More about Laptops

[Anonymous]

Am trying to reduce my footprint again - moving to a smaller place and needing to get down to a laptop and my big Samsung 23.1" LCD. Currently have a nice Sony 16.1" screen GRT-170- P4 2.8 and all and saw one of the newer IBM fast Centrino units at ACU West. Since there seems to be a dearth of info about Centrinos using AC, can anyone comment on the differences??

Dell has a workstation laptop that seems quite good ----BUT VERY expensive for my budget. It is a Centrino with a 7200 RPM hard drive. Amazing..Will be needing the info fairly soon.

Lew Bishop Architect
Soon to slow down

[Link]

I have been contemplating a new laptop and have been looking at the HP7000 and again at Sagers.

I like the affordability, weight, screen ratio & drop me warranty of the HP, but for pure power, you still can't beat the Sager 8790. If money wasn't a problem (yeah right), this is what they will happily cram into a Sager 8790 for you:

17" WSXGA+ Active Matrix LCD
Pentium® 4 3.4 GHz EXTREME Edition 800 FSB **2MB L3 Cache** (desktop - not mobility)
2048MB 400DDR RAM
**TWO** On board Hardware Raid 60 Gigabyte (7200 RPM) hard drives
**256Mb** ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 Graphics Card
4X DVD+R/-R/RW/CD-RW Combo Drive
Integrated V.90 56K Fax/Modem
10/100/*1000* Mbps Ethernet
Internal 802.11g TURBO (108Mbps) Wirless card
Internal Bluetooth
Infrared
Internal 7-in-1 Card Reader
Integrated Digital Video Camera
Integrated TV Tuner option w/ Remote/Digital Video Camera
Full Size Keyboard
USB Port: 3 USB 2.0 Ports
IEEE-1394 Port: 1 IEEE-1394 Port (6 PIN)
PC Card Slots: 2 Type II or 1 Type III
Other Ports: 1 S/PDIF out & microphone in / Center & subwoofer speaker out, 1 Headphone / Front L/R Speaker out, 1 Line in / Rear L/R Speaker out, 1 infrared, DVI out port, 1 parallel, 1 Serial, 1 PS/2, 1 S-Video-Out, 1 S-Video-In, 1 RJ-45, 1 RJ-11

Sure a laptop with these specs will come close to $4.5K and will weigh close to 11lb, but these guys are definitely leading the way in the power stakes.

www.pctorque.com

Just gotta start saving!

Cheers,
Link.

[Jefferson]

Issues have arisen with the HP ZD7000 series laptops that should be considered. SOME units when making memory intensive moves in Photoshop will [DO] crash as in "lights out", no power, the whole computer shuts down. Until this is resolved I would shy away from these, if it weren't too late............

[Anonymous]

http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index17.html

worth considering

[Jefferson]

Bill, first, bitchin' avatar!

Second I love those things but no seperate builtin numeric keypad really put me off, just the way I work.

[Anonymous]

jeff, cheers

powerbooks have an 'embedded' numeric keypad but, yes, they're a pain in the a** for entering numerical data

bill

[Anonymous]

http://www.ajp.co.uk/?show=wide_info&id=D870P

does anybody heard about this? is it good for Archicad 8.1?

[Aaron Bourgoin]

The debate rages at the moment as to whether or not a Pentium 4 chipset and motherboard is better than an AMD box for ArchiCAD.

The pc your looking at is certainly at the high end of the Pentium side.

Being on the verge of buying one myself, I guess this is the last question to be answered. And I really still don't know.

The laptop you're looking at is a chassis made by a company called Clevo and sold by a growing number of custom computer manufacturers. They also make an Athlon 64 box as well.

The prices vary widely as different vendors put very high tech gear into them and tweak the registry for maximum gaming performance. Originally called desktop replacements (they weigh 10 pounds), they are now marketed to college kids whose game hardware requirements exceed the computational power required to do anything in the curriculum.

Other vendors include:

Voodoo
Alienware
Hypersonic
Sager
Eurocom
Falcon NW

You might want to "configure" a few and check out consumer reviews for customer service ratings on the vendors before you decide on one.

If you're in no hurry you might wait for the motherboards on these machines to adopt PCI-Express versions. That way you should see even more improved video perfomance.

The vendors all have configure your own style websites and there is more information on http://notebookforums.com/index.php?

[Aaron Bourgoin]

PCTorque, a Sager reseller have just posted specs on their forthcoming Pentium/PCI-Express machine, the 9860.

see: http://pctorque.com/news.php

The promise these hold is the ability to upgrade the video component and to choose between ATI and nVidia based cards.

Eurocom have a similar box described in their "Future" department and both are announcing ship dates at the beginning of next month.

see: http://www.eurocom.com/

Vapor? Maybe not.

[JCovarrubias]

bill wrote:
jeff, cheers

powerbooks have an 'embedded' numeric keypad but, yes, they're a pain in the a** for entering numerical data

bill

inexpensive solutions
http://www.xpcgear.com/17keypad.html

http://www.adesso.us/product_details.asp?dept_id=107&pf_id=KA33IKP18

[Aaron Bourgoin]

I've come across a modestly priced laptop that might be of interest. I went out to buy a portable machine for my family to use and came back with something that I think I could take out on the road.

$1699 Canadian Dollars at Staples.

The Averatech 6130 has a SiS motherboad that takes a Pentium Desktop chip. This one boasts a 3.0GHz "Northwood" chip which runs cooler and delivers the same performance as a similarly clocked "Prescott".

A 15.4" widescreen (1280x800) is powered by a 64Mb ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 card. In the big box stores, its very hard to find a laptop that has 32Mb of dedicated video RAM in this price range.

The unit ships with 512Mb RAM and a 40Gb hard drive. Both of these items can be upgraded - 1Gb faster, better rated RAM or a faster spin, higher capcity hard drive.

Also included are a built in Wireless G card and a 100MB Ethernet card. The on board CD/DVD player will burn DVDs (as far as I can tell).


specs: http://www.averatec.com/notebooks/6100series.htm here.

Reviews: ttp://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/print/5470/

and http://www.thelaptopauthority.com/averatec_6130.html

I'll post some benchmarks on the card, etc after I receive ArchiCAD 9.