will have to pay about 400 dollars more for that card to be in the LT. Keep in mind, both cards are gamer oriented cards with AntiAliasing and Pixel-shader and other gaming support making up the majority of its price. There are professional grade cards out there, such as this: http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...133-103&depa=1
But these are mostly for desktops. For graphic design, the X800 is definitely not worth it, for you pay for a high-end gaming card, and not get much in return for a 500 - 600 dollar card. (about three time the cost of a 9700).
With the only major advantage being the DVI port. Unless you are a avid gamer, the X800 will not be worth it, by a long shot, IMHO.

3. You are obviously a advanced user, and will have a good chance to get Windows Long Horn when it come out in 06. Win Long Horn is a native 64 bit operating system, which will only run on an 64 bit CPU, and will run on the 4750, but not on the 9860. There will be a version of Long Horn that runs on 32 bit systems, but that will not have the full performance advantage of the 64bit version, and possibly will be lacking certain advanced features. And since you will likely be running XP Professional this year, you know that when the 64bit Window XP comes out, you can trade in your current copy of the 32-bit XP for a 64-bit copy. Although the performance gain will be at an estimated 10%, that is still a 10% gain for FREE. The 64-bit version of Windows XP will be available in April, and will be completely compatible with any current appliations through WOW(windows on window) technology.

4. The 4750 will be somewhat better on battery life and will be lighter. While these may not be high on your list of things, that's something else to consider and add to the equation.

Here is another option from Fujitsu, the Amilo 1630, a much better price/performance ratio than the N6010, and will run much cooler, and hence have higher reliability than the N6010, which has a P4E CPU. This one has identical graphics cards, but an AMD processor instead.
http://www.fujitsu-siemens.com/produ...s/amilo_a.html

This is not true - Longhorn is just the new version of Windows - it will be in 32 and 64-bit editions.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/...ditions_1.html

Please read my entire post carefully.

Here is some info on Win Longhorn;

http://www.computerworld.com/softwar...,92990,00.html
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...1368543,00.asp
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116008,00.asp


Here is on the release of WinXP - 64bit:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0209windoserve.html

This is probably the rumour that Iccaciatori is talking about:
http://www.infos-du-net.com/en/news/...rn-64bits.html
http://msmvps.com/xpditif/archive/2004/11/18/19650.aspx

I don't see what you're talking about...

You said "Long Horn is a native 64 bit operating system, which will only run on an 64 bit CPU"

I said it will also run on 32-bit. And the sites you pointed me to support that:

"Microsoft also plans to release versions of Longhorn for Itanium and 64-bit extended systems as well as a 32-bit edition, according to Greg Sullivan, a lead product manager for Windows."

This was what I said:

Please read my previous post again.

This was a highly disrespectful and unnecessary post.
If you have difference of opinion please state so without the added flaming, as it puts whatever information you may have provided in a poor light.
It is also quite obvious that you have had little or no experience with the equipment in question, else you would have taken several things into question.
It may be that I was unclear in my statement, but I was not referring to a dual-core Mobile CPU. I was referring to a dual core Xeon server, which has been around for quite some time. Does the G4 outperform a server in every aspect? Absolutely not. But the in the case of video rendering and audio production, there is no PC that can compare to a Mac. For this reason, the large majority of most Video/Audio professionals use Macs. They are far from outdated, quite the opposite. They are no good for games, mediocre in many things, but in this respect (which happens to be the same field in which Samantha C hopes to use her laptop) they are the absolute peak.
Now to explain the MIPS/CISC references, and hopefully shed some light on your apparent confusion.

The MIPS processor is a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computer) processor. Compared with their CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) counterparts, RISC processors typically support fewer and much simpler instructions. The premise is, however, that a RISC processor can be made much faster than a CISC processor because of its simpler design. These days, it is generally accepted that RISC processors are more efficient than CISC processors; and even the only popular CISC processor that is still around internally translates the CISC instructions into RISC instructions before they are executed.
Another upside to the RISC based processors is that they run much cooler than their CISC counterparts.
If you would like more information in an even more elaborated fashion (addressing modes, exc...) I would be more than happy to provide it.

Cheers.

So, so, so hard do decide.. Of all those new laptops that is now coming out does anyone has "it all".

15" good screen, preferably not widescreen.
Sonoma
512-1024ram
x700
Good weight; under 7lbs ( 3kg )
4 hrs battery life

And good look, and a solid brand that wont brake down / fail

Sonoma? You would be paying 400-600 more for very slight gain in performance, just stick to the old Centrino and save yourself some serious dough. And it's not like Sonoma will be more upgrade friendly, once Yonah comes out, the chipsets, hence the laptop chassis will all be new again, even when you want to upgrade the CPU, you will have to get a whole new machine.