My hands-down always-recommend for laptops is the Dell Inspiron series. I have an Inspiron 8000 from a couple of years ago, and while it's getting dated (only 1ghz), it fills most of your conditions as is. The LCD is great! I like high resolution and the 1600x1200 is awesome, to me. The fonts are a bit on the small side for some people at that resolution and "standard" size fonts.
Other comments: Battery operation Horsepower and Long Battery Life are pretty much mutually exclusive. You can buy a second battery pack for the Inspirons that goes in place of the removable floppy drive. (When's the last time you used a floppy?) As it is, my I8K gets around 2.5 hours if I'm not spinning a CD/DVD or surfing the wireless network. (I use a 802.11b PCMCIA card). If I'm doing either or both, it goes down to around 1.5h. I think newer laptops with the new "mobile" versions of the processors are a little better in this regard. Also - bear in mind that most laptop designs are normally configured to run the CPU at a lower speed to preserve battery life, so you "depower" a little while on battery. Point being - you can consider trading battery life for more power and V/V. Wireless - most new 'tops have the built-in wireless chipsets now. Memory - don't pay the maker too much for extra memory - check Crucial.com and see what their matching memory goes for before splurging from the maker. Dell offers the 64MB DDR NVIDIAŽ GeForceT 4 4200 Go video option, that should suit your video needs. Hard drives - the price a goes up somewhat exponentially for larger drives, and battery life goes down a bit with the faster drives. I like using a 200G firewire drive at home for holding most of the stuff I wouldn't use away from home anyway. So balance your space needs against the quickly-rising extra 20 or 40G of drive space. I'm unfamiliar with the Fujitsu screen you mention, but the new Dell screen is apparently the "Bees Knees". Good luck and have fun! I'd bought mine while contracting for a company that essentially "dot-commed", and they were supposed to reimburse me, so I picked out what I felt was a solid machine for me and for a little bit of the future. It's been phenomonally great. No question about it in my mind, Dell Laptops are excellent. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Aerofoam" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "RCSE" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, October 17, 2003 4:21 PM Subject: [RCSE] Laptops? need advice from the nerds..... > OK guys I need advice from the super geeks.(I know there are a few of you out there) > It is time for a new laptop (or a desktop AND a laptop) for Aerofoam. > I have been looking, but haven't made any firm choices. > It must have: > P4 at least 2.4ghz. > 60 to 80gig HD. > Video inputs so I can use it in the field as a UAV monitor. > Good video performance for editing. > Good performance with flight simulators. > Good graphics processing. > onboard wireless would be nice. > Reasonable battery operation, 3 hours + would be good. > Nvidia video card with 64meg video ram for 3d CAD operations. > > I am still hacking away on a 380mhz Compaq so I am seriously deprived, > if you can think of other useful features, let me know. > I was very impressed with the LCD screen on the new Fujitsu, it even looks > good from way off to the side, I would like to get that type of screen on > whatever I end up with. I won't even consider a pc with a celeron processor > and also won't buy a Compaq or HP. > > Mark Mech > www.aerofoam.com > > > RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. > RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off.
