Notebook computer shopping -- Any advice?

Here is my advice: If you are looking for a high end laptop then that means you have some galactic credits to spend, which is a good thing. The problem is that a good high end gaming laptop is going to suck up a lot of juice(forget about long battery life) be rather bulkly and heavy (forget about toting it around easily) and make you extreemly nervous about carrying it around getting bumped, jostled, breathed on too hard, or (god forbid) stolen. I suggest you get a decent desktop system for gaming and then spend about $500 or less for a laptop to carry around for web browsing, word processing, class recording, and relitivly simple tasks like that. The 2 computers will cost about the same or probably less than a high end laptop suitable for gaming. The cheaper laptop will be easier to carry around and you won't have all your freighters in one trade trade route (eggs in one basket). You can use the two computers to backup each others vital files and protected from an unexpected file loss or hard drive woes. The downside is that when you are in the mood for gaming and you only have your laptop with you, you will have to settle for games that it can handle, while your serious gaming would be on the mother ship, er... desktop rig.

i have a mac book pro, get one with leopard and use boot camp to install vista or xp on a seperate partition, mine runs pretty much anything from galciv to bioshock,cept for like crysis. great battery life and power too

I've seen some that looks good that doesn't drain a lot of power.
-- Asus F3SV-A2
-- I can't find the other one.

It is also never going to be more than 1 meter away from me while I'm out some place with it.



So how well does it work for you?

You'll have a hard time finding a laptop with a powerful 3D video processor and 3 hours of run-time. Advertised run-times are usually somewhat exagerrated. In reality, you'd need an auxilliary battery pack to get run-times like that, even with a conservative laptop. It's going to come down to one or the other.

im actually using the previous version of os x, tiger or w/e its called, so im using the bootcamp beta and running xp, runs flawless

Reply #4 above is right. Trying to get a laptop to do both well and you'll end up with one that is okay overall, but excels at neither. I'd like a 250hp sports car that gets the milage of a Prius and handles the snow like a Hummer.

Agree,
Don't joke too readily about the versatility of vehicles though - There are some remarkable developments and you will probably be seeing a vehicle that can do all as you mention relatively soon if it hasn't already been done.

One thing i will give mention too is this new development with V8 engines - they can run on just 4 cilinders when power is not required. I imagine there would be powerful laptops doing a similar thing with processing power?

Modern laptops are very power efficient and have all kinds of mechanisms built-in to conserve power. At idle, they reduce power consumption drastically. However, if you need a lot of run time, it's probably because you need the laptop to do stuff where it won't often be running at reduced power consumption. That's where those exaggerated run times come from, they're not talking full load.

True, and you would be a total idiot to get a battery size anything less than the maximum!

Speaking of battery size, am i the only one who hates modern mobile phones because no company is currently making a model specialising in long battery run times?

These new mobiles have all this crap load of features packed into them that i don't wan't or need, i would prefer all those recources going into longer run time instead!

Yea, my old brick had a huge battery that lasted forever. My new "chicklet" size phone has a tiny little battery that doesn't last that long. Hehe, something to be said for old technology.

But if you had the modern efficient mobile technology and enough modern batteries to fill that 'brick' the battery life would be astronomical!

Personally i would be happy with a standard modern mobile that was just a little bit bigger than average to accomodate more battery power, but they simply do not make them!

Oh here is another funny joke with regard to the idiocy of tiny mobile phone batteries.... they just recently released a new product on the market here in Australia, a big battery backup pack for mobile phones!

Ok so my question is this, if they know there is enough demand to release that big battery backup pack onto the market, why the hell are they so blind to making a mobile with more battery life in the first place?????????

I think they're just so obsessed with making them as small as possible, they're forgetting about the practical aspect of things. I think most people would give up a little compactness for better battery life, I would. My cell phone is already so small, I can't even push the buttons without hitting two of them at once, it's almost ridiculous.

Well put!

The funny thing is that most people i talk to seem unaware about the concept of longer battery life for their mobile, or the ability to press tiny buttons! I dunno, perhaps they are all under the influence of some Alien mind control ray.... the objective being to disrupt communications when they invade because no ne can press the tiny buttons on their mobiles before the battery goes flat!!! LOL

hehe :LOL: 

If they make longer-life cell phones, there will be no market for them to make extra money on extended-life batteries. Have you seen how much some of those things cost???

The other consideration is that most providers offer a basic phone for no charge. You can get a different one if you pay for it. I just went for the phone that came with my service. It's a tiny thing. I could have paid for one with a better keypad and possibly a larger battery, but I really don't use it much so I didn't want to spend the extra.

You could???
Well some may have better keypads than others, but when i say 'better' i mean like it is a joke verses a bigger joke!!

I havn't seen any bigger than average 'new' phones available at all, they don't exist.

Well I use a high end Think Pad. They are a top quality product never had any problem. But they don't come cheap....

Think Pads are great laptops, I use one for work. But do they offer models with graphics cards for gaming? This means nVidia or ATI, not intel.

Don't buy Sony, they may look like a good deal with a nice design and competitive parts but the screens are rubbish and the keyboards break. Just my personal experience, if anyone has had an opposite experience with one then please say so.

They do. Mine has a ATI Mob X600 PCIE (128 mb). The new T61p have a nVIDIA Quadro FX 570M with 256MB RAM. The Z61p has a ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 with 256MB. Or other ATI or NVidia cards. That actually changes depending on the offer. Look for the T - Series or Z - Series.

I think those are are still pretty weak video processors though. The good ones right now are the Radeon Mobility HD 2000 series and GeForce 8000M series. To get a really good GPU, you have to look at laptops from Acer, Alienware, or Sony to name a few. I have an Acer with a Radeon Mobility X1600. That was ATI's high end mobile product at the time I bought it. It does pretty good on games.

Well they do the job for me. GC2 runs at maximum and I can even play Oblivion at pretty high graphics settings.

The point with laptops is that not only do the idividual parts count but the whole thing.
If the quality is not maintained in every aspect you might not be able to utilise the potential of the video processor. Now TPs are very good in that respect. As with Acer or Sony I never had one so i can't tell.

Its true that there are more powerfull video processors in laptops out there. And Lenovo doesn't use the top of the line ones at the moment but that might change in the future.

As with Alienware, that would be the ultimate Gaming machine. But they are far more expensive than even TPs.

I'd didn't realise that this post was started up again. I guess I should provide an update. Thanks for the continued support though.

This christmas, I got a labtop. Due to my indecivseness, it turned out to be a "Asus G1S". Its a gaming labtop that is as noisy as sin (loud fans) when playing games or music. To top it off, its vista, and it doesn't play the game I got for christmas (Crysis).

Oh well. Its not a complete loss. I needed a labtop to do homework (I go to university in the computer science field). I should be able to get some parts so I could record classes, and I don't forsee any problems with downgrading to XP.

Anyhow, do you guys have any comments?