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OtonVM
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 3:45 pm    Post subject: [BOUGHT] Advice on buying a laptop Reply with quote

Sooo a new school year has started today for us medicine students and this year (the seccond) is gonna be like hell at least until march.... but also later... :cry: And I'm required to buy a laptop this year. It's nowhere written but you can read it between the lines... :roll:

Any suggestions? I'm posting here because I'm going to run gentoo on it anyway so I'd like to hear about peoples experiences with different hardware, most of all wireless cards, pcmcia and company, display, graphics card, cpu power usage, etc. What certanly works, what to avoid, stuff like that. I'll start looking myself and post back.

Oh, and if someone bought a new laptop this or last year in the range of 1200-1500€ (1500-1900$) with a reasonably new cpu (no need for dual core, but 64bit is welcome) and 1GB ram, preferably in italy (I'll have to buy it there...), would you be so kind to provide a link so I could consider it too?

Thanks in advance to all kind souls that will take their time to reply!


Last edited by OtonVM on Thu Oct 19, 2006 12:12 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Maedhros
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 4:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It's not really advice, but you might be able to check any options you come up with against this thread: How Many Fully Working Gentoo Notebooks....
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

you definitely cant go wrong with mac .. ;)
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OtonVM
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Maedhros: wow thank you for that, very helpfull indeed.

playahater: hehe. I know that, but macbooks are overpriced. ok it's a mac, but look at this:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/italystore.woa/6724043/wo/Mw25tiU2fYC53okhLNA1YUPOnlY/4.?p=0

compared to this:
http://configure2.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=it&cs=itdhs1&l=it&oc=n10947&rbc=n10947&s=dhs&sbc=itdhsrsinspn_9400_1

I hope you can see what I see... Both should be costumized pcs before buying them... If you can't see them (if it's just a cookie in my browser) than I can give you a screenshot.

EDIT: sorry for the italian... But I guess you can understand the basic info. If not, post back and I can translate stuff...
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 5:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I would go with a laptop that has everything on Intel in it. My bro bought one and everything just works under Gentoo (mostly due to Intel actively supporting foss drivers for most of their stuff).
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OtonVM
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

boniek: yeah I think that would be best.

I'm currently playing around with the dell page. Is there any other company that allows you to costumize a laptop before buying it? Anyway, the problem is, that I can't really go under 1200€, otherwise that difference get's wasted. But I also don't need a gaming system, I need that to study, it has to be fast and stable. 100GB sata disk, as much ram as possible. And I see that dualcore cpu are allready a standard...

EDIT: forgot: what is the difference between Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7200 and the T7400?? the price jumps for almost 300€ with the seccond one...
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OtonVM wrote:
Maedhros: wow thank you for that, very helpfull indeed.

playahater: hehe. I know that, but macbooks are overpriced. ok it's a mac, but look at this:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/italystore.woa/6724043/wo/Mw25tiU2fYC53okhLNA1YUPOnlY/4.?p=0

compared to this:
http://configure2.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=it&cs=itdhs1&l=it&oc=n10947&rbc=n10947&s=dhs&sbc=itdhsrsinspn_9400_1

I hope you can see what I see... Both should be costumized pcs before buying them... If you can't see them (if it's just a cookie in my browser) than I can give you a screenshot.

EDIT: sorry for the italian... But I guess you can understand the basic info. If not, post back and I can translate stuff...


yeah .. sure .. but .. when i bought a mac ... I could buy a BEAST of x86 or an ibookG3 .. and i`m not sorry for buying, in that time "slower" laptop .. it`s still working as hell .. :)

macs have better monitors, they are more quiet than any x86 .. and have less hardware failures .. and all that for couple of hundred bucks more ..
you buy and you don`t think .. :)
on the other hand .. unfortunately, money `s on the first place .. i know that .. sad fact .. :( ..

in the past .. ibm`s laptops were damn good .. but today .. i don`t know .. you can try with dell .. as far as I know, there were no broken ones near me .. but that`s not a standard ..

