Phead128

XPS M1330 are now cheaper than ever. I got it when it first came out. $3000 laptop, saved $1000 via discounts. $2000 for an extremely powerful, extremely lightweight and portable laptop.

The key to any laptop is weight. It is equally as important as sufficient specs. Laptops are essential because you have to carry it every from her to there and to class. Weight is crucial, you will find that out soon.

patrook

What would you guys say about this laptop here:

Gateway Computers: Retail - Product Details for Gateway® ML6731

efx2k3

id say its a good entry level laptop. ram, HDD, OS, DVD and wireless are mostly all on par with todays standards. the processor, although dual core is under 2ghz which i dont see much today. the screen also is a standard aspect ratio (not widescreen) good res though. my biggest qualm against this, like phead mentioned, is that size is important. make sure that you are willing to tote this around.

for the price, its a great entry level laptop. check this review out on cnet. they usually make good recommendations. if i was buying a new laptop for college and having it for a while, id spent at least 200 more and get something a bit more powerful.

AVR9052

I know next to nothing about computers, so could someone tell me whether I should get a laptop with AMD Turion or Celeron processor? What's the difference between the two?

Thanks

OldOldMan

My opinion is that Rule 1 of purchasing a computer of any sort is do not buy anything with either an Intel CELERON or an AMD SEMPRON. Both are designed to be used on the lowest cost, entry level computers. In very general terms they less than full processors. The chip will based on the full model but have certain features disabled (cache, math processing,etc -it varies by model). It is a good way for the chip mfg to use chips that don't pass quality control checks that would enable them to be full TURIONs or CORE DUOs.
AMDs generally sell at a bit of a discount to their processing capabilities due to market perceptions of inferiority. Both AMD and Intel have numerous chips that compete directly against each other at different price points.
The most currently available CORE DUOs would be T9300 (?), though the T8100 is more common and affordable, the minimum I would consider purchasing would be T2600 (an older model).
The AMDs TL-60 & TL-58 are the more common more recent chips in mainstream laptops. I do not know enough to venture what a suitable slightly older AMD would still be acceptable.

996GT2

In response to OldOldMan's post:

I would not recommend the purchase of an AMD Turion/Turion X2 equipped laptop UNLESS price is an extremely major concern. At the same clock speeds, Turion X2 CPUs perform much worse than equivalent Core 2 Duo CPUs AND get worse battery life. This is because the Turion X2 is built on the aging AMD K8 architecture (which dates back to ~2003), while the Core 2 Duo uses Intel's new Merom/Penryn Core architecture with smaller wafer sizes, much larger integrated L2 caches, and more efficient execution pipelines. Even if price is a concern, I would recommend purchasing a laptop that uses Intel's Pentium Dual Core processor, since the Pentium DC has all the benefits of the Core 2 Duo architecture with a smaller L2 cache to reduce costs (Despite the Pentium name, the Pentium DC actually has little in common with the inefficient, power hungry Pentium 4 series of processors).

The Turion X2s literally get slaughtered in every single benchmark against the Core 2 Duos:
Benchmark Results - Tom's Hardware : Dual Core Notebook CPUs Explored

The perception of AMD chips being inferior was completely untrue during the Pentium 4 era (AMD's CPUs were more efficient and faster during that time), but now that very perception actually holds a great deal of truth. AMD can't compete with Intel in any area except price; on the desktop side, even their high-end Athlon/Phenom chips are greatly outperformed by the cheapest Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quads, and on the mobile side their aging Turion/Sempron chips cannot keep up with Intel's Core 2 Duos. I built my own desktop around an AMD Athlon X2 3 years ago. Back then, it was a pretty high end system...now the X2 processor in it is outperformed by even entry-level Dells with Core 2 Duo processors.


Regarding which Core 2 Duo to pick:
The T9300 is actually one of the higher-end Core 2 Duos and is not available in most budget to midrange systems except as an upgrade. It's not worth the price premium over a T8100 or T8400 (the one I would currently recommend for its high clock speed and decent cache), since it often costs $150 more as an upgrade and only provides a 5-10% performance boost over a T8300. Getting additional memory, discrete graphics unit, bigger battery, or a larger/faster hard drive would all be more worthwhile upgrades than getting a T9300 over a T8100/8300.

The T9xxx and T8xxx Core 2 Duos are based on Intel's new 45nm Penryn architecture, which is more efficient and gets slightly better battery life than the older T7xxx and T5xxx (which use the 65nm Merom core). I would not recommend getting a T2600 or the like, since those are the original (Yohah core) Core Duos that are already beginning to become outdated.

Hope that clears some things up for those currently shopping for a laptop...

patrook

Interesting...

Would you suggest waiting for the Centrino 2 chipsets this summer? Or would the Core 2 Duos be almost the same?

996GT2

Centrino 2 comes out in early June from all of the major makers, and the new Montevina chipset that accompanies the platform adds several minor performance tweaks and features (for example, WIMAX support, DDR3 support, SSE4.1 support, and faster FSB speeds). The updated Penryn processors will get a speed boost as well, ranging from 2.26 to 3.06 GHz, and will consume less power in the process (29w TDP vs 34w TDP of current generation Penryn).

What this means in overall terms is that laptops using the Centrino 2 platform will perform 5-10% better and get about 5-10% better battery life than similar Santa-Rosa (the current Centrino platform) laptops. Whether this additional performance and battery life is worth the price difference is up to you. If you want the latest and greatest, then go for Montevina. If price is a concern, you can save money by getting a slightly older Santa Rosa laptop. If the latter is the case, I would suggest that you wait until after Centrino 2 is released to buy because the current models will become outdated and command very low prices at the outlet stores of each manufacturer (even though they don't perform much worse).

Ninth

I'm one of the few insane students who personally built a massive PC just for the sake of college. My doctrine is that laptops will never be as powerful as desktops, especially for price, and I'd be better off investing in building a high end pc and a very cheap laptop, the laptop only for being able to work mobilly, the desktop for anything else.

As per the proc discussion, time to get technical.

I would actually support celeron for being perfect, but only in a very slim area, namely, fileservers and hosting main/sub hubs. Otherwise, Intell makes wonderful core2duos. I would never really support a quad, especially in a laptop, merely due to the fact that very few applications will actually use one, and if yours do, you probably know it already and know to ignore what I'm saying here.

If you're looking into laptops, my advice would be the EEEpc.

I can't say enough things about that machine, it is, in my eyes, beautiful. If you have any more specific questions, I'll try and answer them as best I can, computer building is something I've done as a hobby for quite a bit now.


Oh, and the OS debate... -sigh- My new box runs gentoo and XP, both 64 bit, but my secondary box is a pure mac machine. I wouldn't reccomend Wine to anyone who wants to do anything like gaming, or especially hardware reliant applications, it's... awkward, and oftentimes innefectual. I would however reccomend to NEVER go vista, and if you're looking into linux, Kubuntu is a good starting point. Other than that, it's basically your choice, you can always partition your drive after the fact to install another OS, linux and mac both play very nicely with windows but sadly not the other way around.