Help with buying a new computer!

[Ikka]

Hello!
I'm about to buy a new laptop and I was wondering what important things to look for before buying.
I've had some trouble with converting and burning with my (soon to be) old computer (also laptop).
I want a laptop that can handle the normal stuff but also I want a computer that I know can convert movie files and burn without problems like shutting down in the middle of the proccess (like my old computer).
I know that having a good amount of RAM is going in the right direction but what else should I look for?
Any ideas or advice would be very helpful and I would be very glad!

Thanks!!

//Ikka

[zoobie]

educate yourself on mobo, CPU's, and ram
stay away from salesmen until you do

[oldandinthe way]

In making a decision to buy a laptop rather than a desktop, you have reduced the capacity of the hard disks available to you, and the speed of the hard disk. You are also likely to find a slower CPU.

That said buy the fastest machine you can afford with the most disk and the most memory. Dual core is preferable and in my opinion Intel is preferable to AMD but others will disagree.

If portability is not a real requirement (it isn't for some laptop owners) I'd go with a desktop - you can generally find faster CPUs and larger disks for the same money. Larger disks mean less frequent defragging - if you don't defrag - your conversions and burns will get slower and slower. Defrags on a disktop will also take less time.

Augmenting the laptop's hard disk storage with a USB or Firewire External will still lag the performance of a desktop.

[TBoneit]

Agree with the above!

A laptop isn't really designed to run the CPU 1t 100% for long periods of time.

The CPU heatsink will clog up quicker, the CPU Fan(s) will have to run full speed and won't last as long that way. They'll cost more to replace. in a laptop 120Gb is a large drive. If you wanted to replace the burner it will cost more and be harder. The burner in your new laptop will most likely be a slower model than a desktop would have.

Haing said that I have seen a couple of HP models that were designed as desktop replacements. Large screen, heavy and actually had a unusual feature for laptops. It had room to add a second hard drive. Very rare feature.

You can get more speed at a lower cost by going desktop.
The screen and DVD burner can be easily upgraded anytime. Laptops gereally have 2 slots for memory. Laptop memory is more expensive.

In short laptops cost more and anything for them is more expensive.

Plus the other weak spot we see here at work. Broken hinges. Or we charge $159 to fix them when the power connector gets broken loose from the mainboard. Less conectivity. Not a great keyboard or mouse device either.

[edDV]

To further load on to above, you can buy a basic laptop plus a high power desktop for less than the price of a powerful laptop and have the advantage of two machines.

High end laptops are priced for corporate power users and trust fund babies on a generous allowance (read Powerbook).

[oldandinthe way]

And laptop DVD burners tend to be limited to 8x write, and have slower rip speeds as well.

[andie41]

Even though the replies in this thread are reasonable and accurate, the OP stated they were going to purchase a laptop, and what features are important. No doubt you get more bang for the buck with a desktop, but I am very satisfied with my laptop purchase, even though I delayed it because of comments in previous threads, from some of the same posters.

I like the small size of the laptop, the portability(even though it isn't a requirement) and convenience. It is also extremely quiet and when doing general computing tasks runs very cool. True the DVD burner is only 8X, but I can live with that. Perhaps over time I will be less satisfied, but for the moment (and $750) I am getting a lot of enjoyment from my little toy.

I bought a Dell with Intel Core 2 Duo - only 1.6 GHz, but HCenc encodes my video (without filters) at 33-35 fps, which compares to 7 fps on my old Athlon XP 1700+, so of course I am liking that. The laptop has the Intel 965 chipset, which apparently has considerable improvement in performance, power management, temperature control, etc. (at least according to Intel).

I use an external HD, that has its own power supply on a USB bus, and it appears to work without problem. My laptop came with XP and I only got 1GB or ram, for what I am doing it has been plenty adequate; but I got 2 GB's for my daughter's laptop with Vista.

[budz]

I use an external HD, that has its own power supply on a USB bus, and it appears to work without problem.

