Looking for a new notebook any recommendations?

[Guern]

The time has come, the desktop in the spare room has to be ditched in favour of a notebook that takes up less space.

Any recommendations up to £800 ex vat (as I can claim this back in CI).

Any thoughts re Mac V PC?

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Guern,

Best Chipset/CPU for notebooks is the Centrino with the Pentium-M processor. The best Video for notebooks are currently the ATI Mobility Radeon family of cards.

You will find, notebooks with that hardware inside, offer the best performance, battery life, and features out of all the notebooks on the market.

Take Care,

Richard

[Timothy]

Avoid Dell like the plague...their after sales service has become truly awful

W

[TimS]

Try AJP computers (if you are UK based) - www.ajp.co.uk

Have had half a dozen machines from them over last 7 years or so - you get a lot of 'bang for your buck' and reasonable back-up.

My last 'top of the line machine' lasted 5 years as my only machine dragged all over the world and used daily before its recent mother board failure.

TimS

[reynoldsno1]

I bought an Advent from PC World (yes, I know...) about 3 years ago. The battery is a bit kanckered, but other than that it's been remarkably reliable, even with Windows ME...

[Capt. Horatio Slappy !!]

Laptop Value versus performance

Hi !

Having bought Dells for 3 years I decided that the best value for money versus performance could be obtained elsewhere.
( By the way, my personal experience with Dell has been very good, their products are first class and so is their support in as far as RMA parts exchanges, telephonic assistance leaves something to be desired however as this has been outsourced to India, overall it is still the best support in the industry. )

I opted however for the cheaper alternative and buy 3rd party manufactured laptops using Desktop solutions.

These give you the best performance and the best value for money, the only negative side is product support and battery life, the real positive is upgradeability, generally they use CLEVO motherboards, the latest incarnation of which will support desktop CPU upgrades to 3.2 Ghz including hyperthreading enabled BIOS updates generally on a 533 or 800 mhz front side bus, pc 333 or faster ram and modular micro video cards.

Of note is the fact that a lot of manufacturers of laptops, I cite two in particular : Hewlett Packard and Compaq are reverting back to shared memory architecture on-board video, not only is it crap but it cannot be upgraded and who's principal intention, while at first offering good value for money, requires the user to purchase an entirely new laptop 12 to 24 months down the road when newer software requires more system resources currently left over after the video robs your ram and/or direct X 9.0 extensions and or the latest incarnation thereof, currently not supported.

After shortlisting about 20 different manufacturers and on-line retailers of laptops I have found the best value to be SAGER or PROSTAR and there is one more from whom I have ordered my latest laptop:

www.expressnotebook.com

When buying, look for a good display, I always opt for UXGA 1200 by 1600 pixels, I have also found anything less than a 16 Inch display on a laptop screen with a higher resulution as above is hard on the eyes.

When buying a laptop using a " DESKTOP " CPU solution, opt for INTEL over AMD, ( these are regular desktop processors and do not support speedstepping or mobile technology hence the higher drain on battery life, however they are substantially cheaper and I have still been able to get over 90 minutes of use out of a battery running a word processor and or music application)
The reason behind opting for INTEL CPU's in this case is that both AMD and INTEL Desktop CPU's run " hot " when used in a laptop who's cooling solution is not as adequate as in a more spacious desktop environment, Intel have an on-die thermistor who's function controls two types of thermal protection: throttling of the CPU by generally 50 percent although this may be adjusted if your BIOS Version allows and, overheat shutdown prior to CPU damage if for example the cooling fan were to fail, AMD does not directly support this protection and this feature may or may not be available depending on the motherboard which may or may not provide an on-motherboard thermistor close to the CPU and temperature protection, if available, will be controlled through the BIOS or through windows via a control applet.

Note: I had a mate who experienced a CPU fan failure on an AMD based laptop and it was junk shortly thereafter as it required replacement of the processor and motherboard.