Good Luck .. :)

Cheers
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OtonVM
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

playahater wrote:
OtonVM wrote:
Maedhros: wow thank you for that, very helpfull indeed.

playahater: hehe. I know that, but macbooks are overpriced. ok it's a mac, but look at this:
http://store.apple.com/Apple/WebObjects/italystore.woa/6724043/wo/Mw25tiU2fYC53okhLNA1YUPOnlY/4.?p=0

compared to this:
http://configure2.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?b=&c=it&cs=itdhs1&l=it&oc=n10947&rbc=n10947&s=dhs&sbc=itdhsrsinspn_9400_1

I hope you can see what I see... Both should be costumized pcs before buying them... If you can't see them (if it's just a cookie in my browser) than I can give you a screenshot.

EDIT: sorry for the italian... But I guess you can understand the basic info. If not, post back and I can translate stuff...


yeah .. sure .. but .. when i bought a mac ... I could buy a BEAST of x86 or an ibookG3 .. and i`m not sorry for buying, in that time "slower" laptop .. it`s still working as hell .. :)

macs have better monitors, they are more quiet than any x86 .. and have less hardware failures .. and all that for couple of hundred bucks more ..
you buy and you don`t think .. :)
on the other hand .. unfortunately, money `s on the first place .. i know that .. sad fact .. :( ..

in the past .. ibm`s laptops were damn good .. but today .. i don`t know .. you can try with dell .. as far as I know, there were no broken ones near me .. but that`s not a standard ..

Good Luck .. :)

Cheers


Yeah I know. I always wanted a mac, however money is a problem. I guess if I weren't forced to buy a laptop now i would have waited untill the next gen of mac get's out and I would buy the ones out now.
I also count on installing mac os x (wich my proffs all use, so their docs don't even open on pcs) in the intel pc. I was succesfull with my current pc, but I prefer linux. :)
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 6:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OtonVM wrote:

Yeah I know. I always wanted a mac, however money is a problem. I guess if I weren't forced to buy a laptop now i would have waited untill the next gen of mac get's out and I would buy the ones out now.
I also count on installing mac os x (wich my proffs all use, so their docs don't even open on pcs) in the intel pc. I was succesfull with my current pc, but I prefer linux. :)


there is no sweeter and better thing than running a gentoo on a Mac .. :twisted: .. OSX is OK .. but gentoo is .. 8)
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PostPosted: Mon Oct 02, 2006 9:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ok, long research, but it seems that dell and acer have the best proposals and best support for linux.

I think I'll try to find the:
Aspire 5673WLMi
Intel® Core™ Duo T2400 (1.8 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB), Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition, 15.4”WXGA Acer CrystalBrite, ATI Mobility™ Radeon® 1600 HyperMemory™ 512MB, RAM 2GB (2 x 1024MB), HDD 120GB SATA, DVD Super Multi, wireless, Bluetooth, IEEE 1394, Memory Card Reader, Works

and

Inspiron 6400
costumized with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7200 (2.0 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB), Schermo 15.4" Wide Screen UltraSharp™ WSXGA+ (1680x1050) con TrueLife™,256MB ATI® MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400, PCI-Express x16, 2048MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2x1024) other stuff as a normal 6400.

The Dell seems stronger in the cpu and looking at tests, this cpu performed quite well. I don't know any of the screens, though... Can anyone illuminate me on those? I've seen a crystalbrite 17˝ and it looked allright. Dells are praised however. Oh, and have you heard/seen about batteries exploding? Those were dell's...

Btw, almost forgot... how's ati support lately in linux? I was quite dissapointed some years ago, but now ati supports aigxl and has new drivers and stuff... I'm generally a nvidia supporter, but if the drivers are good... I'm not buying this for playing games, but working. But even when working I can have some water effects on my screen, right? :)
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 1:53 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Definitely don't get a Mac. I have owned 2 and they were both terrible machines that broke often. (I had 2 because the first one broke so many times they gave me a complete new one... which broke.)

