Some quick laptop advice.

BeatFreak

Right I've decided who I'm buying from (RockDirect) and what I'm buying (Quaddra DTS Pro) BUT ! There's the small matter of some upgrades before I finally send in the order, which I'm hoping you good people can advise me on.

1.) Upgrade from 512Mbs to 1Gig of ram, worth it or not? So far I haven't had the need for more than 512Mbs but I'm gonna future proof this as best as possible. Is it worth it in performance terms?

2.) Upgrading the 80Gig Hard Drive from 4,200 rpm to 5,400 rpm, again will there be much increase in performance?

3.) Wireless lan: There is an option for internal wireless and a wireless pc (pcmcia?) card. As it stands I dont have a wireless network in the house but will most likely, some time in the future, upgrade. Worth shelling out the extra few quid or just grab one when I do decide to upgrade the network?

Thought I'd ask for a second opinion before I purchased, maybe I'm wasting my money on worthless upgrades... Which is not an idea I'm particularly fond of

ZENER

1.) Upgrade from 512Mbs to 1Gig of ram, worth it or not? So far I haven't had the need for more than 512Mbs but I'm gonna future proof this as best as possible. Is it worth it in performance terms?

As RAM is always going to be much faster than a mechanical hard drive then yes, even if you dont run apps that my take up all the memory the OS will use the ram to cache the drive thus making it run faster overall.

2.) Upgrading the 80Gig Hard Drive from 4,200 rpm to 5,400 rpm, again will there be much increase in performance?

See above - in theory the new drive will be about 20% faster but more memory will benefit the OS more so than a marginally faster hard drive. Of course if money is no object . . .

3.) Wireless lan: There is an option for internal wireless and a wireless pc (pcmcia?) card. As it stands I dont have a wireless network in the house but will most likely, some time in the future, upgrade. Worth shelling out the extra few quid or just grab one when I do decide to upgrade the network?

Wireless technology is improving all the time so unless you intend to go wireless within the very near future then hold off, it will get cheaper.

Tinky

BeatFreak

Thats pretty much what I was thinking,

1.) I'll go for.
2.) I might go for
3.) I'll leave till a later date.

Cheers for the reply

Gerry

When you are using windows, most of the time your cpu is not being strained. It is waiting for data from memory, or if you are loading something, from the hard drive. The hard drive is a major bottleneck. Compare the speed of a 2.4ghz laptop to a 2.4ghz desktop, with the same amount of ram. Almost of the speed difference will be due to the desktop hard drive being waay faster.
So, buy the faster hard drive. Put it ahead of the ram upgrade, you can always upgrade the ram in future, for a lower price.

ZENER

Granted the increased rotational speed of the drive will benefit the loading of apps i.e. speed it up. But consider several apps loaded at once thus consuming the available RAM. At this stage the swap file comes into play. On a poorly maintained system this file could be spread all over the drive. The extra RAM will reduce the requirements of the OS for the swap file thereby increasing app swapping speeds. As the RAM is going to be much faster than the Drive then the apps will work far quicker only having to access data held in RAM rather than the slower drive. This will have the effect of of reducing power consumption by the drive as it's often turned off to conserve energy.

Tinky

RicardoSmith

Get the faster/bigger hard drive and put the ram off till you actually need it in a few years time.

ZENER

Heh heh ! This reminds me of that mortgage ad on TV !!:D

Tinky

BeatFreak

Uh ohhhh, I did a naughty thing... Placed the order without the 5400rpm HD and decided (with help from your advice) to drop the ram and buy the fast HD. But ! When I rang I got over excited and said f*ck it, it's xmas I'll get the ram too... Now the price has gone from very expensive + the VAT to very VERY expensive + the VAT Oh well I've been a good boy I guess I deserve it. /me prays from decent xmas bonus

newstalk

acer 2.4 p4 15" 512mb 40gb dvd cdrw win xp pro €1379


how does that sound?

BeatFreak

Not as good as:

Intel® Mobile Pentium® 4 3.2GHz Processor
1Gb DDR333 RAM
80Gb Ultra DMA-100 Hard Drive
17.0” WXGA TFT Screen (1440 x 900 Res)
128Mb ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 Pro Graphics
5.1 DTS Sound
5 Speaker System including Subwoofer
Built-In Video Camera
Sony Multi Format DVD Writer
6 in 1 Card Reader
56k Modem & Gigabit LAN
Firewire™, 2 x USB 2.0 & Serial Port

tbh

BigEejit

Originally posted by Beat Freak
Not as good as:

Intel® Mobile Pentium® 4 3.2GHz Processor
1Gb DDR333 RAM
80Gb Ultra DMA-100 Hard Drive
17.0” WXGA TFT Screen (1440 x 900 Res)
128Mb ATI Radeon Mobility 9600 Pro Graphics
5.1 DTS Sound
5 Speaker System including Subwoofer
Built-In Video Camera
Sony Multi Format DVD Writer
6 in 1 Card Reader
56k Modem & Gigabit LAN
Firewire™, 2 x USB 2.0 & Serial Port

tbh

wtf? ... you sure you ordered a laptop .... I'd just love to see a laptop with 5.1 sound .... can you post a link to this baby?

BeatFreak

Uh ohhh, better not be got too many of those allready Can't get a direct link atm but it's from http://www.rockdirect.co.uk and its called a Quaddra DTS Pro, you know the rest Oh and I haven't really looked into the 5.1 sound tbh I'll be mostly using headphones, mostly.

MiCr0

Originally posted by newstalk
acer 2.4 p4 15" 512mb 40gb dvd cdrw win xp pro €1379


how does that sound?

where's that from?

newstalk

some place in kildare


im looking for a 40gb 512mb firewire, cdrw/dvd 14" laptop really no other spec ..

not looking to spend over 1500