Laptop recommendation please.

For general stuff not particularly gaming.

Must be reliable, cheap (below �400), decent processor and RAM. Not bothered about fancy trendy kid extras on it. Non-widescreen would be an unlikely preference. Smaller the better too.

Ta. 

and i'm very satisfied with it, although the high age brings disadvantages like having only one usb1.0 slot :(

Keyboard is high quality with a good layout, small (12"), both trackpoint and touchpad, etc.

If it's your secondary computer mainly for carrying around, i'd always suggest smaller models over faster ones, unless you need the speed or good screens. 

and it came with external cd and floppy drives ;) 

Lenovo/IBM's Thinkpads are said to be amazing.

megaman: Doesn't it have a PCMCIA slot? I got an Dell D6x0 something and it only has one USB1.0 too. So I grabbed an PCMCIA card with 2 USB2 slots. It's very "fragile" though or it is the driver or Windows, transfers like to stall and I get some filesystem warnings (on my 8GB stick, 2GB one is fine I think).

And one (noname) card I got earlier froze the whole PC (from the hardware or low-level software side) when I put it in. Once I unplugged it, all was fine again... 

Lenovo/IBM's Thinkpads are said to be amazing.

They are indeed. I got to play with one for a few months while cleaning it for a business associate last year. Core 2 Duo model. While I didn't try gaming on it much, it did run Quake fine and I could edit half a gig PSD files without slow down...

They're fair spenny tho, model I had was retailing for over a grand when I looked. Depends how much disposable cash you've got and how much you value portability (they are very ickle and very light, especially for the power).

Using a Toshiba Satellite Pro now, which I'm very happy with. Runs everything except DX10 games fine and you can pick them up fairly cheap these days (altho I did combine xmas sales+recession to get mine cheap). Bit heavier/larger tho... 

ibm's are fine, too. that's why the quality of my dell surprised me so much. it's almost on par (and has more features).

if you can't spend so much money, get a used one and buy a replacement battery.

Spirit: hmmm, i had a card like that a few months ago, but it stood out of the chassis on the left (where the pcmcia slot is) -- i don't know how portable the laptop will be with something like that. Is your card smaller so that the slots are completely inside the chassis? 

Oh, it's perfect to leave a USB stick plugged in and accidentaly step on it... So, no, sadly not. It is also chunky and blocks the other PCMCIA slot (not that it matters for me). 

Yesterday my dad uncommented the lines with "hiddenmenu" and "timeout" in the menu.lst. And the next time he booted the machine the screenrez was too low. Doesn't that sound strange? What can be wrong with the machine? 

Just spent over 12 hours this rainy easter trying to install Win98SE on my 4coredula-sata2/E5200. No joy though... I think it's meant to be possible, but perhaps i have to remove the SATA drive (I've got win98 on an IDE drive) where Linux lives.

I tried hyperion drivers 500A and 522A, and 4-in-1 drivers 145 and 143 i think, as well as 81.85_forceware_win9x for my AGP GF6800. But whatever i do i can't get my dvd on ide2 recognised, and no agp either i think, as the card is reported as installed but wont go over 640x480/256colors.

It's not a bad board actually.... I guess i'll do a clean XP install, but i
miss those old games running natively. Ho humm.. 

It is a shame that VirtualBox has no Guest Additions for Windows 98. Wine might be a better choice. I just recently spent a whole day testing and doing a bug report, heh. 

in the BIOS. Had a problem with my freinds computer where we had to "enable Plug and Play devices on the PCIe"

Until we did the card would only allow us 640x480, 256 colours.

So I would go through the bios and look for some sort of PnP AGP option or something..... 

Thanks Ricky, will try that.

Spirit.. I used to play with virtualiszation... but none of them have hardware accelerated openGL/directx do they ?? 

Sadly not for Windows 98. But for Linux and Windows XP it works very well. Just tick the "Enable 3D Acceleration" in a machine's settings. 

 

 

Back on the laptop tip here. Am considering a few options, par example:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158888

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/158353

(Noted what nntt said about Toshiba)

Naturally I still have questions and confusion:

2gig ram minimum, more wouldn't hurt. 160 gb HDD is probably enough. Maybe it is worth me getting something cheaper with lower specs and adding ram?