Thinkpads are great machines and have always worked very well with Linux, although I don't really think you will have many problems with most machines these days. One thing you may want to make sure of is linux support for the wireless card in the machine. Having a machine that plays well will solve a lot of wireless headaches.

Also, my personal laptop right now if from a company named Linux Certified, which ships laptops with Linux pre-installed on it. You can also get it without any OS, which was wat I did and put Gentoo on it. I have been pretty happy with it, and it has been running great for about 1 year.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 7:13 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

OtonVM wrote:
Ok, long research, but it seems that dell and acer have the best proposals and best support for linux.

I think I'll try to find the:
Aspire 5673WLMi
Intel® Core™ Duo T2400 (1.8 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB), Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition, 15.4”WXGA Acer CrystalBrite, ATI Mobility™ Radeon® 1600 HyperMemory™ 512MB, RAM 2GB (2 x 1024MB), HDD 120GB SATA, DVD Super Multi, wireless, Bluetooth, IEEE 1394, Memory Card Reader, Works

and

Inspiron 6400
costumized with Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7200 (2.0 GHz, 4 MB L2 cache, 667 MHz FSB), Schermo 15.4" Wide Screen UltraSharp™ WSXGA+ (1680x1050) con TrueLife™,256MB ATI® MOBILITY™ RADEON® X1400, PCI-Express x16, 2048MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2x1024) other stuff as a normal 6400.

The Dell seems stronger in the cpu and looking at tests, this cpu performed quite well. I don't know any of the screens, though... Can anyone illuminate me on those? I've seen a crystalbrite 17˝ and it looked allright. Dells are praised however. Oh, and have you heard/seen about batteries exploding? Those were dell's...

Btw, almost forgot... how's ati support lately in linux? I was quite dissapointed some years ago, but now ati supports aigxl and has new drivers and stuff... I'm generally a nvidia supporter, but if the drivers are good... I'm not buying this for playing games, but working. But even when working I can have some water effects on my screen, right? :)

I would definitely not go with an ati if you plan on running Gentoo on it. That said, I'd go with the Dell.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 11:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

boniek wrote:
I would go with a laptop that has everything on Intel in it.

For the largest part, I completely agree. I've had nothing but good experiences with their Linux drivers. I would advise the original poster to, if he's not planning on doing 'serious gaming', seriously consider the option of getting a laptop with an Intel i810 based card in it. Mine has a 945GM and its support is excellent. I'm currently running vanilla compiz (via AIGLX), which runs flawless, and doesn't require any funky 'hacks' to do so.

There is however one important exeption: the hellish spawn of Satan that is ipw3945, and especially the ipw3945 daemon. Requiring the presence of a proprietary 'regulatory daemon' for the driver to even create device nodes has every potential to break udev coldplugging and subsequently net hotplugging in a horrible way. I'm still trying to get rid of the ipw3945d init script by trying to get udevtrigger to start the daemon, an enterprise which is severely hampered by the daemon's retarded behaviour with regard to leftover pid files.

It's a shame that one does not really have the option to not get an ipw3945-based card, as it's part of the Intel centrino duo package.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 1:18 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a toshiba and *love* it.

The monitor is as beutiful as any mac, the tech support rips that of apple apart, and the hardware quality is superb overall.

Also, they won't void your warantee for running an OS other than what they put on there.


There are three issues:
(1) Some Toshibas use a custome PCMCIA controller (ToPIC 100) - this can cause challanges with BSD and Linux - Linux handles it better, but it still gets confused
(2) Mine has a 3945 - I don't mind closed source drivers, if they are available, which they are in Linux, but not BSD, that's caused me some issues when I'm using BSD [irrelevant for most people here].
(3) Unlike apple, they will not pay for your shipping to a service center, however they do have many local service centers.

