I've found the build quality of Dell laptops to be excellent too. If you look on their reconditioned site they also have some great bargains sometimes for machines that have the same warranty as new but for 20% or more less.stuartrayner wrote:I have little experience of laptops, although I am in the market for one now.
In my experience of Dell desktops, the build quality at least has always been very good. Also, the one time I needed to call their tech support line, I was impressed with the service. Thats just my experience though, so please dont just take my word for it. The Dell Vern mentioned does seem to strike a good compromise between performance and price.
Some laptop video cards can be swapped, but getting hold of alternative cards can be tricky (and expensive). You also have to be careful with power consumption as even a relatively minor card can push the relatively tight tolerances in a laptop too far. The same goes for CPUs, easier to replace, but exercise caution on power and more importantly heat. Hard drives are usually an easier proposition and a relatively simple swap (and drives are much more readily available). 7200 rpm laptop drives are now becoming common as are larger capacities, although laptop drives are quite a bit dearer that their desktop brothers. One thing to watch with 7200rpm drives is that they do run much hotter than 5400s and the ventillation for drives is often poor in laptops which can lead to poor lifetime for the drives in extreme cases.stuartrayner wrote:I have a few questions myself if I can be forgiven for hijacking the thread just a little....
1) Is there any upgradability to a laptop at all (apart from memory). The (semi-stripped) picture I saw seemed to suggest that NVidia GO cards can be swapped, SLI'd and/or upgraded at a later date. What about the processor and HD?
I don't have personal experience there, but my guess would be that one will probably balance the other out to some extent (faster clock will be preferable in some cases, more pipelines in others).stuartrayner wrote:2) Can anyone comment of the practicalities between an 8600 GO GS gfx card and an 8600 GO GT one? The GS has higher clock speeds, but the GT has twice the pipelines and a higher fill rate.
You can usually use generic drivers with a little research as most laptop manufacturers use standard parts, but it can be hard sometimes to find out what those parts are. For video drivers, have a look at http://www.laptopvideo2go.com which offers modded drivers to support "mobile" chipsets (the same drivers, but a modified installer to recognise the chipset). Most of the talk about "custom" drivers from the laptop manufacturers is nonsense, the modifications are usually just to add their own logo (especially for the machines with an nVidia or ATi card rather than integrated graphics). The aforementioned website lists a lot of appropriate drivers for laptop sound chips, network crads etc. too.stuartrayner wrote:3) Drivers & OS. It sounds as though some laptops require drivers from their manufacturer rather than, say, nvidia. Anyone know about this? Do you usually get the Vista setup CD (as opposed to one of these recovery CDs that are no good fir heavy duty surgery), as I would like to set up Vista / XP dual boot.
What OS CD you'll get depends a lot on who you buy from. Sometimes it will be a recovery disk, others a full OS CD. Either way, you can of course usually buy them without an OS and buy your own Vista. One word of caution with dual booting, don't forget you'll have relatively little drive space in a laptop so dual OS will chew up a lot of valuable storage capacity up.
Personally, I'm running Vista 64 bit on one desktop and one (Alienware) laptop and have had no compatability issues at all. Driver support for Vista 64 is lightyears better than it was for XP x64. Is it worth it? That is going to depend on what you want to use it for. If you are going to be manipulating large data sets and so are going to use large amounts of memory and / or access massive files on a regular basis, then yes. Otherwise, the benefits you'll see will be small to none, and indeed the OS will consume significantly more hard drive space as 64 bit executables are up to twice the size of their 32 bit counterparts.stuartrayner wrote:4) Vista 64 bit. Is it worth it, and are there many hardware/software compatability issues?
Thanks for any help.
For a desktop, the only drawback to Vista 64 is the additional storage, which won't matter so I tend to advise people to go 64 bit anyway as it doesn't cost you anything and might come in handy one day if you decide to get into video editing or something, but for a laptop, I probably wouldn't bother unless you plan on that type of activity, or go for one of the larger laptops with 2 hard drives.
Of course a lot of that is just my personal opinion, but I think it is only fair that people know that whatever laptop you buy from a bare bones base model, to a top of the line gaming laptop, your options for upgrades are much more limited, complex and expensive than a desktop.
Paul