Processor, I don't know what's better out of Intel / AMD, are they roughly comparable?

Graphics, this confuses me too, in the above examples the HP has a small GFX card, whilst the Toshiba has intergrated GFX with more memory assignable. Which is better?

Also, Vista, I've never heard anything good about this, although I've used it at a friend's house and it seems a bit inferior to XP in useability but not badly so. What problems are there with software and shizzle??

Etc etc.

Ta :) 

Looking at tech 5 months after I bought stuff makes me sad :(

The Toshiba is almost identical to mine. From experience, it's a nice machine, runs all my apps without slow down and lets me edit stupidly over-sized PSDs without any lag. Does suffer as a gaming machine (altho not sure if you want a laptop you can game on). While it runs recent games fairly well (runs source engine stuff fine, been playing Demigod a lot on it recently without a hitch), it'll struggle with top end stuff (and sometimes flat out refuse to run (see DoW2)) as well as the occaisional old game that doesn't support it's API properly.


The HP model is easily better spec'd. Likewise, don't know how the Intel vs AMD chips stack up, but certainly for mobile gaming and ting it'll do better, not sure what HP's build quality is like, I imagine it's not terrible (and you're unlikely to take your laptop to a field for several days or have it sat on top of vibrating things ;) but mebe someone else has experience with them.


As for Vista, dunno about the HP, but the Toshibas come with an XP Pro disc since while they are contractually obliged to install Vista, they are well aware it's shite... 

Note, a lot of my points there relate to the different graphic chips more than anything. The Intel GMA just isn't a gaming chip (altho the 4500X does at least manage to cope most of the time, the older versions tended to fall over sideways a lot more). 

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_6920G_Gemstone_Blue_Laptop_LX.APQ0X.657/version.asp?PID=

Horrid brand, nice price + features :) 

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_6530G_Laptop_LX.AUS0X.213/version.asp?PID= 

NNTT, that's the bizzle I'm on about.

Not bothered about gaming that much. Editing large PSDs n shizzle, yeah. Reliablity and stuff very important too.

Interesting point about Toshiba supplying XP, that could be handy. But I don't know how bad Vista actually is...

Ricky: Too expensive. �400 max, and I've got to include an optical mouse with that too. 

Those are hawt.

Spenny tho (not for what you get I'll admit, but for 'a laptop' as it were) 

I would go for a standard sized laptop if you can afford one because then you could by a better GPU at a later date if you so wished.

TBH the GMA 4500HD chipset isnt too bad. I got one to play Quake Live but on high settings it was 10-20 fps and on low settings it was a stuttery 30-40.

Heh - reminds me of my freind recently, ended up spending �600 on a new PC box. He came to me saying "what can you find me for �400" I said to him it was false economy because he might as well pay an extra �200 (�600 is still pretty cheap for a gaming PC) and he would have something which was a lot more futureproof and he would get a lot more use out of.

But yeah - your basically stumped. I would recommend Intel centrino/Core 2 Duo processors. And your not going to get anything much better than a Intel GMA chipset for that money, but they are OK for internet and old games. To a degree.

Don't you think that getting a blu-ray and full gaming capabilities for an extra �150 is worth it? 

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/FO_-_Asus_F6V-3P087C_Laptop_-_GRADE_B_-_Minor_Cosmetic_Damage_42672-1%5CF6V-3/version.asp?PID=

Heres a good site for checking out your mobile chipsets with benchmarking: (I have found the benchmarks for the GPU in the afforementioned link)

http://www.notebookcheck.net/ATI-Mobility-Radeon-HD-3470.9594.0.html 

Don't you think that getting a blu-ray and full gaming capabilities for an extra �190 is worth it?

No. It's not intended for gaming (I'll update my home one for that) and I have no interest in blu ray, I don't know what it is.

I'd rather spend, say �400 getting a decent laptop, and �400 at some point updating my PC to run modern games well, rather than �600 on a laptop that will do games "okay" but still not be good enough for modern games.

The Asus looks quite nice, I was attracted to smaller laptops but now I'm not so sure. I could be tempted if there was a good value 14.4" though.

What about Asus / Acer as brands, though??