#1 is easily bypassed. Call tech support, ask them the PCMCIA controller; They'll give you the southbridge, you'll tell them it's usually a custom chip, then they'll try looking for it on the online PDF, then their books, then they'll grab a notebook and tell you what the windows device manager says. The last stage does work, believe it or not. Regardless, the fact that their tech support is competant enough to find that information impresses me greatly.

#2 You can easily get other chipsets on many models, I'm thinking of selling my current system to a friend and getting a tablet (and that reminds me, how does gentoo deal with tablets?)

#3 Ok, that's an annoyance, but if you go to an approved local repair shop, it's not a problem either.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 1:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I bought a HP in september. I'm quite satisfied with it. The cpu is a turion64. The graphic card which is an ATI X200 (I think) supports 3D. The video output works. I got 1024 MO of RAM and the hard drive has a capacity of 100GO.
I even got a remote control. It reproduces some keys of the keyboard. I will see if I can configure somewhere which key it has to reproduce. Could be fun when I watch a movie on TV :D
It has a good autonomy (3 hours) and it's not too noisy.
It cost me 745 euros.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 2:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

HPs start out nice, I just find they have shorter half-lives than other hardware around.
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 6:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

First thank you all for all your answers!

It looks like Dell or Acers are my only options. HP is too expensive. nico_calais, where did you buy that one?

Toshiba... Well, I know it has troubles with linux (and not the other way around... :) ). Most probably Gentoo will be my only system untill vista sp1 comes out, so I need working hardware. But also when I installed win on a satellite (for a friend) I had many problem with it. Not serious ones, but those that make you curse "and what nooow?? Oh, yeah...", you know? After that I'm not really fascinated with toshibas... And they are more expensive.

vonr: any ideas for a i810 laptop? :) Is it really that hard to get the wireless working?? What about the Acer? It's the Mobile Intel 945PM Express chipset.

tylerwylie: the everlasting ati-nvidia battle... :roll: :) But I know people who run gentoo on ati without problems... playing wow on wine, using cedega... Not to mention aiglx. Which is the only thing I need.
Do you people have any experince with ati on a laptop on gentoo?

Can somebody please explain the differences between Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor T7200 and Intel® Core™ Duo T2400? the cache is one, I can see that. I think that would make the core 2 duo much faster, but I'm no expert...

Thanks again!
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 6:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

the latter is essentially a dual core PentiumM, whereas the former is a souped up dual core PentiumM.

Assuming they are the same clock speed, you would probably get petter performance and lower power consumption from the Core2 Duo.


Of the two you listed, I'd get Acer.

As for "Toshiba having troubles with Linux", well, the operating systems are typically designed to work on hardware, hardware is very rarely designed to work with operating systems (although I admit, some of the nicer vendors are kind enough to grant us with drivers)
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 03, 2006 8:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OtonVM wrote:
vonr: any ideas for a i810 laptop? :) Is it really that hard to get the wireless working?? What about the Acer? It's the Mobile Intel 945PM Express chipset.

Don't worry, most of the time ipw3945 works. It just doesn't work the way I want it to damnit, because (insert trivial whining about semantics here). I just feel that using an initscript for launching a daemon such as this is a rather messy solution; besides, it breaks net hotplug on boot (at least in an aestetic manner). And it likes to spew useless nonsensical error messages my way.

Intel i810 based cards are usually found in 'budget' laptops, because integrated video is relatively cheap. It just happens to have good Linux support. As soon as you see something with the 'Mobile Intel' tagline for graphics, it's usually of the i810 family.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 12:18 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have a Dell Inspiron e1405, and I'm very happy with it. It's got: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00 GHz dual core, 667 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 cache, Merom), 2 x 1 GB, 533 MHz DDR2 RAM, 14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) TrueLife (glossy) LCD, 120 GB SATA hard drive, 8X DVD+/-RW optical drive, ipw3945 wireless, Dell bluetooth, 85 WHr (9-cell, about 8 hour) battery. It all works, as far as I've tried. You would probably want the e1505, which offers a 15.4" LCD with up to 1680x1050 resolution, and, more importantly, a discrete graphics card. (Check dell.com to see what it is--I don't remember.)

