Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ratslash]

going to be in the market for a new laptop in the next few months. i was thinking of just getting a standard dell - nice and straight forward website, order it and it turns up, plug it in and you're good to go.

however, i then thought, well why not ask any techies out there for some advice. now, all i need it to do is turn on, have word processing, and connect to the internet. although not essential, it would be good to have some kind of game playing capability. i'm not talkin top end games like bf2, more like age of empires games, stuff like that. so, maybe a 256mb graphics card, perhaps.

my budget, and the top of my budget, is 700 english pounds.

if someone would be so kind to post me a good spec for around this price so i know what to look for.

an example, that i have seen on dell's website it:

Intel� CoreTM 2 Duo Processor T5200 (1.60 GHz, 2 MB L2 cache, 533 MHz FSB

1024MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM (2 x 512MB)

80GB (5,400rpm) Hard Drive

256MB NVIDIA� GeForce� 7300 Turbocache graphics card

this would cost around 700 english pounds. is this a good spec, or bad?

any advice would be greatly received. thanks in advance.

[mlomker]

If you are going to run Vista then I'd encourage you to add more memory. Unlike Windows XP that runs pretty much the same on anything over 512 MB, Vista really does run faster at 1.5/2 Gig than it does at 1.

My laptop averages 8-900 MB in use with only a couple of applications open. Vista uses the remainder for disk caching and it's very efficient at doing so.

[mrsquirrel]

IBM R60.

Upgrade Ram to 1 or 2 GB.

Dual core

80GB HDD

Really strong metal hinges.

[alleyoop]

[gsxr750r]

Youngsan in Seoul.

Lots of every brand close to each other.

Bare minimum 1 gig of Ram with Vista. Try for 2.

[mrsquirrel]

I paid 31,000 Baht for mine.

Got a good deal on it.

I'm in love with it.

With the exchange rate now that is about 800 dollars

[mrsquirrel]

http://www-07.ibm.com/lenovoinfo/kr/thinkpad/r60z61.html

They have just upgraded it as well.

Buggers that they are.

I bought my wife a Compaq V3000 before I came out here. The build quality just didn't match up to the IBM. Little things like the CD tray doesn't wobble up and down and feel flimsy.

It's a work computer. Not for games. Screen doesn't reflect either.

Keyboard is near perfect . nipple and touch pad. Three USB's.

IBM's excellent backup and recovery software.

And it runs OSX-86 if you are feeling like showing off.

[alleyoop]

[ptarmigan]

Don't worry about the RAM, 1 GB apparently will do just fine. I speak from experience. You can add RAM in a year or so when the price comes down. Right now a 1 GB card of 4200 RAM is exhorbitant.

A cheaper way to supplement RAM is to just insert a USB RAM drive or SD flash card, assuming the laptop has a built in reader. Vista gives you the option of dedicated the RAM device to "improving system speed." I assume that means the computer uses the device as a virtual ram drive, instead of the hard drive. I stuck a 2 GB 133x SD card in the slot, and the laptop runs just fine.

You should ask more questions about the hard drive. Is it a serial ATA? That is the new spec. 5,400 rpm is good. 7,200 is faster, but also uses a bit more juice, and is much pricier. Does the hard drive have 2 mb or cache or 8 mb? If it is 8 mb, that is very good. A lot of laptops cheap out and use 2 mb cache drives. I switched out a 4,200 rpm 2 mb hard drive for a 5,400 8 mb drive on an older laptop and it significantly sped up performance. The brand of hard drive is also significant. You can see this by pressing F2 or whatever during boot up.

The serial ATA drive connection may be necessary to use the new hybrid hard drives that are on the way for Vista, if you wish to upgrade later. And this laptop is good enough to keep and upgrade. In a year or two, 80 gb may seem a bit small.

The other issue is screen size and quality.

The core duo 2 cpu is the current model; the core duo with 1 mb cache is the old, cheap one. Guess what? The core duo 1 mb is what I got on my new, cheap laptop with Vista. And you know what? It runs just fine. It certainly is a lot snappier than my old 1,500 mhz Celeron laptop. You need the horsepower for things like video editing, I hear, which I am not doing.

What I have done is rip a CD to WMA in 3 minutes. That's fast enough for me. And I burned a backup 4x DVD in 15 minutes. Then I loaded it back onto the hard drive in about 12.

Frankly, there is a lot of hockum being spread about Vista. It's not all that bad. Indeed, there's lots to like about Vista. But then, I haven't lobotomized my computer by taking out one of my RAM chips to see how it runs on 500 mb.

What I have done is turn off the the bells and whistles. There is a tab somewhere in there that lets you chose the option of weighting configuration for performance, or for features like shading screen fonts. I opted for performance and it automatically unchecked all the doodads. I also unchecked the Index Servicing on each drive - sped up the boot up and shut down times. Then I turned off the go back points, or whatever they are called that allow you to undo a program install (you still get uninstall with most programs). Might turn it back on later. These features also exist in XP, and slowed down XP. I turned them all off on my XP laptop and managed just fine.

There's all sorts of other stuff the manufacturers like to suck you into. Like automatic updates. This could be working in the background, slowing you down at times. Just check for updates once a week. You will most likely survive a viral infection, though with Korean websites, this could be more problematic.

I don't think it's Vista (or XP) that slows the computer down so much as it is all the so called automatic conveniences that the computer comes with turned on.

On the other hand, some people like them. For novices, it is probably a good idea to leave the automatic protection stuff on. It is a dangerous world out there, or so they say.

Postscript:

I had my new Vista laptop sitting idle on battery, no programs running, and when I came back the LED for the hard drive was flickering away. I checked task manager, and could find nothing to account for the activity.

Suspicious, I went to the help index, typed in "defragment" and clicked on the appropriate highlighted text. Sure enough, the computer had scheduled itself to defragment my hard drive every Wednesday at 1 a.m. -- I am not making this up.

It was 1:13 am and it was still "analyzing" my disk. There was no option to turn the analyzing off. I did, however, uncheck the defrag schedule box. I eventually turned off the computer.

I DON'T WANT TO DEFRAGMENT MY HARD DRIVE EVERY WEEK!

But that's the way the computer came set up. Try doing some project with the computer running auto defrag. If you do it manually (in XP), at least it gives you the option of pausing it, I think.

So eventually I turned the computer back on. I was in the process of conditioning the new battery, and testing its duration. The power was running down. But the hard drive was still ticking away with its analyzing when the power finally ran out.

This is why I turn off all this automatic stuff. It sometimes doesn't have a whit of common sense.

[mrsquirrel]

They have a center here but I can't remember where it is.

I was told yesterday. If you can get somebody to examine the website I'm sure it has the address on there.

[ratslash]

cheers for such an in depth reply ptarmigan and thanks everyone else.

anymore thoughts though?

[rocklee]

I have been very impressed with IBM/Lenovo notebooks for their built quality and durability. You should check out the reports on IBM's own site about their thinkpads surviving fires :

http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/thinkpad/community/legends/index.html

About defragmenting, don't do this too often as it will eventually wear down the hard disk.