[PLUG] Looking for new laptop vendor

[John Purser]

AthlonRob wrote:

>John Purser wrote:
>  
>
>>A couple of pieces of advice I received on components: Fast laptop
>>drives are expensive and you're not going to notice the difference for
>>most applications.
>>    
>>
>
>That's such a bad call.  :-)
>
>Hard drives are the biggest bottleneck in computers today.  Applications
>load faster, the system boots faster, if you swap out it becomes more
>responsive... all with a faster hard drive.  And believe me, going from
>a 4200RPM IBM drive to a 5400RPM Seagate drive in my laptop has given
>this little system new life.  It went from sluggish to snappy.
>
>Spend the money for the fast hard drive, you won't regret it.  They
>aren't generally very expensive, either.  This 60GB 5400RPM drive with
>8MB of cache (the 16MB cache Toshibas are also nice, but not as fast for
>some reason) was somewhere around $80 from Newegg.
>
>RAM and hard drive are the two most important components in a laptop for
>performance.  A sluggish hard drive will kill the whole system... and
>even the "fast" hard drives aren't as fast as their full-sized desktop
>counterparts.  So get yourself a lot of RAM to compensate.  I wouldn't
>even CONSIDER having less than 512MB, and wouldn't purchase a new laptop
>today for myself with less than a gigabyte of RAM in it.
>
>You'd find better general computing performance out of a laptop with the
>slowest MHz rating available, a gig of RAM, and the fastest hard drive
>available than you'd find with that same laptop with the fastest CPU,
>half a gig of RAM, and a medium-grade hard drive.
>
>Rob
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>
>  
>
Rob,

Thanks for the advice.  I had to go back and check my hole card.  Dell 
DOES make a VERY slow 4400 rpm drive for some models that I wouldn't 
consider.  The "slow" hard drive I ordered has a 5400 rpm as opposed to 
the more expensive 7200 rpm models.  I did notice they made a 100 gig 
7200 rpm drive I'd have been glad to pay for but because my account said 
"small business" instead of "personal" I couldn't see the inspiron 
models at all.  That was annoying.

Well, we'll see.  I did save a few bucks from the budget on this machine 
and was planning on getting a nice flat screen monitor when their prices 
drop.

Thanks for the advice.  If I think the machine is a dog I'll look at 
swapping that drive out first.  I got the gig of ram as well.

Have a good one.

John Purser