some dell laptop questions

[roadie]

hi there i have not posted for a long time because i have been working my a$$ off in a fridge for the past couple of weeks, but now i have a day off and some questions!

i am buying a dell inspiron 8200 for my year in america next year. it comes with a 64mb gf4mx440 and i was just wondering whether it was better to get a faster than 1.7gig processor (for cpu scaling) or a screen with a resolution over sxga+ (1400*1050 or something)???

another question is whether it is worth getting 512mb ram over the other options (better res or faster processor). basically this machine is going to be used for games (and a little bit of work) and iwas wondering whether it would be noticable on a win2k pro machine in games???

of course the final option is whether i should save $150???

cheers

[Gurm]

1.7gig is fine, the lower res is fine. i'd go with more ram, although you can upgrade the ram yourself, so maybe the faster chip?

how much resolution do you REALLY want to pack into 15"?

- Gurm

[agallag]

By far the biggest bottleneck in laptops is the harddrive (4200 RPM usually, and damn slow seek). Get as much ram as possible, because you don't want to hit that swapfile, EVER.

[ayoub_ibrahim]

dell are shipping some of their laptops with 5400 rpm hdd which are either toshiba with 16Mb cache or ibms with 8Mb cache.
the ibm seems to benchmark a little better than the toshiba.
get the minimum amount of memory from dell & supplement it with some more from crucial to save yourself some cash.
as for screen, I found the uxga natively(1600x1200) too small for my eyesight but people differ. the enhanced uxga has been praised by many but haven't seen one myself so can't comment.

[Gurm]

Yeah, 1280x1024 is as high as I would want to go on a 15" or smaller screen.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy with 1024x768 on a laptop. Anything more and I'd have to bump up the font sizes and stuff.

- Gurm

[ZokesPro]

If your gonna get it, get the most with what you can afford right now. One you start upgradinfg parts Dell will add a 40% mark-up on all parts sold after the system is bought. That's IF you upgrade it through Dell.

[Gurm]

*shrug*

I'd never upgrade through dell.

You can buy laptop hard drives from Pricewatch. Good, fast, cheap ones.

You can buy laptop memory from Pricewatch.

I wouldn't buy a laptop that used proprietary memory modules, most don't now. My mom's sony takes SO-dimms. No biggie.

The important parts are the graphics and sound chips, and the cpu - since you can't upgrade those yourself. That's what I was TRYING to get at in my original post, rambling though it was.

- Gurm

[Technoid]

And when you do buy one:
Wipe the drive and Reinstall!

Brand name out of tha box installs suck!

[ayoub_ibrahim]

Originally posted by Technoid
And when you do buy one:
Wipe the drive and Reinstall!

if you do the above, remember to get rid of the 31Mb hidden partition dell installs on the hdd!

[ZokesPro]

Originally posted by ayoub_ibrahim

if you do the above, remember to get rid of the 31Mb hidden partition dell installs on the hdd!

Yup diags and crap nobody uses, funny part is that when there's a defective part on the system the diags don't even pick it up!

[Technoid]

Originally posted by ayoub_ibrahim

if you do the above, remember to get rid of the 31Mb hidden partition dell installs on the hdd!

On my brother in laws one it was 300mb

[ZokesPro]

On systems with win95/98/me they mirrored the the drive after it everything was installed so that when it crashed you can just type one simple command in DOS and voila, everything is re-isntalled. They called it ZZtop or Zig Zag.

Needless to say it pissed off some people, the fact it took up so much space. Makes a tech's life easier!

[ZokesPro]

Oh yeah, run a defrag more than once and that mirror image was toast!

[roadie]

ok here goes...

basically the first thing i wanted upgraded over the default system was th hdd, as i know that this is the largest hold up on a laptop, so i will have a 5400rpm hdd

atm i have a compcrap laptop with a 13"tft that runs @ 1024*768. i like this res for this screen size, and reckon that with a 2" increase in screen size a 2 step increase in resolution should be ok.

another thing i will definitely be formating as soon as i get the dammed thing, i will go from xp home to win2kpro. i have never formatted xp before, but i assume for a full wipe you just boot from the cd and go throught the options. is this correct???

i think i will go with the 256mb of ram, and then just buy another 256 from crucial as i is alo lot lot cheaper

finally i have decided that clockespeed is not really that important since i looked at some anandtech reviews and saw that the only games under which the gf4mx440 scaled well was in the quake 3 based games, which it is fast enough in already

[Gurm]

Erm, is there a SPECIAL reason you don't want XP Pro?

- Gurm