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What to buy? When to buy? Input would be appreciated.

I

imported_tsniff

Junior Member
Hey everyone,

Unfortunately I just have not had the time to read up on a lot of the laptops, laptop technology and so on. As a result I am at a loss as to what is a good choice to buy right now.

Basically I am looking into getting a new laptop. I do a lot of high end work with prgramming, graphics, video, etc. basically I do a bit of everyhting as a consultant. I am looking for a pretty decent powerhouse laptop with a minimum screen size of 15 that will handle all my processing needs. I use dual screens all the time so I prefer the larger screens aruond 17". Not a must though.

I prefer Windows Vista and I defintely would like a minimum of 2 gig mem. Most likely I will upgrade to 4 or so. A decent size hard drive is good but I have plenty of portable drives I use to store files. I am mobile all the time so my Verizon data card is in use all the time. A built in card would be great but I defintely don't need it as I can use the one I already have.

I don't do any gaming although it looks like system designed for gaming may be a good choice as they are designed to be powerhouses. Wondering if I should look into discrete due to the graphics I do. Sometimes I work with 3d but truly not alot.

Not much of a mac user so I prefer pc.

I understand the Core 2 Duo is the newest out but I was wondering if there is some kind of new tech coming soon. If fairly soon I can wait but if 8 months from now I can buy now and upgrade later if needed.

I'm looking to spend up to around $2200.

I've looked at the Thinkpad T61 and the Asus G Series. Any other suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
 
HP pavilion 9500 (17" screen) nicely equipped is well under your budget. My brother has one and loves it.
 
Since gaming isn't a priority you don't need a powerhouse GPU which will drain battery life unnecessarily. However, I'd go for the lowest discrete GPU available. Integrated will allocate your system RAM away from your processes, and it seems like you need all 2GB's you can get.

I'd spend my money in this order of importance: RAM > CPU > HDD (Speed) > Screen Resolution > GPU > etc.

HP DV9500 and Dell M1720 would be great models to configure if you want a 17'' laptop. Asus and Lenovo make some very nice 15.4'' models too. You should be able to get something suitable for far less than $2K
 
If you really need a powerhouse, Sager and Clevo make probably the most powerful laptops available. In their top end notebooks they use desktop CPU's so like Core 2 Extremes and Quad Cores. Might worth looking into if you need real power.
 
Furthermore, Sager and Clevo apparently make the laptops for a lot of different companies, so they know what they are about
 
Originally posted by: tsniff

I'm looking to spend up to around $2200.

I've looked at the Thinkpad T61 and the Asus G Series. Any other suggestion would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...

If I was you, I'd get a Metallic Black Dell XPS M1710... 😀
 
Thanks everyone... I am defintely gonna have to look into the Sager and Clevo laptops.

The more the power the better honestly for me. I might have to just up my budget to around $3000.

Anyone know of any benchmarks that compare mobile and desktop processors?

 
Originally posted by: tsniff
Anyone know of any benchmarks that compare mobile and desktop processors?
Click to expand...

Apples/Oranges...

There might be some comparisons, but I don't know if they would be of any use.

For instance, I usually run my lappy in 'balanced mode', so called. When I monitor my dual-core AMD processor, it's constantly switching back 'n forth from 1800MHz to 800MHz.

What kind of a comparison could you make to a 1800MHz desktop OC'ed to 2500MHz, or whatever?

Personally, the only thing I care about is temps/battery life - and once again, there is NO comparison to desktops... 😉
 
Well you wouldn't run a benchmark comparison test in balanced mode anyhow.

And you don't run OC'd processors against non-OC'd processors when you are trying to find the true performance difference.
 
Well obviously the desktop cpu's are going to be more powerful, so you have that right there. It all just comes down to how much power do you want vs portability. I'm pretty sure that all the laptops with desktop CPUs weigh in at 12+ pounds, so they aren't exactly the most portable, but as far as pure power goes they will be the fastest and also leave the option open for CPU upgrades in the future.

www.notebookreview.com will probably have more answers on their site (as they have many, many ,many through laptop reviews), and in their message boards.
 
It isn't really apples and oranges like Vin said... think about it, there are standardized tests that can be run to determine how a system handles certain tasks.

So you get yourself a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo notebook, and a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo desktop, preferably with the same amount of RAM, and then you can go in and test hard drive read/writes, how fast it handles computations, how long it takes to rip a movie, to copy a CD, all kinds of stuff.

