Offhand, I can't think of what PIO stands for, but it's waaay slower all around. DMA = Direct Memory Access and is faster.
Dell was cheap enough to not worry about having XP forced upon me. I wiped the disk clean upon initial start up, and loaded Linux without hesitation. BTW, if you do happen to go w/ dell, look into any refurbished** units they may have. I've bought my last two workstations that way; much cheaper and have had zero problems. **refurbished does not necessarily "refurbished", btw.
whats the benefit of using linux vs. xp?? and where can i get i good deal on a laptop siuted for running QT and IB TWS and maybe sierra charts?? any recs?? i would like a 17 inch monitor to take with me at the los vegas expo in Dec.
I have a Sony viao with 16 inch screen 512 ram and 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 processor. It also supports dual screen mode. It's pretty good. Pretty much a desktop replacement. Not very portable if you're travelling a lot. Quite heavy and the battery life is about an hour under load. But I use it more as a transportable workstation than a notebook. The one thing that I do not like about the sony viaos is the cheap plastic CD drives they have. They are so flimsy they feel like they are going to break every time you use them. I run esignal and TWS with a heap of scripts and it handles it all but I push it to its limits. Runningear
runningbear if you only get 1 hour life per charge whats the point??? are their battieries with at least 4 hours life? the main reason i wanted one is to travel and hook it up in a hotel room so i can trade while out of town.
Get a VTBOOK laptop video card if you want to run 3 or 4 monitors on your laptop. Works great for me.
I purchased and am happy with a Dell 6000 when they were running one of the $700 off $1500 deals. I'll just mention some of the choices I made, though your priorities may be different: -good battery life, 4hrs plus, on a 9 cell Dell -Pentium M (Centrino) processor. you'll see P4s offered at what seem attractive prices, but the centrino runs cooler and longer on battery. also, the processor speeds quoted for Pentium M units understate their speed vis a vis P4s -WSXGA+ (the mid-level upgrade) screen is great for charts -Dell has the Bios set such that the cooling fan is always running, but you can use fangui (free program) to set the fan to run only when the processor reaches certain temps (still well within the safe zone) and the 6000 is very quiet. My fan typically runs only a few times per hour and then only for 15 seconds or so. -15.5 wide view screen has plenty of real estate for when I trade and travel. At home I just connect to an LCD. I considered a 17", but decided the extra drain on the battery was not worth it. - integrated graphics. Intel recently upgraded their integrated graphics and it works just as well for my trading as did the more expensive, power slurping, and heat generating dedicated cards I previously used. There are better machines out there, but I couldn't find one anywhere near as good at the price when Dell ran one of these specials.