Well, starting in a few months and for the next year or so at least I'm going to have to say goodbye to modding, having time to fiddle around inside the case and generally doing anything with a computer other than work and the odd bit of stress relief (games and movies). In fact make that stress relief with the odd bit of work. So basically going to sell up and become more mobile, but only to the point of a desktop replacement - but I do want a little battery life so looking at P4M. At the moment the Dell XPS Gen II looks the most likely candidate (I know there are 'sparkle' issues with the screen when displaying lots of white), anybody know of any alternatives or have any experience with the Dell XPS Gen II? Particularly interested if anybody knows of any other companies that are just about to (as in the next few weeks really) offer GeForce Go 6800 Ultra equipped laptops. Up until the last week or so I have had little interest in laptops so and help would be appreciated. Cheers.
Dude, only people who work for Voodoo suggest Voodoo, and even they know better. Dell will be fine for you; they have a good replacement program, good battery life (considering), and come with enough "upgrades" to offset the cost a tad. When it comes to laptops, you are always going to have to play by OEM's rules, which I know doesn't bode well for our lot. Personally, I've found IBMs, HPs, and Dell's to be the best laptops. If you're going to be doing a load of gaming, though, go for the Dell. Next we'll here someone suggest that an Area 51 laptop is a good idea.
i used to use a sony vaio, there a great machine, the only thing i caoud fault my laptop on was the price i paid for it, over £2000, and they tend to be a little on the heeavy side.
Should also mention I am in the UK so limits my choice a little - do voodoo even ship to UK? Never came across BOXX in all of my searching, look quite nice. As for Alienware apparently if you get a good one then all is fine but should you have a problem, unlucky... Sager is another make I have heard alot about and have some very powerful beasts but again, US. Anyway, Dell are the only ones with the Go6800U for the time being so it seems that that is the deciding factor. From reading around Dell also seem to have amazing customer service as long as you stand up to them. As for the price and weight, they are the only bad points...
Went for the Dell XPS Gen 2 in the end: Pentium-M 2.0Ghz 2GB PC2-4300 DDR2-533 (Transcend, not Dell) NVIDIA Geforce Go 6800 ULTRA 256MB 1920x1200 17" Widescreen Hitachi 60GB 7,200prm Panasonic UJ-845 DVD/DL/+-R/RW/RAM Bluetooth and Intel ABG Wireless Cola bottle for scale: Size comparison to a 12" Compaq Presario 1255 I'm currently fixing for a friend, the XPS Gen 2 weighs less! Widscreen CS:S, 1920x1200, max detail and all that stuff - no slowdown: Also I didn't realise how much money you can get off and freebies you can get just by calling Dell up rather than ordering over the internet...
Glad to see you went for a mobile pentium, one of my housemates has a prescott core'd P4 in his Dell 9100 Lappy and has found that its gets pretty damn hot when doing anything that gets the cpu up to more than half load. I tried running a few benchmarks such as superpie and 3d mark 03 on it and within 30 secs of full load being hit the processor was overheating and was being massively throttled back. I really don't see the point in putting beasty (and hot) processors in laptops as they can never utilise their full potential.
Free delivery (normally £55). £170 Off. 2 extra power adapters (for work and travel). Extra battery (worth £45.83). Free upgrade from 1 year NBD Support to 2 years on-site (normally £129.25). Sure, not as good as the 40% off (and other coupons) you can get in America but not bad really, espicially since I didn't have to 'trick' them into giving me money off (false complaints, threating to cancel / return, etc)... The Pentium-M is a great chip and throws out some impressive scores, much more efficient than P4. The only time things really get hot is after a prolonged gaming session, the fans kick up a notch to cool things down (the 6800U is more responsible for this than the CPU, the base still only feels warm though) but not really noticable over the sounds of the game.
http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.html Great notebooks heard their made by alienware but like $400-$500 cheeper
I had a similar problem with that laptop, one of my friends owns one as a desktop replacement (aged), and as it's been sitting on a dining room table, it's burnt all the varnish off where the CPU has been! You'd think they'd have thought putting a Prescott in a damned laptop might make it a little warm?! (That's not to mention the fact that it's the noisiest hairdrier ever, it's louder than my desktop PC on full!).
