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General discussion

New Laptop - Intel or AMD?

by russell Oct 14, 2005 6:33AM PDT

I am looking to purchase a new laptop as my very old Gateway finally died.

I am new to the laptop scene as my old one was very old! The new laptop technology has me at a loss. I am not sure what to purchase. At BestBuy the salesman tried to sell me on the AMD 64 instead of an Intel Mobile processor. Is this the right way to go?

I am a graduate student that will be doing using a lot of accounting programs, large excel spreadsheets, music downloads, watching dvds during airline travel, and websearches.

Is there a specific laptop I should look at or is there one to stay away from? I am looking to spend somewhere between $1000-$2000.

Thanks for any help!

Discussion is locked

4 Posts
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Intel 100 % best bet
by CLUBTURBO Oct 14, 2005 7:04AM PDT

AMD is good with numbers, not as good as Intel.
Some software wont work well on non-intel chips.
All the laptops are almost all the same today.

16 to 17 inch wide view screen
DVD burners,
large (100 gigs +) hard drives,
huge memory (1 full gig, 1028 megs)


Here is a list of the fastest Intel mobile cpus as of this post.

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/mobilepentium4/index.htm

The Cnet.com Laptop site was one of the best for a long time, but now its gone down hill & is some what behine & misleading with some of the info on laptops & CPUs.

there you go, hope i helped some.

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some thoughts
by linkit Oct 14, 2005 9:11AM PDT

My Recommended Minimum:
- Centrino technology (battery life)
- Pentium M 730
- 512MB RAM

Go up from there.

Highly recommend visiting a store to test:
- weight
- screen size
- screen quality
- text size at native resolution (especially in Excel)
- keyboard size
- comfort

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RE: Some Thoughts
by gadget girl Oct 15, 2005 7:03AM PDT

Question on your (and other informed People)
You recommend Centrino; doe this mean Intel Pentium M plus Intel PRO/Wireless (as other posts have indicated). You site battery life as reason, yet have read number of posts and other info that suggests AMD processor give longer battery life (Just as I think I understand it; I get confused)
The size processor (Pentium M 730) and amount of memory (512MB RAM) make sense.

From there
= like recommendation to go to store to test various things

What are your feelings about screen size for a non-desktop replacement laptop that will be used for seminars and classes, and on vacations for DVDs (playing/not burning), CDs, and music??

Also doe AMD Semperon parallel with Intel Celeron and Athalon with Pentium. If so, where does Turion fit???

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I've been shopping for months...
by togus Oct 14, 2005 10:24AM PDT

And I bought one of the new HP Dv4000s with the ATI X700 GPU. It's a very, very good value for the money, mine cost me $1170, peanuts for a machine configured like this one is. It came today, I've been playing with it and so far I like it, I think (but I'm not quite sure yet) I'll keep it.

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