Need a crash course in modern laptops!

Post by **Xest** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:49 am

Okay to cut a long story short, Dell suck ass and have spent the last 3months taking my laptop back and fourth failing to fix it, all it needs honestly is a new video card but obviously they're too incompetent to realise that. I got it back for the 4th time on Monday and last night, once again, display corruption, laptop crashes even at BIOS level. I phoned Dell up again and they've said we're sorry blah blah blah but we'll give you a new laptop instead which I don't mind as mine is out of warranty now (3 years) although it wasn't 3 months ago when the problem started, it's an old Inspiron 8200, 2ghz.

Now Dell have said the laptop they replace with will be equivalent or better and that they'll send me the specs for me to accept, now I haven't kept uptodate on laptop tech in a year or two because we're only using them for office and stuff at work and I haven't been inclined to buy a new gaming one at home so I'm wondering on a couple of things:
- How do mobile graphics cards like the ATI X300 cope with modern games? I'm not expecting anything amazing out of them but I do expect something capable of running 3D applications at least
- How do Pentium M processor compare? My old one was a 2.0ghz, I notice these new Pentium Ms generally have lower clock speeds, is there speed boosted in other ways or are they simply lower clock to save power as some rumours have suggested?

My old laptop could do 1600x1200 too so I'm going to make sure I get something that can match that res. at least. Looks like you can only get widescreen laptops now though, not that I'm complaining if that's what they offer but I get a sneaking suspicion they'll try offer me some crap which I wont accept

Anyone had any experience with Dell in this respect to have some idea of what kind of replacements they offer, are they good/bad?

Ankh Morpork · Post by **Ankh Morpork** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:54 am

Isnt it possible to ask the DELL for answers to this? Surely they should be able to answer atleast some of the questions (proberbly not the graphic question tbh)

/Ankh

Post by **Xest** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 11:57 am

They can't even fix my laptop...

Cromcruaich · Post by **Cromcruaich** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 12:46 pm

Xest wrote:How do mobile graphics cards like the ATI X300 cope with modern games? I'm not expecting anything amazing out of them but I do expect something capable of running 3D applications at least

It's acceptable, it's not gonna play FarCry at 1600x1200 with 8x antialiasing, but you should be ok with catacombs.

Performance problems ive had with laptops is that the disk subsystem seems horribly slow, so if it needs to swap out when playing you get horrible jerks, so make sure you get plenty of ram.

Xest wrote:How do Pentium M processor compare? My old one was a 2.0ghz, I notice these new Pentium Ms generally have lower clock speeds, is there speed boosted in other ways or are they simply lower clock to save power as some rumours have suggested?

They are a lower clock speed to save power, and what you also get is the clock speed being throttled when the system gets hot - you should be able to disable this throttling though.

The pentium-M makes up for its lower clock speed by having a larger instruction set, meaning some instructions that take say 4 clock cycles on a new pentium can be done in one clock cycle on the -M. It's partly the same effect you see with AMD quoting equivalent pentium clock speeds.

Xest wrote: My old laptop could do 1600x1200 too so I'm going to make sure I get something that can match that res. at least. Looks like you can only get widescreen laptops now though, not that I'm complaining if that's what they offer but I get a sneaking suspicion they'll try offer me some crap which I wont accept Anyone had any experience with Dell in this respect to have some idea of what kind of replacements they offer, are they good/bad?

Sorry no, all I can say is that ive had bad experiences of dell as well, ive always liked Toshiba for lappies, but you do pay a bit of a premium. If they offer you a 1600x1200 display, thats a mid to high end laptop, it would certainly keep me happy! Ofcourse you wont be able to play many games at that resolution, but good for developing etc.

Good luck

Post by **Xest** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 12:55 pm

Yeah it's mostly for when I'm doing dev. work I want the resolution, really helps when debugging and such, also for 3D Studio Max, hence the want for high res and a decent card.

My only worry about the graphics card is that they'll offer me some standard intel chipset card which afaik still suck at D3D/OpenGL stuff compared to the ATI/nVidia cards. For gaming I'm not so fussed about resolution, I'm happy in 800x600 on the laptop, but I don't want some crappy card that'll cry when it's asked to render even a pixel shader 1.0 scene. The X300 looks like it's PS2.0/DX9 compatible so hopefully that's the minimum they'll offer me.

If I disable the throttling on the processor is it not likely to then crash from overheating though? I generally have my laptop on about 10 to 16hours a day, my old 2ghz was fine with that other than in the hottest days of summer where it began to struggle with the temperature somewhat. I think my biggest concerns are that they'll a) Offer me a bog standard graphics card which is likely of little use to me, b) Still not sure about these lower clock speed chips, I hope they really can keep up the pace and c) They'll try and fob me off with a lower resolution display.

OohhoO · Post by **OohhoO** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:08 pm

I'm not uptodate on the processors, but you should be able to get them to offer you one with a 128mb graphic card in it NP. The chances of them offering you one with a screen which can handle 1600x1200 aren't too high tho IMO. I think my Dells screen is their middle quality 15" widescreen one, and that only does 960x768 iirc.

Post by **Xest** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 1:31 pm

Well the thing I'm going to play on is the fact my old laptop could handle 1600x1200 so if they're going to offer me equivalent or better as they stated it's going to cost them a pretty decent laptop. They've screwed me around for months not to mention I found my warranty info recently which proved I'd paid for on-site warranty as I thought even tho when I requested they refused to honour it so I have a LOT to play on

Takitothemacs · Post by **Takitothemacs** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 2:52 pm

the ATI mobility cards do ok... have one in this machine (Latitude D600) 2 years old.

Now while it wont kick the ass of a desktop card it holds it own... used to play daoc on this after I got it... but wont play now as I use the cata client and its a bit too much for this machine with lower ram than Im used to.

OohhoO · Post by **OohhoO** » Thu Nov 17, 2005 3:34 pm

The thing I wish my laptop had most is a numeric keyboard like any normal KB has.
My brother-in-laws laptop has one & I'm well jealous

.

Mojo · Post by **Mojo** » Fri Nov 18, 2005 4:17 pm

Xest, why my inspiron 8200 got nicked Dell advised my insurance company that the = replacement was an inspiron 6000.

Now aside from the fact that the 8200 i had was 2 gig p4 (iirc exact spame lappy as you had down to last spec) and the 6000 was a 1.4 centrino. The 6000 had much better spec, more on board, nicer design, was widescreen, higher res, slightly better gfx.

As it turns out the 6000 blows the 8200 away and also ****es on my mates 9100. So if you cant get an XPS out of them i suggest u try for a fully loaded 6000 but make sure u get a high rated centrino cos they fking rule. (oh and 1gig o'ram)

Pic http://www.mdsalih.com/images/news/Inspiron_6000.jpg

I still rate Dell lappys above all except alienware even if they do have **** support.

/Edit just for reference it runs Cata's faster and higher rez than my 8200 ran ToA