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Laptop recommendations...

Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 3:31 pm
by His Royal Majesty King V
All,

I'm considering getting a laptop for my wife....

She'll need it really for office-type work. Gaming capability, while nice, is a bottom-of-the-list priority.

So I was looking, and I know the Centrinos are supposed to be very good in terms of minimizing power consumption . . at least on the CPU side of things.

However, do I go with something fairly modern? Or would getting something a bit dated be useful? As long as it can run a web browser, office suite, and similar software, that'll cover my wife's needs. The only thing is that it has to be a Windows-based system due to the software she's required to use.

I'm figuring on getting the slowest, or at least lowest-power consuming CPU I can get, because frankly, even 1GHz is overkill.

Lots of RAM would be nice just to avoid the slowdowns and power use of the hard drive thrashing about.

DVD/CD reader is all that's needed, a burner's not necessary.

Do the modern Centrinos consume less power than say the P-III laptops of yore?

Just looking for some thoughts/ideas.

Posted: Thu Feb 24, 2005 1:44 pm
by Wiggy
Second hand laptops are a totally overpriced. Rediculously so. Plus you'd have to budget in for a new battery. (if you intend to move it around)

You could get a new cheapie Sempron (or whatever they're calling 'em), but they are noisey and run hot, no matter what sort of clever power saving stuff they use. Sit it on your lap, and you'll be shooting blanks in no time. I used to have a 2400+ and it was bloody awful.

My Acer Centrino is absolutely fantastic. You can bearly hear the fans at all, and I am a noise freak! You can sit it on your lap and not even feel that it is on. I can't recommend them enough. Intel has (finally) played a blinder.

Trust me, go for a cheap Centrino.

Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2005 8:01 am
by His Royal Majesty King V
Thanks Wiggy! The heat and fan noise thing would definitely be an issue!

Having browsed a bit looking at laptops, I have to ask now... Do the "Pentium M" and the "Celeron M" both fall under the Centrino name, with the extremely low power consumption and heat production? Or is it just the Pentium M?

EDIT: Ah . . I should do a bit of research on occasion . . apparently, the answer is "Mostly yes."

Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2005 5:36 am
by Wiggy
My, my. Terribly sorry about the lack of reply. :oops:

You may or may not be interested to know that you can now get desktop Mobos for Pentium-Ms.

A modern K6+...???? 8)