[AT] laptop

[Chris Britton]

I just picked up a laptop at the beginning of the year.  I scoured DELL, HP 
and COMPAQ, and GATEWAY websites for comparisons on deals.

Here's what i found.  HP owns Compaq.. so offer similar products.. except 
the laptop with an HP logo on it costs about 10% more.. and as far as I can 
tell.. uses identical components.. when ordered from the HP website..  Dell 
was the next runner up.  Price wise i could find Dell's that were neck and 
neck with Compaq.. The only difference was availability on some of the 
economy brands, cd/dvd capabilities and video card.  I noticed that on 
equivalent priced dell and compaq products.. generally the cd/dvd 
capabilities ont he compaq were 1 step up.  If one unit had a cdr.. the 
other had cdr and dvd.. if one had cdr and dvd.. then the other had cdr and 
dvd+r..e tc.  That left video.. that's where i dropped Dell from the 
running, as I wanted a laptop PC to do some gaming, as well as work.  It's 
much easier to take your laptop to your friends house and plop it down for 
some network gaming, vs toting the whole tower..  Most of the Dell's I 
looked at had the intel extreme graphics (un) accelerator.. some version of 
the 9xx series.  While they don't completely S-ck.. they aren't too much 
above it...Especially in terms ov video memory you can allocate.  We have a 
few emachines at work.. just mid and low end terminals.. all have the Intel 
ex graphics.. and on many units.. 8mb is the largest you can allocate... etc

I opted for the ATI mobile 200 series card, and took a small upgrade 925$ ) 
that added 128mb of ram on the car so that I wouldn't have to share system 
ram.

Next is screen.  Passive matrix is economy.. works.. but can ghost a bit in 
high speed graphics environments.  Active matrix is better.. If you have 
options like clear view ( many brands have their own name for this ).. or 
widescreens.. get them if you have the dough.  On my laptop, I think I added 
100$ worth of add ons, and it made a huge difference.. from the video, to 
the widescreen, g card.. etc.

Next advice... Go ahead and get 1gig of ram if you can afford it.. Windows 
makes a major step up in productivity at the 1 gig mark.

Also.. Your wireless g network card... if there is an upgrade.. get it.. Not 
all G cards are equal.  My buddy has a decent mid to upper line dell 
laptop.. about as old as mine, using whatever dell includes as a wireless g 
card.  On my compaq i upgraded fromthe basic g card to a broadcom g card.. 
If we are setting in the parking lot of a place with an open G network, I 
get better signal strenght than him.. side by side comparison.  In many 
cases.. i can identify and locate networks his dell can't even detect.

The last to consider is your processor.  Besides raw computing power.. this 
will be one of the power hungry parts of your system.  AMD has a turion 
mobile processor that is a bit more economic on power usage and a tad faster 
than the Athlon.. however.. it is a bit pricier.  I chose an 2.4ghz amd 
athlon 64, vs taking a 2 ghz turion.. My battery will last a bit over an 
hour of hard use.

If you go mobile alot.. a spare battery may be in order.  some offer multi 
cell batter upgrades for nearly the same price as the basic battery... with 
only 30-40% power increase.  in that situation.. 2 basic batteries may get 
you farther than one upgraded unit.

lastly.. many of the new processors.. AMD and INTEL scale processor power 
based on battery level.. I know when my batter is getting low.. my amd will 
drop to 1ghz.. etc.  Same with monitor options.. My screen drops to a less 
performance mode, .. less backlighting.. etc. when on battery.

just observations based on my purchase in january.

Soundguy

>From: "msm10301 at juno.com" <msm10301 at juno.com>
>Subject: [AT] OT - Laptop reccomendations
>>I've been thinking about sidelining our desktop and switching to a laptop 
>>instead. Ideally, I would >like to install a wireless router so that my 
>>wife and I are not tied to the desk if we want to surf the >web or read 
>>email. My question is, what type should I be looking for, and what 
>>features are >important? I know very little about the chip sets used in 
>>laptops, and how they compare with the >ones used in desktops. Here's what 
>>I would need the laptop to do. Internet and email (wireless), >Microsoft 
>>Office applications, digital camera storage. Our desktop is a PIII 1GZ and 
>>it works just >fine for what we do. Any thoughts with regards to 
>>brands/features would be appreciated.
>Thanks,
>Mike