ESR - Need a decent notebook! *updated*

Need a decent notebook! *updated* (46 comments)

( Forum: HW)

Posted by spyteman @ 09:29 CDT, 19 August 2005 - iMsg

Currently I'm looking for a decent notebook for university (prolly won't take it to uni every day, but I need something to replace a desktop pc as I won't have one anymore), so it doesn't have to be suited for gaming (as if any notebook was..). As the IBM Thinkpads are quite expensive and as I don't really trust that many noname brands or Ebay notebooks, I think I'll go for a HP one, probably HP Pavilion zv6130EA. I'm thinking about picking some other verions instead, too. But I don't know that much about notebooks and hardware in general anymore, so I'm not sure which components are really good or not. Other ones would have Athlon64 3200+ & 60 GB & ATI Radeon Xpress 200M 128 MB (rest same) or Mobile Athlon XP-M 3000+ & Geforce 4440 Go 64 MB & only 1024x768 resolution.

What CPU and gfx card are the best out of these, and how much difference makes the resolution (15,4" / 15" for 1024x768)? Rest of the components should pretty much be the same.

Update:

sif anyone cares

I went for the Acer Extensa 4101WLMi (MediaMarkt link) for 1.299€ (I'm pretty much flat broke now). Short overview of specs is:
Intel Pentium M 730 1.6GHz, 533MHz FSB
80GB HDD (4.200)
ATI Mobility Radeon x700 (PCI-Express 128MB)
1GB RAM
Gigabit LAN
15.4" WXGA CrystalBrite TFT LCD
DVD+-RW/DL
802.11b/g WLAN (Centrino)
Win XP Media Center Edition

Only bad things I noticed so far is the Bluetooth thing not working (don't even know if it's supposed to be in there, can't find anything about it in BIOS either but it has a LED like WLAN has) and the OS which is recovery-only. The HDD was split in 2x ~35GB FAT32 partitions and a hidden recovery partition, which kind of pissed me off. Smart as I am, I didn't try to change partition sizes and filesystem with PartitionMagic or similar, but just put in some other Win XP CD and deleted both partitions. Right after that I noticed I can't install Win XP from my own original CD as it's recovery-only, so I tried to do the recovery thing - which ofc failed. I expected the filesystem to be broken (or rather non-existant as I just deleted them) and tried to format the C: partition. During that progress my battery went off so the notebook shut down and I expected to have killed my HDD as I did on a desktop machine some time ago :> . The HDD however turned out to be fine, so I installed an older Windows version to get a filesystem and the Windows GUI back (cba to do DOS) and tried to do Recovery from within Windows - which ofc failed. Luckily now I was able to do the recovery right after booting again. Now I still had to change the filesystem to NTFS (recovery converted it back to FAT32..) and kill random Win XP things and hopefully now I'm ready to do all the stuff I originally wanted to do bout half a day (or night in this case) earlier.

Beside my elite recovery actions :> the notebook has been working fine so far. The software shipped with the PC is fine once you found all the stuff hidden on 4 different CDs and got over the recovery-only stuff. The display simply owns (brilliant colors, everything looks just great) and it's working very quietly (usually you can't hear anything at all). Also the weight is ok, I expected 2.95kg to be much worse. The battery is supposed to run for about 3 hours in normal use I guess, and there's lots of stuff to tweak with the Acer notebook software that comes with the CDs (or the recovery :> ). So far it doesn't look like the 1.300€ have been wasted :)

Thanks for any input from you guys.

Edited by spyteman at 16:44 GMT, 21st Aug 2005 - 4888 Hits