My 1st Notebook

Hi all,
I've never had a laptop before so I don't know much about them. I've been doing a little research and have found HP and Compaq to be the least expensive. I can afford a Pentium 4 HT 3.2 (no mobile stuff)

I've been looking at HP's ZV5000T or Compaq's R3000T. I need this laptop to be able to effortlessly run a search engine which will search through 2 gig of info including pictures and work with farely heavy duty video and photo editing software and play those videos/dvd's smoothly and clearly.

I will be using this mostly at home or in the car so I don't care much about battery life, I'd prefer performance to battery life. Do you know if there is a car adapter I could get for the laptop?

What are your recommendations? Thanks.
- The One

 

theone,

Anything is going to work quite well for what you want to do. If you are more concernd with performance look at a laptop with an Athlon 64 processor as they are much cheaper and equal in performance to P4.
I am a graduate student in Software Engineering and Computer Science and I can tell you any new laptop processor(Mobile or not) is going to be able to search through 2GB of any data in a mater of a few seconds unless you have no idea what you are doing. The only thing you really need to watch out for is the amount/speed of the memory and make sure you do not get an integrated graphics card or shared video memory. I would recommend 512MB or 1024MB or ram.

You might look at the zd5000z unless you have something agains AMD Athlon 64. You will save about 200 dollars or more on the zd5000z over the zd5000t at the same performace.

For the adapter for your car just get a power inverter(aka box that converts cigerette lighter to AC/Wall power) and you can use your regular cable. They are usually no more than $20 for cheap ones. Don't let anyone sell you one for $50+ unless you are going to be plugging in a Microwave. You don't need hardly any watts about 35 or less so anyone will do.

 

theone --

Anything which is shared, is your loss [ ]


"Life is too short,Live it"


1.7GHZ :: 512ram :: 8x dvd-rw :: 60GB hdd :: 12 cell battery :: 54g Broadcom+bluetooth :: BOOQ Vyper-M sleeve

 

Thanks for the advice. :-D
What's wrong with shared graphics?
(not trying to sound clueless)

 

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=317691&pfp=BROWSE 1799 and than u get a free handheld tv too [ ]

 

OK, basically, yea, the shared/integrated graphics will make all that heavy duty video and photo editing worse. You'll want at least a 64 mb GPU that is at least a GFX Go5650 or an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. You should try for 128 mb GPU though, that will make it better. Integrated and shared just takes memory from your main memory to use for GPU memory, resulting in less preformance. So if you get a Radeon 9000 IGP 128 mb ram, (which is an integrated), and you buy your system with 512 mb regular ram, you regular ram is cut down to 384 mb ram because of the integrated, but even if you stuff 2 gb of reg. ram in with an integrated, it still won't mean much...

Point of this: MAKE SURE you get a dedicated video card with its own memory, not shared with main memory.

 

Cool. Ty for the link.
- The One

 

Thankyou for explaining that to me. That did help me to understand the situation better. Thanks.
- The One