USB is cpu intensive so it's good you have a fast c2d processor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today I heard a OFFICE DEPOT manager tell a customer it cost $500.00 to replace a motherboard in a laptop. He was trying to sell the guy the 2 year extended warranty. For that kind of money I'd just buy a new laptop.

[RabidDog]

Whatever you do dont buy a Via based laptop.
Dont buy a pentium 4 based laptop
Also if encoding movies is your bag then look for something which can do what you require either overnight, on the mains.. or get a cheap desktop.
Encoding movies to either mpeg2 or mpeg4 is very heavily cpu dependent (ergo battery draining) therefore NOT to be done on a laptop on Battery power, your previous machine probably shut down either because the battery was drained or because it was overheating.

[TBoneit]

I use an external HD, that has its own power supply on a USB bus, and it appears to work without problem.

USB is cpu intensive so it's good you have a fast c2d processor.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today I heard a OFFICE DEPOT manager tell a customer it cost $500.00 to replace a motherboard in a laptop. He was trying to sell the guy the 2 year extended warranty. For that kind of money I'd just buy a new laptop.

actually that could be cheap. If you buy from IBM a new motherboard for certain model Thinkpads are $600+

I called on one Thinkpad model recently and IBM would replace the Motherboard including labor for a reasonable $450

For what the OP is looking to do he should get a desktop replacement type laptop, it;ll be heavy and have shorter battery life but will have a decent sized screen and research should yield a model that can take two hard drives. They're out there I've had them in for service.

[andie41]

USB is cpu intensive so it's good you have a fast c2d processor.

Interesting. I didn't realize that was the case. How would I go about checking that? I tried encoding, both to the external HD and to my laptop HD with the external unplugged, and I get virtually identical encode times, and while watching the cpu meter, it appears extremely similar, never gets above 55% either way.

[oldandinthe way]

Most laptop drives are 5400 rpm. Most desktop drives are 7200 rpm. Most 3.5" external USB drives are 7200rpm.

7200 rpm drives should perform better than 5400 rpm drives. If your USB drive is 7200 rpm and performs the same as your internal 5400 rpm HD, you are losing performance.

[edDV]

USB2 drives top out for sustained transfer in the low 30MB/s (~240Mb/s) whether 5400 or 7200 RPM. The same drives mounted internally reach 50-60MB/s. External SATA drives run as fast as internal drives.

[andie41]

7200 rpm drives should perform better than 5400 rpm drives. If your USB drive is 7200 rpm and performs the same as your internal 5400 rpm HD, you are losing performance

Understood, but I thought that was a limitation of the ATA/SATA vs USB bus, rather than CPU load. The fact that both encodes are the same time indicates to me that the drives are not being pushed to their limits.

USB2 drives top out for sustained transfer in the low 30MB/s (~240Mb/s) whether 5400 or 7200 RPM

So I can realistically (and my tests support these figures) transfer at over 25 MB/s and my encodes are at approx 25 MB/min, so is my external USB drive a practical limitation?

[redwudz]

It may not have much effect on encoding, but the USB bus gets 'polled' by the OS quite a bit. Not really noticeable for small files but sustained transfers may get momentarily interrupted then restored. ('Delayed write failed' error in the worst case. ) A lot of traffic goes back and forth on the bus, so you may not see optimum USB 2.0 transfer speeds that often.

And if you have other USB devices, the traffic to them can cause some interrupts. USB keyboards and mouses (mice? ) can cause problems at times. You may very likely see problems at some point if you have two USB hard drives running at the same time. I'm not complaining about USB, it's just something to consider.

FireWire seems to fare a bit better, at least for sustained transfers or large files.

I use some external SATA (eSATA) hard drives on my desktop PC. I guess there are a few laptops that also have that available. Very fast.

[edDV]

Encoding won't be affected much but file copies are much slower to/from a USB2 drive.