ilvMLK29

I will be going for a new Laptop soon, don't know jack about them, but am more concerned with price than anything else. Could someone please list the following manufacturers in their order of best vs. worst.

Acer
HP Compaq
Dell
IBM
Fujitsu - Siemens
Sony
Toshiba

Also, could you tell me which is better; the centrino or the pentium 4 processor, I will not be using it for travelling, etc. just for keeping it on my desktop. Also is Intel's HT technology all that it's hyped up to be, or is it just a gimmick?
Thanks in advance

 

HT is more of a gimmick. Sometimes it helps you, sometimes it hurts you (usually when you'd need it the most). It's certainly not a substitute for two real CPUs. Occassionally it causes software to fail (that's been a topic on the AccessDTV email list lately).

The Pentium-M, an Intel WiFi card, an Intel support chipset, and a $300 million marketing campaign are collectively known as Centrino. The Pentium-M is the best chip Intel currently makes IMHO, basically a Pentium 3 on steroids. The Pentium 4 is better in some situations but the difference in power consumption is extreme.

The AMD Athlon 64 is best overall (again IMHO), with power consumption in between the P-M and P-4 and performence superior to both. The hardware-assisted virus protection (activated when you install WinXP Service Pack 2) is most useful. The trick is to find an Athlon 64 notebook with an acceptable configuration. HP used a weak video chip in theirs; if you're not into 3D gaming that's not a problem, but if you want to play Doom 3 it is (pity, the A64 CPU excels at gaming). Acer's flagship Ferarri 3200 used the Low-Voltage Athlon 64 2800+, THAT is a very nice notebook, kinda expensive though. eMachines makes some decent notebooks, they had some hinge cracking problems but I think that's been fixed.