Input on Notebooks

[Ranga Sreenivasan]

Hey Ranchers,
I need your inputs on the best notebooks out there (Price range $1300 - $1500). The Specs should be similar to the Dell Inspiron 8600:
Intel Centrino Technology 1.6GHz
512 MB RAM
DVD/CD Combo Drive (RW)
80G Hard Drive

Am not too particular about Intel Chips. AMD would work for me.
Thanks!

[Michael Ernest]

I'll be moving this to General Computing.

[stara szkapa]

I wouldn't take anything that has less them 1GB RAM, or doesn't have the upgrade capability to 1GM RAM.

[Adrian Yan]

1 GB of RAM on a labtop? What kind of apps do you run?

[stara szkapa]

WSAD

[Gregg Bolinger]

Originally posted by Adrian Yan:
1 GB of RAM on a labtop? What kind of apps do you run?

Any kind of Java development really requires this to be 100% proficient in my opinion. I am dying at 256MB

[Adrian Yan]

Most of laptop bottleneck is at its harddrive, not its RAM.

[David O'Meara]

The centrino is not a great chip. It's slower than the celeron, isn't it? Definitely less than a Pentium.
Yes, a laptop will typically bottleneck at the harddrive, but if this machine is designed to be a development machine, 512Mb of RAM as a single 512 stick is mandatory. (a single stick so you can add another one when you realise it isn't enough )

[Ashok Mash]

Originally posted by Adrian Yan:
Most of laptop bottleneck is at its harddrive, not its RAM.

I agree. I upgraded from 256MB to 640MB (128+512) on a P4 1.6 Dell Inspiron 8200, and it hasn't improved the performance much - I believe my 40GB harddisk at 4200 RPM (I guess) is taking ages to write and copy any large files. Look for a faster RPM harddirve when you shop for laptops.

[Ranga Sreenivasan]

Originally posted by David O'Meara:
The centrino is not a great chip. It's slower than the celeron, isn't it? Definitely less than a Pentium.

Thx for the suggestions.
I thought Centrino was specifically designed for laptops (mobile technology)
Has anyone heard of Averatec? :roll:

[Adrian Yan]

Actually, if your notebook says Centrino, then it's more than just the processor. Centrino is an actual platform from Intel. It's supposedly designed for wireless networking. In order for a notebook to have Centrino stamped on it, it has the Pentium-M process and the intel 855 chipset. It uses something called Intelligent energy saving, which allows longer battery life (obviously since it's design for wireless, if you need a power cord, that wouldn't be wireless ).

[Jeroen Wenting]

Centrino would have a core frequency lower than a Celeron but yield similar performance to a PIV with a higher frequency.
For example, a 1.4GHz Centrino could compete with a 2GHz (maybe 2.4) PIV (depending on other hardware in the config).
Another example that CPU speed alone doesn't mean a thing when measuring computer performance.