The build quality is decent, but not great. I like the LCD, although it gets dirty easily, and some people complain that it's hard to read. The resolution in particular is amazing.

The speed is awesome, especially when compared to a Pentium M. It's two to three times as fast as my older (broken) Pentium M 735 (1.7 GHz, 400 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2 cache, Dothan) with 512 MB of RAM, because of two things: first, the processor has a slightly faster clock, two cores instead of one, a ton of cache, and is simply more efficient, and second, it's got 2 GB of RAM, so (for example) the entire Portage tree can stay cached as emerge updates the cache after syncing (which takes probably 15 seconds) and esearch updates its index (which takes probably 30 or 45 seconds). CPU scaling works on the CPU--I use the conservative governor, and it can step between the speeds of 1.00, 1.33, 1.67, and 2.00 GHz. From what I've heard, the two cores can be set to independent speeds, but will physically run at the highest speed set. (So if you set one to 2.00 GHz and one to 1.33 GHz, they'll both run at 2.00 GHz.) This means you should probably use the same governor on both.

The hard drive is decent, but only 5400 RPM, so it's not very fast. Still, it's faster than my older 60 GB drive--it gets 4916.55 MB/s cached and 38.85 MB/s buffered, versus about 1 GB/s cached and 29 MB/s buffered on my old drive. The DVD drive works so far--just make sure you use the SATA driver instead of the IDE/ATAPI driver, and use the drive as /dev/sr0 instead of /dev/hdc. Otherwise you won't get DMA, and the entire system will crawl when burning CD's. I haven't tried burning DVD's yet.

The Intel graphics (which I doubt you'll want) are run-of-the-mill integrated graphics. The card requires 915resolution to get native resolution, and (to my delight) I discovered that, by building the VESA console driver as a module and running 915resolution before loading the module, I can get native 1440x900 resolution in the console! I haven't tried anything fancy like VGA or S-Video out, or desktop spanning.

The sound card works decently, although the drivers can be a little buggy. alsa-driver-1.0.13 works pretty well. The internal speakers are on the better end of laptop speakers, but they're still laptop speakers, and as such lack strong bass.

The touchpad is Synaptics (yay!) and supports multiple finger detection, so you can use multiple fingers to perform different clicks (left/middle/right). It does only have two mouse buttons, but the ChordMiddleButton feature in X makes that only a minor inconvenience.

The Ethernet works (use the b44 module) WiFi works most of the time (binary daemon sucks, but works most of the time; use ipw3945 module, in Portage), the Bluetooth works (use the hci_usb module).

The SD card reader works (I haven't tried it for Memory Sticks or xD cards, just an SD card... use the sdhci module).

I haven't tried the ExpressCard slot, but it should probably work.

Software Suspend 2 has worked until lately, and will probably work again once I debug it. It will most likely work for you.

I would strongly recommend the longer-life battery--it lasts an amazingly long length of time! Do note that the battery life on this machine depends more strongly on the usage profile than any system I've seen. With conservative settings, it gets almost 8 hours of battery. When being used full-speed, it gets about 2 hours. Mind you, 2 hours is 2 hours of 2 cores running at 2.00 GHz, so that's a lot of CPU horsepower. You can get away with lower CPU speeds on this box, since it's dual-core, and get more battery life. The temperature of the system is about 43 or 44 C when idle (I'm looking at gkrellm2 right now), and can run up to around 85 C when running full-throttle, or 90 C if the vents are somewhat obstructed. Using it on a flat, hard surface like a desk (instead of a bed or carpet, or a lap) can help it stay cool.

