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Picking a laptop.

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fohfoh:
@Kureshii: I'm not mistaking anything. The ideapads are not as good as the thinkpads. That's a given. Think pads are essentially a magnesium shell with a black grippy coating on the outside. My bro has one. He barely uses it. I'm thinking of buying a battery and maybe taking it off his hands since it's been over a year with his i5 asus. It's an older T42 or something. I paid about $400 for it in a shady backdoor deal about 3 years back. I'm thinking about putting up a few hundred for it, grabbing an SSD on boxing day (I've replaced both HDD and RAM in the past due to corrupted components), a new 9 cell for it and using it as an on the go "tablet". My shitty dell atm is a hell of a lot more useful than a tablet atm, minus the fact that it's not portable (good thing it's nearby) and the screen hinges are cracked. 

My dad has an ideapad. It's been a few months now. It's not bad. I agree with the HP consumer series comment, but it is still miles ahead of the Dells I've seen going at Best Buy. The display ones there for whatever reason always seem like they're near death due to ventilation issues sitting on a flat surface nonetheless. Ventilation is far better in the ideapad than HP which was always the issue I hated about consumer grade laptops, but not the best. The problem with it is the HDD is a piece of shit 5400rpm. Not that 5400rpm immediately = shitty, but it's a huge bottleneck on the i7 set up.

The last laptop I bought was a business grade one. Sony SZ something IIRC. It's been used about 3 or 4 years now. it's great. It was even better after I upgraded the HDD to a 7200rpm.


IF I buy another laptop:
- Lenovo X series
- Lenovo T series
- HP Business grade
- Sony Business grade

Would essentially be the only choices I'd go with if buying it for myself. Those fuckers are not only sleek, they're durable as hell too. Another option is buying an older used mac and tinkering with it to see what people like about it. Honestly, I've sat down with one for several hours and still don't see how it's useful for anything other than basic word, email and stuff. I'd gift it to my mom after I'm done playing with it. (My friend is considering upgrading if she has the cash, I offered $200 for it and she's interested, minus the fact she doesn't have the cash to upgrade yet)

kureshii:

--- Quote from: kitamesume on December 09, 2011, 01:10:05 AM ---Edit: well simple reason of because the i7 is literally twice that of the performance of the i5, but i have no idea if you'll have any use for it =P

--- End quote ---
Lies; only the i7-2XXXQM are quad-core. Even then, the 45W quad-core parts are clocked lower than the i5M parts, so it's not twice the performance, but less. The i7-2XXXM parts are only dual-core, just with more L3 cache than the i5s, generally speaking (the i7/i5 mobile product lineup is quite a mess frankly speaking).

For a cheap laptop I'd actually advise against getting a quad-core processor. The Sandy Bridge quad-core parts have a TDP of 45W (55W for the Extreme models); the dual-core parts are 35W. The TDP is an indication of the cooling capacity required from the chassis housing the chip. Throw in a Geforce mobile, and that's a laptop packing a lot of heat.

To accommodate a processor with higher TDP, you have to ensure that the laptop chassis can handle the higher TDP as well; the quad-cores are not just drop-in replacements for the dual-cores! Unfortunately, designing a chassis that can cool effectively yet remain low-profile is not easy. It's serious engineering work. Most OEMs simply don't care about this part in their cheaper products; you'll see that they use the same chassis for both their dual-core and quad-core offerings. Perhaps they'll slap a higher-RPM fan on the heatsink and consider it done. It takes more than that to run a quad-core laptop that lasts for years.

How do they get away with this? Because consumers don't know or don't care. Give them a quad-core with "literally twice that of the performance" [sic] of a dual-core part for just $50 more, and they'll jump at it. At the same time you can even sell them a laptop cooler to supplement their anemically cooled laptop: "It's a quad-core laptop, it will run hotter so you need something to help!" (protip: it won't help much). A year later the warranty runs dry, the laptop overheats constantly, the customer grumbles about laptops always running so hot, and manufacturers not making things as hardy as they used to, and goes off to buy—another quad-core-$50-more-than-the-dual-core laptop.

