Ready to make my purchase on 9100! Does it look ok

I want it for taking notes it college classes, and for gaming.

Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz. WUXGA

1 Year Warranty

No accidental Damage Coverage. (Should I get this?)

512MB, 400Mhz, 2DIMM Memory

128 DDR ATI Mobility Radeoon 9700

24X CD-RW/DVD Combo drive with Sonic RecordNow

40GB Hard Drive

Remote for Dell Media Experience

Price: $1619 with Dell's 10% off they are offering right now.

So what do you think? Any changes I should make?

mind the gap

 

Skip the accidental damage coverage, if you want that then go to an insurance company for a personal articles policy. It has better coverage and is much cheaper. One question, Have you taken battery life into consideration? The pentium 4 will only give 1.5 to 2 hours of battery life on a charge; will you need more than this going from class to class? If so then look at getting a notebook with the Pentium M processor. A 1.6 Ghz Pentium M will out perform a 2.8 Ghz P4 and the battery life will go from 4.5 to +6 hours on a charge.

Jack

 

I agree with Jack, portable battery life will be poor with the 9100, unless you can keep your notebook plugged in during class.

Also, you might want to consider getting the minimum amount of RAM, and purchasing more from a company like crucial.com If you want to save a few bucks.

Although it's a bit expensive, the 60 GB 7200 RPM drive is excellent for gaming. The slower 40 GB should be okay, but you'll get more performance with the 60 GB 7200. You could always upgrade this later.

I also think with Dell it's a bit safer to get more than the 1 year warranty, but you can always extended it before your 1 year is up.

A second battery is about 100 bucks...it might not be bad to have as a backup during class. It is easy to swap out.

Hope this helps.

 

Yes battery life is my main worry with this laptop, but I want it to be able to play all the high-end games coming out, so I think I am willing to sacrifice the battery life for the games. I also understand that the size of the 9100 is a beast, so I am not sure how well that would work in a classroom setting either. Should I buy an addition battery? Are they fairly easy to swap in and out so I could have another 2 hours of charge or is it not worth the extra money?

mind the gap

 

Yeah I added the 60 GB 7200 RPM's and the price is now about $1,753. I am going to have to talk to my parents about it because it is a highschool graduation present but I think he wanted to spend around $1500-$1600. It sounds like that is what I want though if it will increase the performance. What about the Remote for the dell media experience? I wasn't going to get it but I read about a guy who had bought it and found that he enjoyed it alot more then he originally thought he would. Does anyone have it?

mind the gap

 

Alright well the reason I am going with the 512 MB of ram is because right now dell is offering a free upgrade from the 256 MB of ram. Would upgrading to 60 GB really make that much of a difference? I always thought hard drive space didnt effect preformance much, just the processor speed, video card, and ram.

mind the gap

 

Ok, go with the 512 RAM. The reason I mentioned the 60 GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive is that it does have a significant performance boost over the 4200 RPM 40 GB Hard Drive. The higher RPM's means faster access times. I have used both, and on average my computer would boot up much faster then before and programs load a lot quicker.

I think for gaming, it's good to have. Plus I can't remember which game it was, but it recommended having a 7200 RPM Hard Drive.

I don't want to push you on it, but if you can afford it, I would get it especially since you want to play games.

 

I don't think the hard drive is that big of a deal. For several reasons:
1. RAM has a bigger affect on loading time, and the more ram you have the less you have to access the hard drive. If you are low on RAM, the computer is forced to create swap files that are about 1/1000 of RAM speed. Sufficient RAM eliminates this need.
2. Hard disk speed has little effect on the actual gameplay. The concerns here are video card speed and processor speed. It only affects loading time, but there are things that affect loading time more.
3. Which leads me to 3. I have a dimension 4600 with a 2.6 ghz HT processor, 512 megs of RAM, 7200 RPM hard drive and an FX 5200. The painkiller demo takes a good minute and a half to load, but my inspiron 8600 (1.8 ghz pentium M, 4200 RPM, 512 MB, radeon 9600 pro) takes about 30 seconds. Processor speed is the big variable.
4. If you change your mind, hard drives are very easy to replace in Dell notebooks. Just one screw and it clicks in.

The money that would be spent on the HDD upgrade would be better spent on a processor upgrade or more RAM. The fact that the HD has no effect on framerates really turns me away.

 

Here's a nice article on the 7200 RPM drives that might help you decide:

http://www20.tomshardware.com/mobile/20031031/

Andrew makes a good point about processor, RAM, etc., but hard drive speed can really help boost performance in combination with everything else for some computers. I know for me, the speed difference in my 8600 when I put in the 7200 RPM was very noticeable compared to the 4200 RPM.

 

Alright guys thanks for the help. Im going to read the article now.

mind the gap

 

Hey Andrew, how does your 8600 perform with painkiller and other games? I like how I would get more battery life with the 8600 but was afraid I wouldn't be able to play the new high performance games like Far Cry and Half Life 2.

mind the gap

 

Nesbo the only thing that is affected by having a slow hard drive is the loading screen. Everything else will get loaded directly into your ram because that is faster. The 15% they talk about is in benchmarking. You wont notice it normally.

 

I agree with you, but games will still access the hard drive, and with faster access times you would get a boost in performance. Memory, CPU and Video Cards are the main factors involved in speed and performance for computers, but the faster hard drive is just another way of increasing overall performance of a laptop.