OT: I think I need a new Laptop.

I got this Dell Latitude D410 i'm on right now from the Dell Outlet, with 3 years on site warranty, 1.8mobile pentium centrino, 512ddr, no weight and a

MacBook Pro.

Dual boots Win XP.

Wait a while, get a MacBook (probably due to surface this month, maybe next Tuesday). Will dual boot XP and MacOS X.

Richard

He said decent laptop ;-)

Come back! You just recommended a Dell!

Nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't need to speak to the call centres :D

Buy a Toshiba. Job done.

Fraser

And cost 5 million quid and your first born child.

Fraser

Seconded.

However there's some cheap high spec Sony's around - email me if anyone needs more info... (tim at timkemp dot net)

I used to work in the Dell europe (subcontracted) repair centre fixing the laptops. Some of the chimps they hired from agencies would try to nail the laptop back together if the screw they had just drilled through the motherboard didn't hold the case on.

The guys in the call centres, no matter what their country or ethnic origin are a whole higher lifeform compared to the majority of the laptop repairs. You had to have diagnosed, disembled, repaired and re- assembled 10 laptops in an 8 hour shift. Bearing in mind that in some cases Diags would take half the shift, some took over an our to get apart and in other cases after waiting for 40 minutes for parts, after taking an hour to strip the laptop and test the failed part in the test rig, parts would come back and say that it was out of stock and would be a week. So it would go on the on hold shelf and not count to your completed tally for the day. Sometimes you got zero laptops fixed, and got a warning, even though you may have taken 15 apart.

Got to admit, I do like Tosh stuff, and Vaio has been great.

I have noticed some high end (2 gig plus Turion/4 gig plus Athlom=20 mobile) Fujitsu Siemens models with widescreen 15" panels and a gig of=20 ram for between =A36oo and =A3800. While it is overkill for diag stuff, I d= o=20 use my laptop for other stuff too, so it would make a semi desktop=20 replacement, and I could just patch up desktop with a clean up, some=20 more memory, and maybe the best AGP card I could find, and use it more=20 as a file server/ocassional gamer (plays NFS most wanted on low detail=20 settings). The best processor my old motherboard in the desktop will=20 take is a 2.7 Thorobred Athlon XP (not a 64 or an X2, just a base Athlon=20 XP)

--=20 Carl Robson Car PC Build starts again.

Which rock have you been living under? iBooks were way cheaper than most PC laptops of similar durability and specification (aside from the G4 CPU, which was only just comparable to the first Centrino platforms, and left behind very quickly). Do you think Apple are going to push the price of the iBook replacement significantly upwards?

Hell, even a MacBook Pro only costs £200-300 more than similar (and easily compared, now) laptops, and is rather better engineered - smaller, lighter and metal. Oh, and comes with rather a lot of software included.

Richard

Just as a matter of interest, how many buttons do/will X86=20 MacBook/iBooks have (thinking of XP) on the touch/mouse pad?

Will it have 802.11g? Will it hook up ok to my linksys access point? I have nothing against macs, although most specialist software that I=20 use is either windows based, or command line linux.

--=20 Carl Robson Car PC Build starts again.

I don't get the need for a fast laptop. A new £350 dell job does most stuff adequately, or spend less on a second hand one. Battery life is pretty good and it'll run all office apps and play videos and stuff. With the money you save you could then build a decent desktop pc using some of your old parts. An opteron 144 and socket 939 motherboard cost around £160, 1 gig of ram about £75, and a decent graphics card about £150 so you've got a laptop and games pc for under £800. You could also run mac os on both if you so desired.

James

The plan was to spend arround =A3600 on the desktop. That would last me arround 3-5 years before it became unusable (like my=20 current duron 1300, the dual 466 celeron before it, the AMD K6-2 and the=20 Cyrix 686 200+ before it (I won't go as far as the AMD X5 or the or the=20 Cyrix/IBM Bluelightning).

I build my PCs to last now. The old ones would have 1 year to 18months=20 lifespan, because processors still fitted the same sockets, as did ram.

Now it is pretty much all change. I would have about =A3600 to spend, that would get me either a replacement= =20 PC (rebuilt) or a replacement laptop. I won't have money for both, and I=20 won't compromise the lifespan of the laptop. A laptop need to last me 5-

--=20 Carl Robson Car PC Build starts again.

Probably not everybody's first choice but I'm on my second Acer laptop now (first one was a great little machine but even it couldn't cope with the missus spilling beer on it) and for the money the spec is fairly impressive. Recommended them to a few people as well and so far, no problems. Under 600 quid will get you a decent machine with 1GB of RAM, DVD burner and wireless LAN (no Bluetooth but a USB Bluetooth dongle is about a tenner).

An over clocked opteron is the fastest single processor system you can buy (my opty 144 is at 3ghz) but there are very few usages other than games/encoding were it's noticeably any better than my old 1ghz duron. In the past I've gone from a pentium 2 to a 1ghz duron, then a xp1700 @2.2ghz and my latest upgrade is the least noticeable in general use.

If you're wanting a laptop to last that long then you'll probably be better waiting for window vista to be released, either to ensure it'll run it or pick up an incompatible one cheap.

James

Was looking at Acer actuallly. I quite like the look of the Ferrari one with carbon casing. Shame about the horse badge, wonder if I can swap it for a Skoda one. :)

NeedforSwede2 waffled thus:

You replaced your missus? With a laptop?