Hi List,
Looking at IBM laptops I see the following..for processors..
Intel p4 .. various speeds. celerion .. various speeds. centrino .. various speeds.
The centrino seem to be the slower one than the other two.
Do not mind price .. hardware .. trying to find what would be best in long run between the 3 processors.
Kindly some pointers and suggestions to IBM laptops .. please.
I will be crossing that bridge very soon.
Thanks
Johan; There's a lot of things to consider when buying a laptop. My personal preference is a laptop that can handle a normal P4, and NOT a P4M. While this means that it will use battery power faster, most of the time I'm using the laptop, I'm plugged in to AC power somewhere.
P4M's (Pentium 4 Mobile CPU's) are OK, but a standard P4 and laptop that uses Hyper-Threading will always outperform a P4M without question. Also, you should be able to upgrade the P4 as new ones come out, and P4's will always be less expensive than the P4M's.
One other thing about P4's. Some of the newer P4's also have onboard cache that is one MB, and not 512K. This makes a huge difference in how fast the laptop will run. All that extra performance will keep you happy with the laptop much longer than a Centrino or Celeron could ever hope to do.
Celeron CPU's are basically the same as a P4, but have a lot less cache onboard, and this is what makes them slower.
Centrino's aren't an actual CPU, but a collection of P4M, Intel Chipset, Intel graphics GPU, and wireless and/or Bluetooth technologies built-in. Once I knew they used the P4M, I never kept looking for more details so you might want to look into that a bit more.
I've set up or owned Toshiba, Compaq and Asus laptops. My problem is that my clients see whichever one I have and offer to buy them right there! The next one on my shopping list is the ECS G900 which can be viewed here;
http://www.ecsusa.com/products/g900.html
And that says it all.
I know ECS isn't always known for their quality, but I have to see how this one runs before passing judgement. I'm hoping that it will surprise me.
Since laptops are very expensive, most people don't buy new ones very often. My philosophy is to buy the fastest, most powerful one you can buy for the best price, so that your investment lasts a long time.
Remember that many laptops will have modems which aren't supported by Linux, and others can be a real pain to set up. If you manage to get a modem working, consider yourself very lucky!
If possible, try to find one that comes without an OS, so that you can do a fresh install and not have to worry about a Windows recovery CD set erasing your whole hard drive.
HTH
Cheers!
Lanman
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