On Wednesday 19 April 2006 09:51, PenguinPuPPy wrote: > Hello list. > Can anybody please help me with my decision to purchase > a Notebook. After reading the previous messages i am a bit puzzled .I > was planning to go for Dell Inspiron duo core Laptop which comes for > a fair price i.e 799$ regarding these Duo Cores How are the CPU's any > reviews or personal experience? i have seen various websites giving > good reviews but it would be great if some one who has used it can > guide me though. Also that gees without saying that these laptops > should be LINUX compatable.Any help will be appreciated. > Thanks
I own a Dell Inspiron. I can vouch for their quality. Its excellent build. Their support is good and it actually works. Once I asked their support engineer for some info and I he "bluffed". I hate people bluffing technical specs so I rated them low when I got an email for my feedback. In about 2 days time I received a call from their Bangalore office asking me why I had rated them low. The guy not only provided me the specs that I had asked for but also took down a detailed complaint of my problem. As for the performance of Core Duos. Well there is only one word for them ROCKING!!! They kick the hell out of any other Mobile processor in the market. AMD is nowhere near beating the Core Duo ( sorry AMD fans ). The Core Duo runs much _much_ cooler than any processor in the Intel family ( > Pentium 3 ). I think at max load it requires 125W, about 4 Watts more than a single core Pentium-m. It also has cool new features like deeper sleep states reducing power requirements even further and it beats Intel's own top of the line desktop processors P4EE 965. Imagine a mobile processor beating a desktop? :O It also almost beats the AMD64 4800+ X2 ( running at 2.4GHz if I am not mistaken ) while running at only 1.83GHz. So I guess Intel too knows how to play the "performance" game. It gives better performance per clock than the AMD ones. But the core duo is known to be weak in multimedia but that wont be a problem if you use binaries optimized for SSE3 which it supports ( you are going to run Linux after all, aren't you? ). Linux compatibility? Well dude, you gotta understand that however good the distro is, some hardware may always give you some problems. Some of them might be fixable while others may not be. I recommend that you get tech specs of 2-3 books that you want to buy and google for them. Dont just get the model numbers of the books as Dell has a bad habit to give different hardware under the same model number in different parts of the world. Get the revision numbers as well if possible. Also go in for a book which gives you Intel PRO 2200 wifi cards and not Dell's own wifi cards. I am a Fedora guy but I highly recommend installing Gentoo on this baby if you are positively getting one :D. One question, where are you buying this book? In India or outside? $799 sounds an awfully good deal even in Indian rupees :) -- Dinesh A. Joshi -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