When opting for RAM, go fastest and mostest, Desktop based laptops are currently using 333 or 400 DDR Ram, a faster option not available as standard on say a DELL " mobile " laptop.
In addition most laptops have beween 2 and 4 RAM slots, check to see how many DIMMS make up the memory you are buying, for example if your laptop supports over a gig of ram but has only 2 slots and your standard memory is 512 using 2x256mb dimms you will have to get inventive and/or sell off one or more of the original memory sticks in order to upgrade, your best bet is a 512 ram module occupying one ram slot, leaving the other free for another 512 should you need it down the road.

CPU size is optional, like I mentioned before, the upgrade is a simple affair, normally 4 screws underneath will allow for the removal of the panel, 4 more screws allow for removal of the " thermal unit " this is the heatsink and fan combo as one unit and the CPU sits underneath in a ZIF socket which has a small locking lever, operate the lever , remove the CPU, insert the new one, re lock the lever and replace the thermal unit and panel, also a good idea to use a little thermal paste between the new CPU and heatsink.

Video card upgrade is a little more involved but just as routine.

I mentioned value for money, I paid exactly $800.00 US less for Prostar, desktop based laptop, with slightly faster Specifications than the Dell Inspiron 8500 I had been looking at last year.
This year I'm buying a SAGER based laptop and saving about a grand, small price to pay for the loss of battery life and I like the upgradeability factor, should be able to keep my new laptop in the top of the range for at least 24 months and competitive for36 to 48 prior to needing to buya new one. ( Generally laptops double in performance every 12 months, as a footnote when the Intel Pentium 5 is released, it will probably use a new " form factor" or socket, this will dramatically lower the price of pentium 4 based CPU's and allow for a much cheaper upgrade for you in the next 12 to 18 months.


Good Luck !!

[PPRuNe Towers]

>sigh< At last a nice simple one.

The brand new G4 iBook from Mac £850 including vat. Extra memory and an Airport card fill the rest of the saved VAT nicely.
---------------------------------------
Space for breathless prose on hardware config.
---------------------------------------
Space for bollocks on connectivity
--------------------------------------------
No space for any discussion of dreadful operating system or on board software.
----------------------------------------


It's a Mac - you switch it on anywhere in the world and it works. Automatic selection and switching of ethernet, dial up, or wireless.

It appears seamlessly in Windows networks and vice versa with no setup or configuration. Calendar and address book auto synch across all networks, PDA's and bluetooth phones

It fires up out of the box with software that covers everything you connect to, by with or from including e-mail, superb browser, address book integrated into every app, video, telephony, audio voice, audio music, digital photography and digital video editing

Did I mention £850 quid including tax?

And each bit of software is simply the best around. Don't believe me? iTunes, the MP3/Music library/burning software we've been using for years was released for windows today. Free download - suck it and see for yourself what intuitive software is about. While you're at it try an iPod and see how and why a complex 40 gig device has an A5 instruction sheet with less than 30 words and a photo.

Now for the important bit:

2.5 years on and my iBook is faultless - it has crashed once and it's not an underused boutique toy. I'm a permanent road warrior - no base, crew room or office. I run PPRuNe from this machine 24/7/365

I happily set the workload of this machine against any from the pool of IT experts and pros here on the forum - especially if they've bought it with their own after tax income and not on the company!!

The machine has only ever been shutdown for restarts demanded by software updates and one crash in August 2000 where Danny talked me through the restart. So is that clear? The iBook has been switched on for 2.5 years. It travels thrust in the bottom of a flight bag crushed into the corner of a Boeing. It administers this site day in and day out usually for 7 or 8 hours a day on wireless broadband.

75% of the crew I work with have bought one as a result because we are permanently crewed together and they just see it working every single day, year after year.

Regards
Rob

[Daysleeper]

I have the G4 powerbook, my mate the Ibook. both spend lives in the bottom of a flightcase. I can only repeat what Towers says with knobs on. Mac laptops rock.

[Rugz]

I would recommend the following one:

http://www.dabs.com/uk/channels/hard...quicklinx=2PR7

[Ausatco]

I'm Wintel myself - started that way and I have too much invested in Wintel software and hardware to change now.

