TR Forums

A coworker just asked me to get some laptop specs for him as he is planning on buying. Im a desktop guy, so im not that familiar with the mobile chips and what is best.
He is not a gamer, i dont even know if he would play a single game. Just general use computer for word processing and surfing the internet. Im sure there are a lot of computers that can fit this limited requirement, but i naturally would like to recommend something that not just does that work; but does it well(no one wants a new computer to feel slow).
ie. best bang for buck.
retailers to use/not use would also be welcome(Im in Toronto).

HP shopping .com has some great configs of the xpm chips for as little as 600 bucks...i love their keyboards and are a great machine for the money

how do the mobile athlon chips compare to the pentium-m's? I was going to recommend a pentium-m over the pentium 4 mobiles....but if the athlons are comparable, i would tell him to save some bucks.

The pentium m chips are the best when it comes to laptops...especially for heat...but the xpm chips are no slouches in the speed dept..and they run reasonably cool...i had one of the xpm hp's and loved it...so did one of my customers...gonna get another soon at these prices.

the mobile athlon 64's are quite cool and faster than the PM's get them while their hot.

Be careful: the "Athlon 64" chips that HP is putting into at least some of their laptops do everything except 64bit code. They're still good performers, but if you're eyeing one with the thought that you'll be able to go Windows64 (or Linux) later, you're going to be disappointed.

From Xbit: "One thing the new 754-pin Athlon XP chips cannot do is to execute 64-bit applications for x86-64 architecture."

Are these different than the home version chips??

The Pentium Ms are mostly on par with A64s at quite a lot of things (notably, games), and slower at a few (iirc rendering), so at equivalent clocks they'll be significantly faster than XP-Ms. However, if it's only for word processing or the like, just completely ignore the performance -- get 512MB memory, and otherwise just focus on price, battery life, and quality (ie, screen).

Do I really need that extra memory ($75 option)?

256MB is OK, but XP is snappier if you have more, especially if you're multitasking.

With XP and a laptop...i would certainly recommend 512..it makes a big difference.

Since most laptops have slow hard drives, the speed penalty for hitting the swap file is noticeably worse than what you have on most desktops these days. With 512MB RAM, he should be able to run a Word Processor, Browser, play .mp3's, run a firewall, ect all at the same time without hitting the swap; you might not be able to do that with only 256MB.[/url]

I plan on running 2k instead of FP.
As far as many programs running, I don't. It's rare if more than one is running on any box I use. At least one that would be considered a hog of one kind or another.

Be careful: the "Athlon 64" chips that HP is putting into at least some of their laptops do everything except 64bit code. They're still good performers, but if you're eyeing one with the thought that you'll be able to go Windows64 (or Linux) later, you're going to be disappointed.

From Xbit: "One thing the new 754-pin Athlon XP chips cannot do is to execute 64-bit applications for x86-64 architecture."

I thought that they were labled pretty good in their configurator, but maybe it's just me. It seems obvious the differences in the chips, i.e.

AMD Athlon(TM) XP-M 3000+ (1.60 GHz/256K L2 cache)
AMD Athlon(TM) 64 3000+ 1.80 GHz

That's like having a P3 next to a P4 to me... But maybe Joe's mom won't discern the difference. This is why everyone should stay up to date on their TR and hard forums.

Uh, no. Check the link. They were calling them "Athlon 64" but the chips themselves didn't do 64bit operations. They were indeed hammer-derived (hypertransport etc) but had the two 64bit modes disabled. No addressing more than 4GB, no extra registers (unsure if NX or additional SSE instructions were available). No way you could tell short of trying to install a 64bit OS and having it no work (though presumably CPUID would tell you, since the caps bits would reveal the situation I assume). I don't know if this was a temporary thing using a prototype Sempron, or a special deal for HP, or what. I haven't checked to see if they are still selling these (or at least labeling them in a less-misleading way). You'll note my post was a couple of months ago, and the Xbit story was from March.

Do you REALLY need all of that preformance in a Laptop??