[Tfug] Windows laptops?

[JD Rogers]

I'm still pretty sure Cringely is a raving lunatic most of the time,
but he seems to think that intel is pissed at microsoft because
microsoft hasn't kept up the pressure to need ever faster processors
in recent years.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html
Its an interesting perspective. In any case, the last new OS release
from MS was 2002, right? So its logical to me to expect XP to run
reasonably on 3 year old hardware (ok, maybe not 'well', but you get
the idea). Of course, this is pure speculation, because I haven't
actually tried running windows on a low-end machine, but I think
somewhere in the bowels of my office, there sits a roughly 2GHz
machine running XP pro, and it seems happy enough.

All that nonsense aside, I think you should be able to find a very
nice laptop for 1200-1500. Several poeple I know have recently been
very happy with HP dv1000 series, and I personally continue to drule
over used thinkpads like:
http://tinyurl.com/b3h5u


On 7/30/05, Earl Violet <earljviolet at juno.com> wrote:
> For what it is worth, Windows XP really wants all of the memory it can
> get and then some. Processor speed doesn't seem to mean much on my Dell
> with 256Mb but there is so much going on in the background that more
> memory would be appreciated, as much as can be afforded. Another thing I
> would recommend is XP pro instead of XP home as there is a lot more
> configuration stuff with it.
> Earl Violet
> 
> On Sat, 30 Jul 2005 07:15:11 -0700 Claude Rubinson
> <rubinson at u.arizona.edu> writes:
> > I'm wondering if I may have just given bad advice to a friend.
> > She's
> > also in sociology.  She's in the market for a laptop and she said
> > that
> > she didn't want to pay more than $2,000.  I replied that I thought
> > that figure sounded excessive, considering the kind of tasks that
> > we
> > use our machines for--namely, word processing and statistical
> > analysis.  As I've mentioned before, my machine's processor
> > basically
> > sits at 600Mhz.  Complex statistical analysis can push the machine,
> > but most sociologists don't ask their computers to do the kind of
> > stuff that I do (having a background in programming isn't always a
> > good thing ;^).
> >
> > Anyway, my friend wants to buy a new Gateway notebook (brand
> > loyalty).
> > I told her that she could save a lot of money by buying the slowest
> > processor and cheapest video card that she could find, and that
> > they
> > would work just fine.
> >
> > And then I realized that I haven't actually owned a Windows machine
> > in
> > years and really can't speak about them.  (I've gotten good at now
> > answering configuration questions but this was a "hardware"
> > question.
> > And I spoke before I should have.)  I know that Unix is happy on
> > systems that are slow by today's standards but does Windows need
> > more?
> > (I assume that maxing out RAM is probably as still a good
> > suggestion
> > as always?)
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Claude
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