You can even test the graphics capability, you can take notebooks with say... 7950GTXs SLI'd as compared to the same thing on a desktop... see the difference there as well. The drawback is just the simple difficulty in accumulating all these systems, and 1 companies 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo notebook with 2GB of RAM and 8600m GT may have the graphics card clocked slightly differently than another company... or they are running custom BIOSes or who knows what. It makes it difficult to test, but not impossible, and by no means, apples and oranges. Now, effectively comparing the old PPC Apple laptops (or desktops) to the Intel/AMD systems of those times was pretty close to apples/oranges just due to the OS differences and the inherent architecture differences between the processors.
 
Originally posted by: TheStu
It isn't really apples and oranges like Vin said... think about it, there are standardized tests that can be run to determine how a system handles certain tasks.

So you get yourself a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo notebook, and a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo desktop, preferably with the same amount of RAM, and then you can go in and test hard drive read/writes, how fast it handles computations, how long it takes to rip a movie, to copy a CD, all kinds of stuff.

You can even test the graphics capability, you can take notebooks with say... 7950GTXs SLI'd as compared to the same thing on a desktop... see the difference there as well. The drawback is just the simple difficulty in accumulating all these systems, and 1 companies 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo notebook with 2GB of RAM and 8600m GT may have the graphics card clocked slightly differently than another company... or they are running custom BIOSes or who knows what. It makes it difficult to test, but not impossible, and by no means, apples and oranges. Now, effectively comparing the old PPC Apple laptops (or desktops) to the Intel/AMD systems of those times was pretty close to apples/oranges just due to the OS differences and the inherent architecture differences between the processors.
Click to expand...

Well it could be somewhat easy to compare. You just have to know what to look for. Say you have a slew of laptops all based off the same Clevo barebone model, but all made by different manufacturers. Inherently you would think that all manu would use the same parts, but you never know.

Sooo to answer the benchmark question, someone could effectively compare two different notebooks using the same specs, but as far as an OVERALL comparison it would be really daunting because there would be so many variables. I hope this makes sense, because it makes sense in my head. It pays to be a statistician.

But I do remember a Toms Hardware article where they compared the latest AXP 1720 (I think) to the Alienware m9750. Although they were using different GPUs.
 
Originally posted by: tsniff
Well you wouldn't run a benchmark comparison test in balanced mode anyhow.

And you don't run OC'd processors against non-OC'd processors when you are trying to find the true performance difference.
Click to expand...

I see!

First you were too lazy to read up on lappys - now you're an expert... 😀

Tell 'us', which one is the best for you?
 
I see!

First you were too lazy to read up on lappys - now you're an expert... 😀

Tell 'us', which one is the best for you?
Click to expand...

Doesn't make me lazy just because I figured I would pick the brains of others. Duh... Just love people that like to try and insult. Feel bigger now do ya?

 
I realize that you are not an apple user, and you directly mentioned that, according to a recent PCWorld (I think it was PC World) article, the MacBook Pro is actually the best Vista laptop they tested. And although I am not fond of the idea of someone buying an Apple just to run Windows on it (seems like a violation of something) if it is considered the best machine....
 
Yes. A new mac will either have Leopard pre-installed, or you can install it yourself (it will take all of 30 minutes tops if it is a clean install) and it will have BootCamp. With bootcamp you can non-destructively partition your drive so you can have both OS X and Vista installed.

Then, you drop your Vista disk in, install it normally (DO NOT DELETE THE 250MB PARTITION!!!!) on the partition that you set aside. So if you break 50GB off of your 120GB hard drive, you install onto the 50GB partition. I apologize for the obviousness, but I had to help a guy troubleshoot his machine that he had forgone those steps and just installed Vista... he couldn't reinstall OS X.

Once Vista is installed, you put the Leopard disk into the drive to install the drivers, which are nice and self contained in their own unified installer, so they all get put on at once, no hunting required (nice!). Then, when you go to restart, you hold ALT to get the boot menu and you can choose either OS X or Windows.
 
Nice... I'll defintely look into it as I have always wanted to work with the Mac OS. But I'd defintely need an MS OS to work with clients so a dual boot would be perfect.

I'm also looking at building a custom powerhouse notebook. I configured a Quad core, 4 gig mem, custom system for around $3000. I was planning on buying a new laptop and building another desktop as well but I can build this powerhouse laptop to serve as both for about the same price.

I don't know anything about Mac OS but can it be installed on a normal PC?
 
Legally being the keyword but in theory can it be installed? By looking it doesn't seem like there is much difference between the parts in a MacBook pro than in a custom PC.

 
In theory, I can't talk about it, but I am sure if you were to turn to Google, answers could be found.
 
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