Laptops

RAM's a new priority for my next expenditure for my laptop. It's so cheap at the moment, I may go the whole hog and get RAM for all the computers in my house! (Brothers and parents computers.)

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Everyone knows that million-to-one chances happen 9 times out of 10; indeed, it's a common requirement in fairy tales. If the human didn't have to overcome huge odds, what would be the point? Terry Pratchett - The Science Of Discworld

GPGSL S5 Race driver for IED.

turkey_machine Wrote:
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> RAM's a new priority for my next expenditure for
> my laptop. It's so cheap at the moment, I may go
> the whole hog and get RAM for all the computers in
> my house! (Brothers and parents computers.)



Got an old Acer laptop that Mum uses. Runs XP but only has 512Mb RAM. I keep wondering if it'd be worth getting a 1Gb RAM stick from Crucial and replacing one of the 256Mb sticks with that so I'd go from 512Mb to 1,280Mb of RAM or not. Or perhaps even getting two of the 1Gb sticks and giving it a 2Gb RAM to try and compensate for the slow CPU.

Come on Marc, you should know that more RAM can in no way compensate for a slow CPU. RAM can't make a computer calculate things faster as such, more store information from the hard drive. In the vast majority of cases, 512mb is perfectly fine. When you start pumping in a long list of programs, it starts to become more beneficial, but in most systems (read: internet, Email, basic office work) 512mb is plenty.

Vista on the other hand loves RAM, and anything more than 1gb can compensate for older, slower 5,400rpm hard drives that were common-place in budget systems circa 2004 or before, making them much faster than if they had XP on.

DDR2 RAM is a no-brainer at the moment though. DDR1 and DDR3 are both too expensive to consider what may amount to an impulse buy, but if you've more than 1 DDR2 system, getting some more for you and filtering the old stuff down to a lesser used PC isn't a bad option at the moment. I've got 8gb sitting in my PC (Vista's RAM caching again :D) because it's going for pennies, and the old RAM is now in my HTPC (who's old RAM has been added to my PC at work).

I should?! Yes I should.

Tbh I might just do the 1Gb stick. Mum doesn't moan about it much and I think the current £46 is a decent price to speed it up a little but doubling that cost is a waste of money.

received my xps today. I love it!

Dell today released their Studio range, which lies between the Inspiron and XPS ranges, but very much more towards the XPS side. It's pretty much an XPS with dedicated ATI graphics, though some models have Intel X3000 graphics. They've removed the option for the piss poor 15" 1680x1050 screen on it too - they're obviously getting so many RMAs on the XPS with it.

It's on the expensive side at the moment, but that's to be expected.

Congrats djskyline. Enjoy!

thx

is it worth me setting the page file to 0mb (virtual memory) as i have 4gb of ram and this is enough for the programs i run?

Slightly offtopic, but i think it's really funny (but ofcourse it could also be a really easy thing to edit, which it probably is)



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Some say... he's even smaller than 20kb.
And some say... he's so offensive he could get you into trouble...
The only thing we know is that he's called...

THE SIG


Felipe Massa, World Champion 15:34:11pm- 15:34:21pm.

HAHA!

that laptop Gav recommended to me a few weeks ago which was £350, then went up to over £500, has now come down to just over £346, so is that still the best one to get for that price range? it's here: Click

or with 3 year warranty for £401: Click

i'd probably order it tonight if that's still the best value, but if anyone knows of anything better for that price, please post your suggestions.

thanks.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael

Probably. I'm not going to hunt around, but it's still good value. Can't even beat it with a similar Dell Vostro at the moment.

cool, just ordered it. will let you know how it is when it arrives.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael

i don't know what's going on with their site, but that same laptop has now gone up to £528.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael

I'm looking at these two laptops, which have similar specs apart from the GFX. One says 'UMA' which means nothing to me, and the other says 'ATI Radeon Xpress 1100'.

[www.pcworld.co.uk]

[www.ebuyer.com]

UMA I think is Intel, and it's not a good chip, except for displaying an image. The ATI one is actually an X300 graphics chip, which is better than the Intel one, but not good at running games at high settings.

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Everyone knows that million-to-one chances happen 9 times out of 10; indeed, it's a common requirement in fairy tales. If the human didn't have to overcome huge odds, what would be the point? Terry Pratchett - The Science Of Discworld

GPGSL S5 Race driver for IED.

UMA just means it takes the memory from the system RAM rather than having dedicated graphics RAM, and the vast majority of lower-end GPUs use system RAM, likely that ATI included. ATI use the term HyperMemory and NVIDIA TurboCache for their chips which use onboard RAM. As far as I'm aware, all currently available Intel GPUs use system RAM.

At that price range, hardly bother looking for which GPU is installed (only to check it's not an SiS one), as they're all too poor to play pretty much any 3D game released in the last 3 years. You'll be looking at £550 or so before you find a laptop for playing games on.

That first laptop is an Advent, which means the manufacturer has gone around looking for pretty much the cheapest components he can possibly buy and then glue them together with spit. Ghastly machines with just the one exception - the 4211, which is a rebranded MSI Wind, a new ultra portable along the lines of the Eee PC. The second is out of stock, and out of stock laptops generally don't come back in stock as they've usually been replaced with a newer, revised model.

how's this laptop compared to the one i ordered? :click

it's 17" and £400.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael

Why you wondering retrospectively?

It depends on what you want. It's got a bigger screen (and so can fit in a numberpad on the keyboard), but it will also be much heavier and of course less portable. Better resolution, probably a better graphics chip, but a worse CPU. There's barely any difference overall I guess, so you'd have decided on the size and weight factors, and for most, 17" is just too big.

the reason is that the incompetent people at laptopsdirect haven't actually processed my order yet, even though i had a confirmation email when i ordered it. my credit card hasn't yet been charged, so at this moment in time i don't have one on order, so i can still buy a different one. but if it has a worse CPU it's not really worth it.

we're not bothered by the graphics chip as it won't be used for games. just thought that for an extra £50 it might be worth going for a 17" unit.

will contact laptopsdirect and see what they're up to.

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RIP Jules, never to be forgotten. #KeepFightingMichael