Notebook Priorities: Non-Gaming/Wireless

[fb02521]

am purchasing a limited budget business notebook with a goal of best speed for the parts ordered that will be on a wireless Verizon mobile hookup. The use primarily is browsing with fairly complex multi-asking, frequent uploads and downloads, and crunching of larger files where we seek to avoid wasting time and want the notebook as snappy as possible for the parts we can afford. Budget is about $1200.00.

What occurs to me as a novice is that probably the limiting factor for us is the wireless connection, and that the other parts within reason are therefore largely irrelevant. Is this a correct observation?

for speed (wireless), should be build around an SSD drive, or go with a 7200rpm HD and optimize the other parts?

We're choosing among the following:

64bit Windows 7--is there a performance difference with 32bit--will 64 bit be compatible with our 32 bit machines? will 64bit slow down wireless?

Processor-always the sucker for the fastest one. Choice between I5-2540m and I7-2620m, which is the slowest I7 but doubles the cache.

Memory: will 4 gigs optimize handling 64bit windows. do u need more gigs?

Harddrive-- If SSD we need go with slower I5-2410m processor. Our Q--does the faster processor make difference in speed of wireless upload/download? Or will I5-2410m handle the wireless aspect as well as the I7?

any help appreciated. txs.!

 

[TheStu]

By wireless do you mean WiFi? The CPU and SSD will have little to do with your wireless speeds. Most all modern laptops will have Wireless-N these days which is about 270Mb/s speed. You will almost certainly never, ever see those speeds, especially over the internet since well... we don't get those kinds of broadband speeds in this country.

For a network transfer, unless you absolutely must do it wirelessly, gigabit ethernet is faster and more secure.

 

[fb02521]

my lack of knowledge a handicap--

we have Verizon wireless mobile broadband modem instead of WiFi or local network. this computer will travel.

my Q involves e.g. when u download a large video file will processor speed, SSD, memory, etc. affect download speed. Will an I3 Sandybridge download or upload wireless as fast as an I5, I7? Does HD or memory or 64 bit affect such a process?

 

[DaveSimmons]

No, unless you get a very slow processor (like a single-core Atom "Netbook") and are doing something else at the same time, the CPU does not matter for download speeds. None of hard drive, RAM or Windows version matter for upload or download speeds.

It's the "multi-tasking" and "crunching" that might benefit from a fast CPU, lots of RAM, fast hard drive or SSD. Please tell us more about what applications you are using.

 

[fb02521]

txs. for response. the applications are professional. uploading/downloading large files to court websites and a few others. and also horse racing live video streams; always a couple three or 4 programs and microsoft word open. anti-virus with scans.

here is a e.g. of what we'd seek to optimize in terms of speed and snappiness:

we are on one page of a Court website. We switch to the next. it takes on the wireless broadband 1.5 sec to switch pages. Would like to speed that up to 1 sec. e.g.
can this be affected by
processor speed
64bit or 32 bit windows
SSD
memory
or is this strictly a function of wireless download speed?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Then you might benefit from a quad-core processor instead of just dual-core. I'm not sure if there are mobile quad-core i5 / i7 "Sandy Bridge" CPUs available yet but they are a better choice than AMD.

It won't help with uploads or downloads, but it will help with decoding of the video streams after they download.

Do you have any sense of how much RAM the programs use together on your current system? That would tell you whether you need 4, 6 or 8 GB of RAM. For using more than 3.x GB of RAM you do need the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

How much disk space do you need? SSDs are fast but very expensive compared to a 7200 RPM hard drive. For a laptop unless you get a 17"+ that happens to allow for 2 hard drives you may need the regular hard drive to have enough space.

 

[fb02521]

we are stretching budget with $1200.00. sorry to have such a narrow Q of slight difference in snappy speed. in business its a .25 sec. delay repeated 100 times a day u try to avoid with faster system.

so choice is SSD or faster processor.

txs for reply and answering re 64 bit and memory. still wondering if there is decoding/processing slow down with wireless internet between 32 bit windows and 64 bit.

storage is non-issue for us. very little to store. still Q--in laptop, wireless broadband mobile--does the SSD decode/process incoming faster or would difference between I5-2410m and I7 bring the superior speed compared to SSD. from info posted so far, we're going with the I7 instead of SSD

 

[DaveSimmons]

The wireless download speed is the same for i3, i5, i7 CPUs, for SSD vs. hard drive, and for Windows 64-bit vs. 32-bit.

What might vary (by CPU not by Windows or hard drive) is video decoding speed _after_ the video data has been copied from the web. To see how much CPU is being stressed by this you should take one of the existing computers, load it up with the video streams, then CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up Task Manager and go to the Performance tab.

 

[fb02521]

after testing our Core duo E8400 desk top machine seems our processor use at max varies between 25 and 50%. thinking that since I-5 2410m is 1/3 faster than E8400 according to this:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
that even I-5 sandybridge can handle with aplomb anything we do. So, would tend to the SSD drive EXCEPT voila, if u birddog through the Levono and Dell websites, u finally get your quarry--I-7 2620m, 4gigs DDR3 + 128G SSd for our $1200. Previously just had the wrong model of the Dell Latitude. Unknown if the link will work, but cost is $1209.00 for the 3 parts.:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...latitude-e5420