Help with choosing an affordable notebook. Configure my own?

[JCIL]

I'm looking at buying a notebook... Here are some necessities....

P4 with HTT, 1M on die cache
Intel chipset
7200rpm drive


Do you suggest a "configure your own"?

I've assemble many desktop PC's but this will be my first foray into notebooks. I think the Dell 5160 is close to meeting my needs but it can't be had with a 7200rpm drive. Is it possible to replace the factory drive with a 7200? If not, what about a "configure your own" notebook?

Thanks in advance

JCIL

 

[Commodus]

Don't get a Pentium 4 notebook if you're actually interested in travelling. It'll be thicker, hotter, and have shorter battery life than either a G4 (in an iBook/PowerBook) or Pentium M.

What do you intend to use the notebook for? If you're not going to be gaming, it's more important to get a thin-and-light than... well, anything with a Pentium 4 in it.

 

[ShellGuy]

Any lappy you buy now can be upgraded to a 7200 drive and like the guy above me said Y must you have a P4. If you must have intel go with a P-M with 2mb of L2.


Will G.

PS.. What will you be doing with it??

 

[JCIL]

I won't be traveling with it daily... I need a notebook at my hotel room which I stay in all weeklong and return home on weekends. I'll be using it for MS office apps/report generation, networking to 2 desktops at remote offices, the net, email, grabbing music off the net and burning to CD occassionally...

I've had company notebooks before and they seem so damn slow to me. I'm so use to a good desktop that I think a p4 notebook will be the only rig I'll be happy with.

 

[Commodus]

Remember that the Pentium M (at least at good clock speeds) isn't exactly slow. So long as the system has a decent amount of RAM (512 MB at a minimum to be comfortable), it'll do what you need it to quite well.

 

[Lord Evermore]

512MB is overkill even. I was deliberately trying to fill up the memory on my system with WinXP Pro, and even with Outlook 2000, two IE windows, AOL Instant Messenger, and Word open I could barely break 128MB used (it was not paging anything to disk). I ended up having to run Prime95.

Watch the pricing on that anyway, since you might be able to get a second memory module cheaper yourself than having it built in, and memory changes don't void warranties. I just got a PNY 256MB PC2700 module from Staples for 30 bucks after rebate. (Of course Dell is happy to give you free memory upgrades, so it doesn't matter much with them. Although it's strange that you have the option to get the memory free, or pay for it, in the customization options. )

Pentium-M is the best if you want battery life. I'd guess you're not terribly concerned with price given the desire for such an expensive hard drive, other than value for money. The PM is a bit more expensive but is worth it for the battery life and performance.

Surprisingly, a 7200RPM hard drive might not be a killer of battery life as one would expect. Hitachi's 7200RPM Travelstar uses slightly more power than a Seagate Momentus 5400.2 drive, but so do Toshiba's 4200RPM drives. The Hitachi is only very slightly more power hungry than the Toshiba in most cases. At any rate, consider what it would cost to get a laptop from Dell with the smallest drive possible, then to just swap in your own 7200RPM drive, compared to getting a system with the drive already integrated. I'm not sure how much customized laptops have the price gouged for hard drives; I'm sure if Dell had 7200 drive available, it'd be cheaper to buy it yourself separately.

 

[ShellGuy]

With Win XP 512mb is a safe number but it can't hurt to have more. The P=M chips rock out on the P4s esp with the larger L2. Go with somebody like PowerNotebooks or somebody...



Will G.

 

[Wuzup101]

Definitely go for the Pentium-M over the Pentium 4. The P-M is the best mobile chip on the market right now (great battery life). I'm an apple fan, and I'll only really recomend IBM thinkpads, fugi notebooks, and maybe some of the smaller off brands like sager and the like. I can't say I'm a fan of dell by any means. You might look into a powerbook, but none of them come with 7200rpm drives as of right now.

BTW, 512mb isn't overkill for XP, it's what I would recomend for the minimum that a new machine should come with. I'm not exactly sure what Lord Evermore is talking about, but I'm farly certain that windows XP uses more than 128mb itself without any other programs running. I know all my windows boxes are well over 128mb right after boot (though they do have a gig of ram). My guess is he was probably paging something and didnt' realized it. Either way I'll take my powerbook with a gig and a quarter of ram... I can have 20 things open at once with no significant performance hit...

 

[Commodus]

On the RAM subject, remember that having more RAM cuts down on hard disk access, which is often what chews into battery life the most. I suppose this would be more apparent on a Mac (the OS uses as much RAM as it can), but it happens regardless of platform.

 

[Lord Evermore]

No I'm not a moron. I was watching XP's task manager performance monitor, and there was no paging file usage beyond the norm (it is always using the same amount of page file space as the committed memory usage). Turning on Prime95 maxed out the committed memory to all the physical space that wasn't in use.

Right now, my desktop system is using 145MB with Internet Explorer using the most, at 18MB, and Explorer.exe at 16MB. The rest is services or other minor background apps. Of course I do have a GB total in this system for those rare occasions that I want to play a game. Even loading several apps up, I don't really go over the 256MB mark, and letting the system page some of the inactive crap to disk wouldn't hurt.

My company laptop that I just copied my personal laptop's image to is actually using a total of 73MB right now, with XP Pro, out of 256MB (nothing in particular running except F-Prot and some minor other things.) Even Outlook 2000 and Word 2000 both loaded at once only used up an extra 15MB at most.

256MB is enough to get by with, and isn't going to cause any problems, as long as you've optimized it, if you're just using it for basic tasks. Certainly running the default software load of an OEM machine is going to cause the system to lag no matter what, and XP's extra services are probably going to suck down several dozen MB of memory that could be put to better use. Getting 512MB is just a good hedging of your bets, but isn't an absolute necessity in most cases. If it's free, don't say no, but if not, look at what other components you might be able to upgrade for the money.

Incidentally, what's with people recommending Apple systems to someone looking for a PC laptop? Aside from the horrid price difference, how many people are going to just suddenly learn MacOS and all its applications?

 

[Wuzup101]

Chill man I didn't call you a moron, I don't think you're a moron, I just have never seen an XP system running with that little ram usage. Obviously optimizing the system can allow it to run on less memory, and win XP can easily run on 256mb for light office/browsing use. I'm just saying that if you're buying a NEW system, and you're going to be using it for more than surfing the internet, you should definitely consider 512mb of ram.

Incidentally, people are recomending apple laptops because the price difference isn't as much as you think (for a comparable system in both build quality and features). On another note one doesn't have to relearn applications on OSX (for the most part) because the most used PC apps are almost exactly the same on a mac. Asside from that, OSX is a far superior system to win XP, and it takes like a day to learn... so that's not really a problem...

 

[fbrdphreak]

For an inexpensive P-M notebook, I would look at the HP dv1000 series. You can custom order one with 256MB, 40GB, P-M 1.6 or 1.7, wifi, etc for around $1000. If this is gonna sit on a desk most of the time tho, the 14" screen might not fit your needs too well.
In that case, go to Best Buy and check out the Gateway series with the Athlon 64 in it. It is a very fast processor for the money, and IIRC the newest model comes with 1GB RAM, 60 or 80GB HDD, wifi, 15.4" screen, DVDRW?, etc for around $1200 on sale. :thumbsup: