laptops - how do you judge their speed?

I have been thinking of buying a cheap laptop for ages, probably from a local Ebay seller, but I've no idea how laptop specs compare to a normal PC.

For example - a 1.6ghz Athlon XP with 512mb ram and 32mb graphics card for £60 - 1.6 sounds OKish, but how would this compare with, for example, my old desktop PC which has a normal 2.4ghz Athlon?

32mb graphics is not a lot I know, but I only want it to do a bit of Blitzing here and there...

I don't have a graphics card in my laptop, not a seperate one anyway. Apparently my pentium 4 mobility processor has crap floating point performance and not much good for 3d stuff.

BUT, i find myself running and writing code on it.

WindowsXP, 512 MB RAM, 13 GB HD, 1.6 Ghz P4-Mobile.

It doesn't have any sort of decent 3d performance, but it's good to test code on. Any sort of meduim 3d scene and your taking a good slowdown. I don't have a 32MB graphics card in mine though :o) But i love it. It's great to get away from sitting in the one place all the time :o)

EDIT:
£190 mine cost from EBAY including tax and stuff.

Toshiba Tecra 9100 Laptop P4M 1.6GHz/20GB/512MB/XP/DVD

From: http://myworld.ebay.co.uk/ecgocomputers/

Oh and another thing. Battery life on this one last 2 Hours tops. It's a reconditioned laptop. Pretty solid though!

CPU wise it's 2/3 the speed of your desktop... But more than likely it has integrated video using shared memory... That means that that 32 MB is actually subtracted from the 512MB of RAM available to the OS, *and* that video performance will be a heap slower than a desktop which uses a dedicated video adapter.

(MHz alone isn't everything: I get < 1 fps on my old 500MHz laptop, while the same program runs at 120+ FPS on a 400MHz desktop with a voodoo3 graphics adapter)

So it's going to be considerably slower than a desktop PC with a normal 32mb graphics card?

That's OK I think as long as it runs at all - does Blitz3d mind these integrated graphics chips on laptops?

Works fine on mine :o) Blitz is pretty compatable with lots of cards. And has a driver caps for checking compatability with cubemaps and such.

I was thinking along the same lines but ended up buying a laptop yesterday that would replace my ageing desktop. I used Dell Outlet and used LinLap just incase i decide to go down the linux route, might happen.

1) Throw it off a tall building.
2) Time how long it takes before it hits the ground (in seconds).
3) Measure how high the building was (in meters).

Ho, ho, and indeed ho :)

That's probably why Blitz3D didn't work on your tablet PC flame ;o)