I've brain-dumped everything I can think of about this box, and I hope I included everything you wanted to know. I would strongly recommend it, if you don't mind the build quality. If you wait until it's 20% off, you can get a great deal. (Dell usually offers that at least once a month.) If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 12:50 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Holy linebreaks batman. Now, I'm not a natural dyslectic or anything, but formatting your post would perhaps make me able to read it.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 2:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

vonr wrote:
Holy linebreaks batman. Now, I'm not a natural dyslectic or anything, but formatting your post would perhaps make me able to read it.


Done.
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 2:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow ThinkingInBinary! Thank you for this essay! 8O It most probably answered most questions I would have come across once I bought the laptop... And most current ones. I would only ask you one more thing... can you please post cpuinfo cat output? That way I can finally see some real specs of this cpu. The laptop I configured Is basically what you have, with the screen you recommended and a better gpu. However, I can't buy form dell.com... The funny thing is how are system different from country to country. In Italy (where I first thought of buying) you can configure the laptop as you can see in my post, in my country (20km of distance) you can only get the intel 950...

jimstapleton: Thank you. I also found out that the core2duo are 64bit. Maybe today that's still kind of "new" but in 3 years that's gonna be a standard... I think I need that. Not because I need 64bit support now (I run gentoo x86 on amd64) but because I fear some applications might just drop 32bit alltogether... Especially in the ms world.
But why acer between the two? Is there a specific reason? Because I think I can get more from the dell...
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 3:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Code:
no need for dual core, but 64bit is welcome.


hah, if you want to save money, go the other way around. dualcore is really great, esp. under linux, and gentoo all the more, while 64bits has really no true interest as of now (like having >4Gb ram or breaking yr 2038 barrier). maybe in 3 years it'll be standard, but in 3 years, you'll certainly change your laptop.

that said, the core2 is certainly a great cpu. I run it in 32bit and it's blazing fast:
as example: genlop says:
Code:
Fri Sep 29 16:41:52 2006 >>> kde-base/kdelibs-3.5.4-r2
       merge time: 23 minutes and 7 seconds.
Wed Sep 27 02:31:34 2006 >>> app-office/openoffice-2.0.3
       merge time: 4 hours, 47 minutes and 36 seconds.

OOo would be twice less if it was using some makefile instead of a weird tcsh build script (this makes -j3 inefficient, and only one core is used. still, the score is good).

the asus w7j (my gf's) is a great laptop, dell m1210 (mine) too, if I put my suspending woes aside (search the forum) but it's certainly a stupid configuration overlook.
I had nothing but successes with linux and asus&dell laptops (5 in total).
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numerodix
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Joined: 18 Jul 2002
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 04, 2006 9:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ThinkingInBinary wrote:
I have a Dell Inspiron e1405, and I'm very happy with it. It's got: Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.00 GHz dual core, 667 MHz FSB, 4 MB L2 cache, Merom), 2 x 1 GB, 533 MHz DDR2 RAM, 14.1" WXGA+ (1440x900) TrueLife (glossy) LCD, 120 GB SATA hard drive, 8X DVD+/-RW optical drive, ipw3945 wireless, Dell bluetooth, 85 WHr (9-cell, about 8 hour) battery. It all works, as far as I've tried. You would probably want the e1505, which offers a 15.4" LCD with up to 1680x1050 resolution, and, more importantly, a discrete graphics card. (Check dell.com to see what it is--I don't remember.)


Quick question for you. I just ordered a Core Duo w/ 1GB ram a few days ago. And I know that going from Core Duo 1.73/1GB RAM to Core 2 Duo 2.0/2GB RAM is quite the added expense, easily €500 am I right? So why did you pick a model that didn't offer an ATI video card (€60-70 more expensive)? I mean since you were already spending that much..

Also, how long did it take them to deliver? :?
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