[SWLUG] Re: More on laptops

[Rhys Sage]

*Justin Mitchell* justin at discordia.org.uk 
<mailto:discuss%40swlug.org.uk?Subject=%5BSWLUG%5D%20Re%3A%20More%20on%20Laptops&In-Reply-To=20041121150102.38558.qmail%40web52708.mail.yahoo.com>
/Sun Nov 21 19:09:57 GMT 2004/

 >dont forget to budget for fitting a decent amount of ram in it, sodimms
 >arent that cheap and memory hog programs like openoffice or mozilla
 >running on a straight out-of-the-box gnome or kde is going to make a
 >snail look like a land speed record holder in that small an amount of
 >ram.

 >it is of course possible to trim things down with a little care and get
 >a bareable speed, but lets be honest, your just not the type to do that
 >are you. Look to get at least 256mb.

I did consider the $499 laptop briefly. Basically, it was too big and 
heavy for what I want. I decided to save some more for the Fujitsu. 
There was a small Sharp but previous experince of Sharp products has 
been poor and I doubt that the Sharp sub-notebook is any improvement.  
Sure, the Fujitsu is $1600 approx but I think it's worth waiting a while 
to get.

Justin's perfectly correct that the $499 laptop would need more memory. 
It might also need bigger batteries as it could well be something that 
Frys had built themselves. Personally, I think 256mb is pretty minimal 
these days. I'd say 512 is more like the minimum for a reasonable 
system. The Operating System will run under 96/128mb as long as it's not 
doing much. Once a few functions are called then virtual memory gets 
used increasingly. By the time some simple software has been added, disc 
paging grows tremendously unless the machine has 256mb. My own PC runs 
XP Pro and has 256mb which I plan to upgrade to 512mb. If only I could 
remember what kind of memory it took, I could probably buy it cheaper 
here in the US. I know it's DDR but I'm not sure whether it's 2100, 2700 
or 3100. Once things like photo applications are used, memory is really 
eaten up.

Rhys