Which Laptop to By (engineering school)??? Wireless Router for the House?

[grover]

If this was a gaming rig and we were running benchmarks and trying to compare, that would be one thing. It's not like we have any control over it in a laptop- you just have to trust that the engineers who designed it put in a mobo with an FSB appropriate for the PC- you're going to get a lot faster bus on an alienware as you will on a $500 dell. But, honestly, FSB speed isn't going to make a difference on anything outside of benchmarks and high-end 3D games.

Got me a 1068MHz overclocked FSB at home :brickwall: And no, it doesn't check email any faster.

I did have one mobo a couple upgrades ago that I'd bought when Socket A first came out and stuck in a cheap chip, then upgraded it after 18 months. Only problem was it was a piddly 100MHz FSB and despite having a great CPU and graphics card, my benchmarks didn't increase as high as they aught to have & were coming in about 30% slower than everyone else who had 133MHz FSBs which became the norm after Intel tweaked their chipset. It does make a difference! But only to applications that actually need that sort of speed and bandwidth. Again, the question becomes "What will this laptop be used for?" I could tell you what just about every tweak in BIOS does, but I can't even tell you what my CPU clock speed is on my Core Duo Laptop because I honestly have never bothered to look; I don't run any appliations on it that come even close to tapping that potential, just AutoCAD, movies and MS Office.

 

[DVINNY]

^^^ I do digital video editing, and it makes a HUGE difference

 

[JohnNevets]

Now I haven't looked at this in a long while either, but IIRC cant you use the type of memory to determine FSB speed? I thought the memory type had to be a multipple of the speed, or was that the processor speed? I dont remember. That being said, I just looked up both all the dell home notebooks and the gateway home notebooks, and except for a couple processor combos (seemed to be the lower cost ones) on the Dell side, most used a 667mhz fsb, the rest used a 533mhz fsb. The gateways seemed to be about 50/50 533 to 667. They both seem pretty darn fast.

So have we managed to confuse you yet, slugger?

Good Luck shopping

John

 

[Slugger926]

Now I haven't looked at this in a long while either, but IIRC cant you use the type of memory to determine FSB speed? I thought the memory type had to be a multipple of the speed, or was that the processor speed? I dont remember. That being said, I just looked up both all the dell home notebooks and the gateway home notebooks, and except for a couple processor combos (seemed to be the lower cost ones) on the Dell side, most used a 667mhz fsb, the rest used a 533mhz fsb. The gateways seemed to be about 50/50 533 to 667. They both seem pretty darn fast.
So have we managed to confuse you yet, slugger?

Good Luck shopping

John

Now for work related issues:

Which one can survive being dunked in ICE cold water during a duck hunting trip?

Which one can survive being dunked in a ICE cold chest of beer?

Which one can survive have a bottle of beer dunked on it?

Any other work related durability issues that we can come up with?

 

[SkyWarp]

^for ruggedness, the only choice I know of is Panasonic Toughbooks

If you're looking for moderate though, make sure you get a Core 2 Duo, not a Core Duo.