3 laptop questions

[JackOfHearts]

One: Does anyone have a laptop form abs and what are your thoughts. I have been looking around at various sites and found that they have the best bang-for-buck.

Two: How does have a desktop CPU effect battery life.

Three: How do amd64's work in the laptop arena? performance/battery usage...

 

[MDE]

#3) Very nicely. Mine (eMachines M6805) has 2-2.5 hour battery life, and is pretty fast.

 

[Corporate Thug]

i'm in the market for a lappy and i checked out ABS. all their systems (esp the budget) are too heavy for my preference. mobile CPUs consume less power than desktop CPUs (resulting in better battery life)

 

[JackOfHearts]

Is the a marked difference between say a Pentium M and an AMD64... Weight is not a big issue with me but performance and battery life are my main concerns. I will mostly be doing photo editing, some web development and word processing. I will be using it in the car quite a bit, are there any special concerns of which I should be aware?

 

[Gibson12345]

If battery life is your big concern, the Pentium M is the chip to get. You can check the benchmarks here at Anand; it's an exceptional chip all around.

 

[JackOfHearts]

All right on the battery front the Pentium M seems to lead by 2 hours over the 2-2.5 of the AMD64. But it is comparable to a P4 2.4. While the AMD64 3000+ is roughly equal to a P4 3.2. So it comes down to battery life or performance pretty sharply. This is I guess food for thought...
Thanks All

 

[Mday]

Originally posted by: JackOfHearts
One: Does anyone have a laptop form abs and what are your thoughts. I have been looking around at various sites and found that they have the best bang-for-buck.

Two: How does have a desktop CPU effect battery life.

Three: How do amd64's work in the laptop arena? performance/battery usage...

1. i have not.
2. decreases battery life because mobile cpus are more optimized to reduce power usage (this gets translated into desktops at a later time).
3. they work fine, but laptops dont use 64bit mostly because of the lack of support at the software end. since the athlon64s are great 32bit processors also, the performance is there. i have no data on amd's power consumption relative to intel's.

 

[0roo0roo]

you don't buy laptops for bang for buck. you buy from reputable stores that provide good support. any one piece that breaks on your laptop can render it unusable, and unlike a normal pc, you won't be able to fix it yourself in most cases, replacement parts aren't easy to find. get a good warrantee and service plan. and buy for portability of course.

 

[JackOfHearts]

Originally posted by: 0roo0roo
you don't buy laptops for bang for buck. you buy from reputable stores that provide good support. any one piece that breaks on your laptop can render it unusable, and unlike a normal pc, you won't be able to fix it yourself in most cases, replacement parts aren't easy to find. get a good warrantee and service plan. and buy for portability of course.

So dell or someother big OEM would be the way to go then?

It is just that abs has a laptop with everything I want at a decent price...

Has anyone had a experience with there warrentee/service department?

 

[JackOfHearts]

Also one issue I have with dell. If I get the same configuration as the A.B.S system it cost around 600+ dollars more for the dell.

 

[JBT]

Allways go for a good warrenty with laptops that is key. As for the battery life thing if you are in the car alot get a AC adapter for the laptop and plug in when ever possible I don't see whats so hard about that. The only reason I went with a Petium Mobile chip is because I was not goig to be able to plug in for 3 hrs + while in classes. Also I wanted it to be very light so I think that was my only option. AMD64 notbooks weren't out then either.

 

[opmaks]

I just bought a laptop about a month ago and recieved it last week. I bought it from Xtremenotebooks.com because they seemed to have great reviews and their prices were great. They sell a lot of Prostar notebooks. The notebook I got is the 5416 and runs just as fast if not faster than the area-51m and was only $1800 and that includes a 3 year warrenty. 3dmark03 score of 2900 right out of the box . I really shopped around to find the best price but in the end it was the service I recieved. They were some of the nicest people I have ever talked to on the phone EVER, go figure a person answered the phone. I looked at the abs notebooks too and those looked impressive. It was one of my close choices. I do know that the battery life on the one that I got is not long. With a 2.6 P4, 9600 pro, and 512 PC3200 RAM it rips through the battery in about an hour to hour and a half. I am 99% of the time next to a plug so it was not a issue for me. If it ever becomes one I will have to get another battery. I would have loved to get a pentium M but they didn't have some of the other specs I wanted. If you want good service and a good warrenty while at the same time getting a kick butt fast notebook you should check them out.

 

[JackOfHearts]

I did look around at Xtremenotebooks... I guess I will have another look... Thanks op.