I have an excellent "lapdesk". It doesn't pretend to be a lightweight laptop with 5hr+ battery life. But it is a full-featured, game playing, multimedia folding desktop replacement that you can take with you when you travel (and proon as necessary.) If you want to save space, have multimedia desktop functionality, committed to Wintel for whatever reason and don't care too much about the travelling aspects (weight, battery life) it's fabulous. And cheap.

Medion 5400 from Aldi!!! When I bought mine, about half to 2/3 the cost of equivalently specced other Wintel laptops.

They have a later one recently released in Oz, cheaper but not as good, IMO. Things may be different in the Northern Hemisphere with models, features, value for money.

But Towers, that is an awesome CV. If I was starting out you'd have convinced me and I likely would have travelled a different road ....

Cheers

AA

BTW, Towers, I note your replies in a couple of my threads where I detailed my travails - mostly due to my penchant for not-completely-informed fiddling. Now they're sorted, my system(s) are stable, so Wintel, especially with XP, is not so bad, IMO.

[peg20]

The Dell outlet currently have some fantastic deals. Until the end of the month they have several hundred pounds off.

Unfortunately, the news is out, and people are refreshing the page every few seconds to spot when the latest bargain appears. But you can get a very decent laptop for under £500 inc VAT if you shop hard enough. People I have spoken to are getting brand new units, although they could in theory send you a recon.

http://www.dell.co.uk/outlet

[BEagle]

I have a Dell Latitude X200. It's great - one BIG plus is that the basic laptop doesn't have a CD/DVD drive or FD drive, so you can use it on an airline flight without any problems. The drives are actually housed in an external 'media bay' the same size and weight as the computer - so when you need it, just click the 2 together (the laptop sits firmly on top of the Media Base)! Takes about 1 second!

Now that the X200 is being replaced by the X300, Dell's site is offering £500 off the X200 for the next couple of days. If I were you, I'd leap at the chance!

Go for the Media Base with DVD/CD-RW and FDD, it comes with an integral 802.11b wireless card anyway, but you might want extra memory and a spare battery (they last about 2 hours without charging).

It's a vastly superior product to my old Latitude LT - and the 800 MHz Intel Pentium III processor is fast enough for me to run WinXP Pro and Broadband Internet at 576 Kbps with no problems.

Actually I'd choose an X200 over an X300 given the choice - it's slightly smaller, has 2 USB connectors on the computer and another 2 on the mediabase, plus the mediabase holds both a DVD/CD-RW drive and a FDD. Whereas the X300 has a faster processor, but only 1 USB port on the computer (which is a pain if you're using a printer and want to transfer data to a USB memory stick), the mediabase only holds 1 drive system - although it does house a small subwoofer and allows you to charge another battery which the X200's doesn't.

[Guern]

Thanks for all the advice much appreciated.

[Basil]

PPRuNe Towers,
Does the G4 have a PC emulation mode for running PC only software such as TaxCalc or connecting to PC only PDAs such as the Sony CLIE PEG-UX50?

With thanks,
Bas

[redsnail]

Basil,
It does. If you get Microsoft Office Professional (word, excel etc) it also comes with the emulation software bundled in.
You can buy it stand alone. I think it's about 80 quid or so.

[Basil]

Many thanks.
Will have to have an extended play with younger son's G4 (which I know SFA about) and come to a decision.

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Basil,

Why "emulate" when you get a PC and run the real thing?

The Athlon64 Notebooks run circles around any Apple Product and is a fraction of the cost.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. I did not see your post on the second page before I posted.

[Basil]

Thanks once again for advice.
Always intended to drive down and say hello whilst on an Orlando trip but, unfortunately, at present, company problems have put an end to these little jollies

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Basil,

Now you have an excuse to come back to Florida.

Take Care,

Richard

P.S. Well maybe two excuses if you want me to hook you up with one of those Athlon64 Notebooks.