New laptop advice

bluesynight wrote: MikeEnRegalia wrote: ~$1000 notebook which comes with Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and NVidia/AMD graphics chip. Of course if you're into games which also come out on consoles the way to go would be console + cheaper notebook. actually my friend got a nice DELL a week ago, yes you can buy  one for 1000$ and play games, but we checked allot of laptops in this price area, and i can tell you that if you buy one with a nice video cards its mean that it would be heavier, and the battery dies really fast, and i mean REALLY fast.  console, not a bad idea. deepens on your taste, personally i love only RPG's and quests, so i dont like consoles.

Well I'll certainly be getting Neverwinter Nights 2, as I'm also an RPG fan.  I know it's not supposedly amazing, but I like a lot of the fan mode modules on Neverwinter Nights, so I'm hoping there's some goodies.  Plus it's 3.5e rules, without the addition of made-up Bioware feats.

Anyhow, I don't know what spec it is, but I know they said that it's been designed with SLI in mind, so it's not that behind the times.

I'm the same with consoles.  RPGs are better on PC and I know a lot of people seem to play RPGs on laptops, for some strange reason.

As I said though, apart from the first NWN and NVM 2, I don't know what other games I'll be playing, except maybe Oblivion.


Edited by James - May 01 2008 at 15:20

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ~$1000 notebook which comes with Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 GB RAM and NVidia/AMD graphics chip. Of course if you're into games which also come out on consoles the way to go would be console + cheaper notebook.

actually my friend got a nice DELL a week ago, yes you can buy  one for 1000$ and play games, but we checked allot of laptops in this price area, and i can tell you that if you buy one with a nice video cards its mean that it would be heavier, and the battery dies really fast, and i mean REALLY fast.

 console, not a bad idea. deepens on your taste, personally i love only RPG's and quests, so i dont like consoles.

It's going to have plenty of RAM in it as well.  I get the best of both worlds that way.

Guys, I'm not buying a machine for gaming!

There's a few games I may play on it, but they're not that graphics intensive, it's just that I cannot play them on my current machine and the ones I can, are slow.

Most of the time I'll be doing Internet related stuff and I always have a lot of tabs open in Firefox, plus a Genealogy program (with 10000+ records on it) and sometimes even some PDF files and Spreadsheets, so it's all about the multitasking for me.  Currently, it's often a chore to have lots of stuff open simultaneously.

I also may - at a future date - decide to dabble with music on it, so a relatively high-spec machine will last me hopefully a few years, unlike a cheaper and lower spec, which may last a year, or even less.  I just don't want to have to buy another laptop within two years.  The sort of things I'll be doing on it hopefully won't mean I'll need an upgrade any time soon.

..it's all academic anyway - he's already bought it.

Edited by darqDean - May 01 2008 at 09:36

Time for my usual mantra on the subject.

Get a Mac!

James wrote: You're potentially a lifesaver!  These look much better.  Thanks! I'm just hoping XP and SATA will work together, I'm sure they will.  I'm still worried about a high specification machine like this running XP without issues.... I don't know if nVidia even do drivers for XP in that range, I guess they do, otherwise Dell wouldn't be offering it. I have a lot of choices too... hmm, a better graphics card would be nice, just in case I ever do decide to buy graphics intensive games

Of course XP works on new (SATA) laptops ... the only potential problem is that if you need to re-install you're going to need a floppy disk with the SATA drivers which sucks because modern computers don't have floppy disk drives. There are ways though to modify the XP installation CD ROM so that it contains the drivers.

About graphics intense games on laptops: It is possible, but of course the graphics card can't be upgraded so the time frame during which you can play new games is more limited than with a normal computer.

James is gunna get THE DELL... FROM HELL MWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHA

Bluesaga wrote: I'd recommend Fisher Price, their laptops are very cheap and really powerful!  Plus you don't support the Windows regime this way, and you'll be the coolest kid in the UK.

If I can put Linux on it I'm all over this. 

Well mine's older than that... I have got an Athlon though, a K7 1 GHz with only 392k RAM.

My graphics card though, although it's only PCI (not AGP or PCI Express) (which is one of the reasons I could do with a new machine) has 256 Mb RAM, so in that regard, it's quite healthy, although it's an old card now.

HDD space is where I'm let down and moving and re-installing isn't really what I want to do.  True, I have to do it on my laptop, but it'll be a fresh install and all the unnecessary crap (especially Win2k only installs) will not be required, so it should initially run quite smoothly.

Even my current favourite computer game, Neverwinter Nights, struggles on this 1 GHz. (ideally it needs 1 .3 GHz. with the expansions as a minimum) and some Genealogy Software I've tried uses all my processor speed (it uses Java) and therefore slows my computer down to a halt.  This poor machine isn't very well.  The screensaver slows things down, AVG slows things down and when I put a Music CD on, if I'm using Firefox, it also makes my Music slowdown and sound peculiar.

It means I'll also be able to use the XP version of WinAMP (my MP3 player of choice).


Edited by James - April 23 2008 at 21:32