New Laptop

Just got my new laptop. £180 for Toshiba laptop. 512 MB Ram, 14 something inch screen, Intel P4 Mobile 1.6 Ghz. It's reconditioned, but works great! Woooooooot! I got it from an ebay shop. ECgo computer system resellers. www.ECgo.co.uk, just incase your interested :o)

Bad error
P4 mobile is a serious problem for 3d stuff
The P4 mobile is a destroyed P4. Destroyed in the way that it does have 10-20% of P4s floating point performance.

Hope you don't intend to use it for more than pure text editing like work. (had one of those ... like 7 years ago with Win98SE!)

Hehe, nah, thank god i don't eh? Never knew that, but thanks for the heads up. How doews it handle video? Not tried anything like that yet. Just mainly going to use it for coding and browsing the internet. All the important stuff will get chucked onto the main PC.

I like having an E6700 in my laptop...

Should have saved up a few more pennies and bought you self a Sony VAIO AR51SU.
I've got one of these and so far not a problem, though the only thing that irritates me is the fact that 1) It's expensive at £1999 and 2) All the I/O ports are on the right hand side and would/could get in the way of using a mouse.

Boy, I would not want to pay for something like that. Heck, mine was only $2,100 -- that thing's $4k!

I suppose that depends on how you define 'serious problem'. I've just bought a handful of similarly-specc'd Dell laptops and as a "performance test" I found they ran Call OF Duty 2 very nicely.

So if you're looking to do work that's that level of 3D or less, you'll be more than fine, methinks.

Personally, I like the Core 2 Duo, but only if it's 2.66Ghz or above. (?)
My favorite, of course, is the P Core 2 Extreme, but I've been wondering: is a top-line Xeon theoretically even more powerful than that?

LineOf7s: if you have a usefull GPU that can handle that, its no problem.

Mine was a P4 Mobile 1.6 Ghz combined with a GF4 440Go (MX) and SpellForce ran at 15 FPS while it ran at 2.5 times that on 1.7Ghz P4 Desktop with a GF3 TI200

The result were FPS that were nowhere near desirable.
In the end it was this machine that made me use Blitz3D, as DBP after V4 didn't run anymore any usefull on this machine (TGC added the FX system and broke it for nonshader systems)

"Boy, I would not want to pay for something like that. Heck, mine was only $2,100 -- that thing's $4k"

Yep welcome to rip-off Britain we have to pay a thing called V.A.T. (Value Added Tax aka Very Annoying Tax) which if your a buisness, you can claim back. With out this tax it would have cost £ 1701.28 (still expensive) and I'm sure Sony etc are ripping us of at that. But when you live in a country thats tax to death you get use to it... or not as the case may be....

Now I don't mind being tax to death as long as the money is spent wisely.. and on the right things like Free Health Care, Schools, Pensions, etc. But unfortunately the country is run by politicians (of any political party that happens to be in power) and is not spent wisely ( just gets eaten by bureaucrats, bureaucracy and quangoes (here's a wiki if you dont know what a quango is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quango )).

Now back on topic..

"P4 mobile is a serious problem for 3d stuff"
I had a P4 Toshiba Satellite 2450-S203 laptop (don't think this one had a P4 Mobile, but did hav a nVidia Geforce 420Go) but ran 3D stuff fine.

The last Sony VAIO I had was a VGN-A217S with a P4 mobile (ran at 2.0Ghz) and was a bit slow, plus had problems with audio play back in Audacity. 3D stuff ran fine (GPU was a ATI x600 mobile I think? will edit specs later when I get to my nieces cos I gave it to her)


"is a top-line Xeon theoretically even more powerful than that?"

Had a quick look at the Xeon wiki ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon ) you may find your answer there.

£180 is quite cheap though.

I'd take it to bed under the covers and play on it.

*from under the covers* :O)

I want to buy a laptop too. I want the cheapest available as I will use it for blogging, forums and reading stuff. Maybe some web dev. Any suggestions welcomed.

Thanks.

*shudders*

Hey, glad yer pleased with your new lappy, Ross. ;)

It's in good nick, is it?

"I want to buy a laptop too. I want the cheapest available as I will use it for blogging, forums and reading stuff. Maybe some web dev. Any suggestions welcomed."

You could look at the ASUS Eee (the Eee PC 2G-W is selling for £199.99 at PC world in the uk)

or the Advent KC500P for £379.99 ( also at PC world uk )

But a good look on the net should show many more cheap laptops for sale.

You have to pay vat everywhere, in US its called sales tax. The UKs rate of 17.5% isnt that bad, its kind of average for the EU, sweden has 25%!!
The reason we pay more isnt because of tax, its because the manufacturers know they can rip us off, as we are silly enough to pay over the odds.

Why not check that website i suggested? They are reconditioned, but, this one works fine, and would be more than capable of web work and forum browsing.

Big10p, aye, tis great. I can browse the forums while lying on my bed, or in the bog. Canny wack it man!