Need advice on buying a laptop.

[Frank]

Hello !

I am also interested in buyin a laptop. It will be a first for me, so I really don't know what to buy. I do know the following. It should not exceed 1000-1200 EUR + 20% VAT, I am an architect, I will use it for small designs and text editing, small amount of coding, and I will use it at home mostly, sitting in my armchair while me and my wife watch TV.

So. I was thinking of a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo, with Turion processor, 1 GB RAM, some decent VGA with unshared memory, preferably 128 Mb. I am using ArchiCad, it has a built in OpenGL based real time renderer; I have good experience with a desktop Radeon 9600 XT, so I do not need a professional or a very powerful card. The screen should be 1200 x 800, I do not need higher resolution 'cos my eyes are not that good anymore.
So I pretty much know what I need performance wise, but I am uncertain about the brand, and extra options, extensions, connectivity and so on.

Look at these. I have one (a 259IA1), and they are great. They are sold under many different brands like Fuijtsu Siemens (not Uniwill, that's just the manufacturer), and you can generally pick and choose the model you want. Next to IBM and ASUS, they have the lowest number of complaints and problems as far as I have seen.

As only a few brands make their own laptops nowadays, you probably buy one "repackaged", from a manufacturer like Uniwill in most cases. And I think they have the best ones at the moment.

As most of those brands buy laptops from different manufacturers, you really should look who made it, as there is a huge differnce in quality from the different manufacturers.

 

[KimB]

If she's not using the laptop for gaming, then I'd say definitely go for the Turion with integrated video. The extra memory will help more, and it will also likely have longer battery life.

 

[Zaphod]

Look at these. I have one (a 259IA1), and they are great.

Several smaller system integrators/whitebook builders around here are using the upgraded model of that one (259EN). It has a really neat faeture in that it has both a discrete Go6600 and the i915GM chipset. Good graphics performance with the nVidia and amazing battery life for it's class with the IGP. Unique, as far as I know. Most seem very happy with the price/performance ratio.

 

[Hubert]

Thanks to all. This IGP/extended thing sounds very good !

 

[.Melchiah.]

The search for a laptop reached its end yesterday, when I found the Acer Aspire 5024WLMi for her. It has AMD Turion 64 ML-34 (1.8GHz, 1MB L2 cache), 1024MB of memory, ATI X700 128MB and it cost only 70 euros more than the one with Turion ML-32 (with 512kb L2 cache) and ATI X200 with 128MB shared memory. =)

I just ran few benchmarks on her laptop and it scored better than my old 9700 Pro coupled with AMD XP2800+:
3DMark01 - 15740 (my desktop: 14492)
3DMark03 - 5746 (and mine: 5062)

I still got a couple of questions though... when I defragmented the laptop I noticed the file system is FAT32 instead of NTFS. Is this a usual thing with laptops, or should I format it and change it to NTFS?
Which brings me to the defragment program itself. I've used Diskeeper 9 Standard Edition myself, but when I tried to find it for her laptop, I noticed the 9th version is nowhere to be found and the 10th isn't free. So, is there a free defragment program with a scheduler, that any of you could recommend?

There's one (or two) more question... Apparently the laptop uses ATI's motherboard (ATI RS480M and SB400 chipset), so can I just uninstall the preinstalled ATI videocard drivers like I do with my desktop, and install the mobile version of Catalyst 6.2 in its place, without losing the motherboard drivers in the process?

And if I update the AMD processor driver, should I first unistall the older one? The same goes for the onboard audio drivers.

Anyway, thanks a lot for all the help! =D

 

[KimB]

I still got a couple of questions though... when I defragmented the laptop I noticed the file system is FAT32 instead of NTFS. Is this a usual thing with laptops, or should I format it and change it to NTFS?

How? FAT32's limited to something like 20GB's per partition...the only use I've found for it is to have a partition available to transfer files between Linux and Windows on a dual-boot machine....surely there's no reason for that here.

 

[.Melchiah.]

How? FAT32's limited to something like 20GB's per partition...the only use I've found for it is to have a partition available to transfer files between Linux and Windows on a dual-boot machine....surely there's no reason for that here.

It's a 100GB HDD, and it was partitioned to two ~45GB sections.

I noticed also that the defragment process takes a really long time compared to my dekstop, which is odd as there's not much stuff on her laptop yet. I dunno does it have something to do with the Windows defragment program, as I haven't used it for a long time.

So, do you think it should be changed to NTFS? I presume there's no other way to change it than to format the whole thing. :/

 

[KimB]

So, do you think it should be changed to NTFS? I presume there's no other way to change it than to format the whole thing. :/

Check the drive manager. I think you can convert an existing partition to NTFS. But it might be nice to just reformat and reinstall now, as you could reformat it as one NTFS partition to make everything easy in the long run.

 

[Frank]

How? FAT32's limited to something like 20GB's per partition...the only use I've found for it is to have a partition available to transfer files between Linux and Windows on a dual-boot machine....surely there's no reason for that here.

You can format any drive upwards to 2TB as FAT32. It's just that MS wants you to use NTFS instead (they never disclosed the structure of NTFS and they enforce the copyright and all on that format!) that they have limited formatting of drives with FAT32 to 32 GB. Just use fat32format, and they can be as big as you want them to be.

 

[Graham]

of the two laptops you mentioned, the first would by far be the better.

1gb of ram is very important in a laptop as the hdds are usually very slow (try and get a fast SATA drive if you can, or 7200rpm ide drive otherwise).

Also, the turion or centrino processors are the best bet as these are designed specifically for laptops. The celeron M isn't as bad as some have mentioned, it's simply a centrino without speedstep (so the battery won't last as long) and half the cache. So it's still actually not too bad.

as for video, the express chipset has an x300 embedded I THINK (not 100% sure) which would be fine for any of the work you mention.

my 2c.

Consider an upgrade to 2gb of ram as well (installed manually). This would require the laptop have 1x 1gb of ram, *not* 2x 512mb. Laptop makers will often put in the two 512s which is rediculous.