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Comparative Laptop Reviews?
clambert asks: "A few co-workers and I are in the market for a new laptop, but it's been incredibly difficult to try and explore what's out there. How do Sony's warranties rank up against Dell's? Can I get Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on the new Toshibas? What model IBMs feature DDR memory? There doesn't seem to be an AnandTech/Ars/Toms for the notebook market, and short of filtering through all the marketing hype on every {brand}.com, its tough to find out what systems offer what specs. Are there any comprehensive resources out there for those of us in the market for a new laptop?"
Indeed, even for whole systems it's very hard to find comparative reviews these days (i.e. a Dell XYZ versus a Gateway ZYX), and I would gather that the reason is that there are so many options out there, and the models change so frequently (or are badged in a country specific way, which we see a lot in Canada), that it's impossible to stay current (not to mentioning very difficult to get them all together: Pretty much limited to the very large publishers like ZDNet). Instead, the review sites target whatever new singular piece of hardware is out: A nice granular little review for a timely piece of hardware such as the new Athlon XP 2.2 or the WD 8MB cache harddrive -> It's easy to review something so contextual as you know what the readers are looking for.
Couldn't be any happier with my PowerBook G4. Runs Mac OS X great and works well with Mandrake 8.2 PPC. Plus it's one cool looking notebook! 8-)
iBooks are nice, but they use G3 CPUs... Mac users are waaay better off with a G4.
Most of the sites mentioned (like Ars, Anand, Tom's, and so forth) are targeted towards the "enthusiast" market. They're the people who go out and but new motherboards, video cards, and so on, and they tweak constantly. You don't see too many reviews of actual, brand-name computers on those sites unless they are doing something truly unique.
Laptops, for the most part, appeal to two groups of users - corporate shops and students (granted plenty of exceptions). Enthusiasts don't seem to buy as many laptops, probably because of the performance compromises virtually all laptops make. You can't readily upgrade anything on the typical laptop except for RAM, HD space, and Cardbus devices. There's no CPU swapping, no video card upgrades, and overclocking is kind of pointless on a laptop (though I had a PowerBook 3400c once that I overclocked from 240 to 270 MHz).
What coverage there is of laptops has usually been in the "mainstream" print publications like PC Magazine, but they don't even go there too often.
When it's a situation like yours, with multiple co-workers getting laptops, usually it's a pretty simple answer - your IT department will give you a Dell, Compaq, IBM, or Toshiba and tells you to love it. At least you guys get to pick!
As for our shop - Compaq Evo N600c laptops. They're pretty slick. As for me (IRL), I use a TiBook 667 as my main computer at home, and it's most wonderful indeed.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The problem is that the person isn't looking to find a laptop that can run anything: they are looking for a laptop with great specs. I don't think that's the way to buy a laptop.
;)
When my wife and I decided to buy a laptop, we sat down and discussed what we wanted to do with it. After that, the specs wrote themselves, and we could move on to finding compatible machines.
For example, she wanted to run Evercrack. I wanted screen real estate for work application. So a 3D accelerator, 512M RAM, and 1600x1200 display were part of the specs.
Did I eventually want to run Linux on it? If so, then maybe a laptop with no proprietary hardware (as it turns out, I don't want to run Linux on it, though, at least not for a while).
Finally, after determining what we wanted to do with the laptop, we spec shopped for the machine, using C-Net, USENET, vendor sites.
In the end, we narrowed it down to the high-end Vaio and high-end Toshiba. Both had comparable specs, the Vaio was slower, with larger screen size (same resolution, though) and a slightly better 3D card (mobile radeon 7500).
We went with the Toshiba, though: GeForce4Go (but the video card can be swapped out, apparently, which was a big plus), SD/Smart Media readers built in (for digital photography and swapping files to my Zaurus), Firewire. So we got a machine with great specs, but that does what we need it to do (plus more).
Of course, the Everquest thing should have tipped me off. I think I've used the laptop once since we've gotten it. Silly wife.
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
As somebody who's been using laptops for the last ten years as my primary machine, and as a guy who's surrounded by mobile salespeople and execs who live on laptops, the reason why you don't see comparison reviews is because most of us are zealots about one or two brands.
The salespeople at my shop are absolutely married to their Sony Vaios, because they look sexy, they impress clients, and they're very lightweight. They don't care about things like driver support or warranty, because the tech crew handles that, and they always get a new one every year anyway.
The network admin crew loves Dells and Toshibas, because they're solid as rocks and the driver support is much better, with pretty regular driver updates.
You're already seeing lots of people slap up their opinion here, but notice that it's all opinions - not hardware comparisons. Us Slashdotters are subject to the same hardware fanatacism that my cohorts are subject to. Whether you want integrated 802.11b, big hard drives, big memory support, whatever, you can always find it in any brand. Everybody's doing basically the same thing, and the performance is within 10% of the next guy.
What's your damage, Heather?
If you've got the dough and want something that'll last with some "ooo" factor, get a TiBook with OS9, OS X and YellowDog Linux.
That's what I got in January when they finally started to deliver a CD-R & RW burner in 'em. (I HATE not being able to back-up.)
I can only recommend it. My G4/667MHz 512MB RAM 30GB disk is great.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.