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Hard drives and video

post #1 of 3
6/26/05 at 3:13am
Thread Starter 
Hi

I'm looking at possibly buying a Notebook in August (I keep changing my mind about this :-) ). I'm looking at possibly the Toshiba Tecra A4 or the Toshiba Tecra S2 (depending on the price in August). I've considered ASUS as well. I'm an IT student and I'm trying to start up a business using Java and PHP for web sites so I often have up to about 6 applications open at the same time. This means I'd like to have fairly quick screen redraws when changing between applications.

Is there noticeable difference between 4200 rpm and 5400 rpm hard drives? Plus, which brands have hard drive protection (like in sensing when the notebook is dropping or even shock absorbers)?

Also, would there be a big difference between a dedicated video card and a notebook that used part of main memory for video? I'm not a designer so I'm not big with graphics (apart from resizing them), I'm more into the programming side of things.

Thanks

Peter Mount
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post #2 of 3
6/26/05 at 8:06pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Mount
Hi

I'm looking at possibly buying a Notebook in August (I keep changing my mind about this :-) ). I'm looking at possibly the Toshiba Tecra A4 or the Toshiba Tecra S2 (depending on the price in August). I've considered ASUS as well. I'm an IT student and I'm trying to start up a business using Java and PHP for web sites so I often have up to about 6 applications open at the same time. This means I'd like to have fairly quick screen redraws when changing between applications.

Is there noticeable difference between 4200 rpm and 5400 rpm hard drives? Plus, which brands have hard drive protection (like in sensing when the notebook is dropping or even shock absorbers)?

Also, would there be a big difference between a dedicated video card and a notebook that used part of main memory for video? I'm not a designer so I'm not big with graphics (apart from resizing them), I'm more into the programming side of things.

Thanks

Peter Mount
Hey Peter.... Yes, a really big difference between the 4200 and 5400 rpm drives (and 7200, is even better)....
BUT there is even a Bigger difference between the so called "Shared Video Memory" vs a dedicated Video Ram....

If you can help it, avoid, at all costs, 4200 rpm drives and shared video memory !!!!!
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post #3 of 3
6/26/05 at 8:20pm
From what you've said I doubt you'll get much out of a dedicated graphics card, just make sure to get enough ram.

As for the HDD, I would say definately get a faster one at least a 5200 if not a 7200 rpm. You will really notice the difference why you are loading from or writing to the hdd.
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