So stick with an i5/i7 dual-core. It's not a quad-core, but your laptop will very likely last longer in a chassis that can literally take the heat. If you must have a quad-core laptop, expect to pay more not only for the processor, but the chassis as well.

kitamesume:
^ eh... im wasn't talking about i7-2xxxQM vs i5-2xxxM, i'm specifically talking about i7-2670QM vs i5-2430M which are just 200mhz apart.

PS: do notice the last line of what you quoted. in case you dont understand what it means "sure go ahead and jump in if you think that you'll be able to use it."

edit: oh yea, in my mind when people do use their laptops for heavy works that really needs a quad, i wouldn't be expecting them to run on batteries, it'll dry it up in just an hour or less.
edit2: overheating is the manufacturer's fault, thats why you check reviews for them~
(i7-2670QM+cooling dock = overheating) then (i5-2430M+no cooling dock = overheating) else (the manufacturer rigged the thing to cool so beautifully when an i5 is inserted and do worse with an i7)

why and how i came up with that is because 45W TDP(i7-2670QM) and 35W TDP(i5-2430M) is not double of the requirements of the cooling, if the unit itself is boundary overheating with an i5 then the unit itself has something wrong in it.
its like a bus, the bus can hold up to 10people and you put in 8, now theres 4 more people wanting to board, you'll just have to prepare some more seats, i.e. additional temporary cooling on the topic's case.

unless you're saying that cooling takes twice as more per additional heat then i'll admit defeat.

AnimeJanai:
Sometimes by looking over OTHER models of laptops you can gain experience in various laptop features that are not written up as direct performance features.

One bad feature is all plastic bottoms.  Cooling pads don't work well for laptops that are all plastic on bottom since plastic keeps the heat inside.  A lot of the chinese fulfillment-house type laptops are like that.  My Dell Inspiron has metal hatch plates at some locations on bottom and those get hot.  The cooling pad works fairly well on those hot metal surfaces.  Some laptops have tiny fans and those make the loud high-pitched noise.  My Dell Inspiron has a thin 1.5 inch diameter fan so it runs silently unless at highest speed where it is still quieter than other brands excepting Sony Vaio.  The fan is in a horizontal slide drawer so it is easy to slide out, clean, and vacuum the exposed heatpipe cooling fins inside the laptop's body.  The ATI graphics card in the laptop has its own cooling fan.  So, it may be an Inspiron, but at 1920 x 1080, it displays Guilty Crown just fine with zero pixels DROPPED.

If you have a friend working in a major corporation, see if you can buy your dell thru him with his corporate discount.  The corporate discounts are automatic on the dell website since you login and access a private corporate set of webpages for purchasing.  The discount codes you have stack on top of the corporate discount.  The advantage of corporate employee purchases is that if the company maxed out its plan with dell, the employee purchases are also entitled to the same platinum type warranty.   My corp maxed it out and it must be quite expensive, but the service has meant every machine the family uses is Dell.  *harrumph*  Drop it?  Full replacement no charge even for shipping both ways.  Desperate?  Same day replacement (at least for me).  Local depot unable to provide equal or better replacement to your satisfaction?  Courier service (it travels almost like a passenger to and from the Texas depot) meant that I sent my laptop after work on monday and it came back the next day at 2PM arrival time although I waited until after work to pick it up.  Shipping was free both ways and you can imagine courier shipping must be really expensive and my lappy prolly jumped to the head of the waiting line for repairs.  It shipped to Texas, got parts replaced, and shipped back all in less than 24 hours.  And Dell even wiped everything clean so there was not a spec of dust anywhere, even inside the cooling fan area.  Did I buy that laptop from Nordstrom or Lexus?  The service was hard to fault.  Another plus of the dell platinum warranty machines is that I could return it for even one bad pixel.  Of course, all of our inspiron laptosp arrived with zero pixel defects.    It's sort of like the desktops and various laptops were all purchased at Nordstroms since they convey that satisfaction guaranteed feeling.   My family's next PC will also be a dell.  Mind you, we stick with dell because of the unbeatable warranty.

kitamesume:
^ thats why i did say overheating is manufacturer's fault, you'll have to look through reviews for those faults, which you should be doing btw.
but if  kureshii did mean it takes twice as more cooling per additional heat then what shes saying will make sense on a decently designed laptop.

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