[Carnage]

My laptop is finally about to give up the ghost (and be put out of its misery by me chucking it out the window) so its time to get a new one.

Now I know fuck all about processors, GB's etc. Can anyone tell me the what basic specs I should be looking for? I play a lot of music and watch a fair amount of online movies. Plus it would get used for work and needs to be quick whipping through spreadsheets and photoshop/indesign applications. Oh and No macs, PC only plus decent internal wi-fi.

Any recommendations would be cool too, but they need to be pretty generic brands that I can get here and not something too UKcentric.

Thanks as always........

[GCW]

Budget?

[Carnage]

Hard to say - As a conversion it would be about 800 quid but it doesn't really work that way as the equivalent in dollars here ($1600) gets you a lot more than 800 quid in the UK would, apparently.

[slackline]

You'd probably do well to get a dual processor, this means that you have one CPU chip (Computer Processing Unit) that does the processing, but it actually holds two processors.  This means you can do twice the amount of "work".  There are also mobile quad cores, but obviously they're more expensive.  In general the more Ghz the faster it works, but the more expensive it is.  Intel tend to be the better performance ones at the high-end these days.

If you play a lot of music and watch lots of movies from HD, then you'll want a decent size hard-drive.  Most laptops you can get at least 200Gb HD, if not more, although this often comes with a trade-off on size (and my estimate may be well off).

RAM (Random Access Memory) is the stuff that holds the data you're currently using in memory (e.g. the image that you're manipulating; the bit of the mp3 that your listening too; etc.).  Simple rule of thumb is the more the better, you'll have a more responsive system overall.  Unless I can convince you to try linux then you'll probably end up with Vista (or perhaps a downgrade to XP), so I'd recommend a minimum of 2Gb.  Make sure something falled the "front-side bus" has a high rating, as this is the speed with which data is passed too and from the motherboard, which also should have a similarly high rating.  The faster data gets transferred the better, there is RAM that does this around 1024Mhz these days, but that will be expensive.

As for wireless, I can't really comment, although I've an Intel-chip wireless network card built into my old laptop and it works fine.  Most are fairly standard, but don't be sold on any that are rated 'n' since that particular standard (which is faster than the older 'g', which in turn superceded 'b') hasn't been standardised yet by IEEE.

You'll likely benefit from a dedicated graphics card too.  As with the processor the faster the better, and ditto with the amount of RAM.  Most are based on nVidia or ATI and will work fine.

Will likely come with CD/DVD-RW as standard, but you may want to opt for Blu-ray (now that its "won").

One thing to think about also is size.  Its all very well having a great laptop but if its the size of a breezeblock its not so portable (although you could just view it as training lugging it around).

All of this balances against how much you want to spend of course.  Don't really have any great recommendations I'm afraid, but hope thats useful in some vague sense.

[GCW]

It's a tad tricky to advise accurately because things are indubitably different over there.  But I'll try...

You don't sound like you need a top of the range LapTop (notebook etc).  You need to strike a balance between top end and price.  The best kit is alway scostly, but the next best is often a lot cheaper and not far off the pace.  If you have a lot of tunes, hard drive space may be at a premium.  Most decent dual core processors should do you for music and online videos.  If you were to edit vids etc a Quad core may be better, but again at cost.

So, 800 squids.  Over here you'd get a reasonable set up.  Around the 500 quid mark you should get a 1.66 or above core 2 duo (not dual core) processor, 2GB of RAM, 250gig HDD, DVD rewriter.  This is your aim.  Other things you will get will vary the price, such as screen size/ widescreen, bundled software etc  I've had a couple of Toshibas which were solid, but I believe Acer do some good kit.

Shop around.  But first decide what you need and what you desire.  Mmmmmm, quad core.......




..... Or there's always a Mac  

[Carnage]

Nice one! Thanks chaps - That all makes sense and I'll be going on the hunt on the Weekend.

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

If your not going for a Mac, the next best thing...

Voodoo Envy 133

Possibly a tad more spenny than £800  but you know you want one!

[Control freak]

Hey stu - Ive got something you might be interested in at your budget.

Drop me a line and I'll fill you in. Hope the shoulders getting better!

[Carnage]

Thanks mate but I'm going to Good Guys as theres a no spendy for 2 years deal on at the mo - I don't have any real cash at the moment.

[Carnage]

So I went shopping last nite and ended up with one of these:

http://explore.toshiba.com/laptops/satellite/A300

And (after taking on board the advice given) the specs are:

2GB Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor (FSBUS 800Mhz)
2GB RAM (which I gonna upgrade to 4)
200gig HD (I've got a 250 external anyway)
15.4 widescreen monitor
256k nVidia Graphics card.
CD/DVD Rewriter

Seem to be doing the job pretty well so far and I do like the fingerprint log-on 

Cheers again.

[GCW]

Sounds good.  Nice that you got 800meg RAM. 

Why do you want 4GB of RAM by the way?  Are you running shitty old Vista?

[Obi-Wan is lost...]

Yeah I was going to ask that, I think we may have mentioned this before, you won't notice much difference between 2gig and 4gig, as only around 3gig will get used.

Lots of info about this issue here http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm

I'm just about starting to grasp why 

[slackline]

I'm just about starting to grasp why 

A great case for using GNU/Linux , which has no problems with allocating any amount of contiguous RAM to a given application (providing your kernel is correctly configured!)

I think the problems are reduced using Vista over XP (which had problems with > 2Gb RAM, you'd generally find that any one app maxed out around 1Gb or so), mainly because there are more 64-bit processors around and a 64-bit versions of Vista that address this.  Don't have the time to dig out all the boring references on it all though.

[Drew]

core 2 duo (not dual core) processor

Can I ask... what?

[GCW]

Intel Dual Core Processors are just launched striped down version of Core 2 Duos.  They've pretty much gone now anyway.

[Drew]

Ok, so was that a suggestion? I thought it meant the Core 2 Duo IS not a Dual Core processor.

[GCW]

Sorry.  I meant get the Core 2 Duo in preference to the Dual Core.  Obviously they are both dual core (better than the D which isn't truns hot), but the Dual Cores were built for a cheaper market, and are now being phased out.