Ice, I have found that unless you travel alot, IMHO, screen insurance today is not worth it. If you do travel or are constantly on the go with your laptop, I would consider it. nitro
Well guys, I made the plunge on Sat.. Bought a Toshiba Satellite 2415-S205. After going store to store, and on line to a few sites like Dell.com, this seemed to be the best deal. $1199 (after $150 rebates) at Circuit City. Machine has 2ghz p4 and dvd/cd burner. 40MB hard drive. Seems like more than I need for what i do at home, but for $200 more than a celeron sony with a smaller screen (toshiba is 15"), seemed to be the way to go. I can give it to my son next year for school and it shouldn't be obsolete. Weird thing was I wanted to buy a Linksys wireless router and card for the laptop, and I had seen the exact same ones at Best Buy that CC wanted almost double the money for. So I put on a lot of mileage. I am a bit confused about using XP though. Not sure if it the machine, or me, or the OS, but sometimes if the mouse pointer is just RESTING on an icon, the file or application will open without a click. Is this normal?? I called TOshiba about this twice, and got two different answers (neither eliminated the problem completely). Also I sometimes get a circle with a diagonal line through it (like a DON"T DO THIS sign...no smoking, etc.). I never saw that before. Is this a new thing with XP? I am also not exactly sure why sometimes the touchpad seems to scroll the page and sometimes I need to go to the scrollbar. Is this normal? And if so, when can i expect it to do it or not? Lastly, I switched from DSL to cable............much cheaper because they offered a deal with cable tv, which makes the cable modem almost free. So I got the Linksys wireless router and the card for the laptop. Works great. But I had a bit of a hard time setting it up. The Linksys guy at support sort of burst my bubble while he was helping me by telling me the wireless laptop would connect at only 1/10th the speed of the desktop hooked right into the hub. But according to the tests my son showed me, the laptop is actually connecting faster. What's the deal? How can this be? So far (2 days} the machine seems great except I don't feel completely at ease. Where is Scandisk? Where can I find my "available resources", etc. Does XP make all this unnecessary? Thanks for any help in understanding what I got myself into. Oh, I was just reminded...sometimes the touchpad seems to get a little bit weird.... Peace, rs7
Hell, no answers.......Nitro, aphie, where are you guys when I need you?????? Peace rs7 PS: What is the story with laptop batteries? I have had the thing plugged in since I got it. Is this harmful? Am I supposed to let it run down completely like a cordless phone?
rs7 - With XP, don't worry about Scandisk and "resources" isn't an issue (the old W9x-based systems used a fixed sized system-wide resource allocation page regardless of how much memory you had - the NT-based OSes like W2K and XP don't do this). Re: the touchpad scrolling the page sometimes - it's probably using a hot spot along the right edge of the touchpad. If so, then moving your finger along the right edge will cause page scrolling up and down). Re: wireless - depends on which speed wireless you're using. Most wireless is either 11Mb or 22Mb. Obviously, the 11Mb Wi-Fi is only 1/10th the speed of a wired 100Mb Ethernet. But that's only an issue if you're trying to move a bunch of data between your laptop and desktop on the LAN. If you're just accessing the Internet over the Wi-Fi, then the wireless is still at least as fast as your connection. Re: opening a file without a click - make sure you've got the latest drivers installed. Otherwise see if there's a sensitivity setting for the touchpad. Do you have your finger on the touchpad while the mouse pointer is "resting"?
Thanks for the input. So scandisk and resources are obsolete. Glad to hear that. And you are exactly right....the right edge does make the page scroll. You should be writing instructions (no one else seems to). My speed says 11mbps, which seems ok...it is as fast as my sons wired cable modem..I am not familiar with what a 100 Mb would be. I ran a test on some website my son showed me, and it says I am almost connecting as fast as a T1. So what is it that is 10 times faster? I will look into the sensitivity of the touchpad. Any advice on the battery issue?it is a Lithium Ion battery. Thanks, rs7
The comparison of the Celeron (w/400Mhz FSB) and the P4 (w/400mhz or 533mhz) is quite similar to comparing a top line Mountain Bike (peddling required) to a low end HarlyD (kick start required). There's far more to the processor comparison of the Celeron (Intel) / Duron (AMD) to their full line chipsets, such as the Pentium (Intel) and the Athlon (AMD). The full line chip sets use the full instruction sets instead of the subsets used in the lessor processors. These instruction sets are where all the new functionality have been incorporated into. Comparing a current Celeron/Duron to an older processor (inclusive of those previous full line procs) would be more accurate. Consider the stress load on the processor when you open 25 windows of various types/sizes/loads when you engage the DA software, and then add in 4 or 5 browser windows, along with the associated memory paging, data download caching and so forth. Why is it that you NEVER see workstations with Celerons/Durons? Also, the comparison between the P3 and P4 and seeing no difference upon upgrade is a much heralded song. The vast difference in improvements has been consumed by the operating system bloat. Win XP offers the perfect platform for all sorts of things, if they all occurred at once and all the time. However, when you only need a bare bones operating system, then XP is NOT your man. If both systems were running the same operating system, such as Win2000 or WinME/98/95 then you would have seen the tremendous improvement in processors and motherboard speeds, particularly when parcing through a rather large Excel multi-page spreadsheet. Sorry, you just confirmed that you compared Apples, Uh SEattle-berries to Strawberries. I'm glad to see the good words on the AMD processors. They really are superior to the Intel. However, the 3.06Ghz multi-thread/multi-processor configuration has taken a significant lead over competing configurations. Just imagine splitting your existing processor into two and running same apps faster...... wow...
The average upscale DSL Modem allows 1MB downstream and 256kb/512kb upstream. Wireless systems rated above 1MB throughput will be more than sufficient when requests for data are answered from the NET. When requests for data transfer are answered from other machines on you VPN over your WiFi network, then the lowest common denomiator from the source will dictate how much bandwidth (up to and not exceeding) of the 11Mb 802.11b / 22Mb 802.11a WiFi system will be used. The oldest solution on this problem still works, namely allowing for Virtual space management to allocate 3x bandwidth for buffering on each node/computer on the network. For example: allow a minimum of 66Mb exclusive for buffering and caching on a 22Mb network, and a minimum of 33Mb buffering for an 11Mb network. There are so many factors involving the wireless networks, and yes, these speeds are substantially less than the 10/100 Ethernet wired networks over an RJ45 connection. Perhaps that's why they move up to the Gigabit ethernet configurations. Cheers
I really do greatly appreciate these last two responses. But they are so over my head that I feel like I need at least a SCUBA setup. If not a deep sea diver's rig. I know how to work a computer...I even remember a little DOS, but this stuff? I just really want to know more about XP and the snags I described. I shut off the "tapping" feature and that seems to have resolved the pointer at rest launching programs. But this does not seem like an ideal solution. I LIKE the tap feature. Also a bit confused about the battery. Read the manual...totally useless (phone tech support seems excellent though). Strange that the machine came with no XP documentation. Is this the new standard for MSFT? It's so intuitive they don't think they need to provide a manual? Does XP use so much more processing power? Or memory? This 2ghz with 256mb seems a bit slower than my p3 500mhz with only 128 mb. Thanks for all and any help and explanations. Peace, rs7
rs7 - would doubt XP is the source of any slowness you perceive, I've got an XP box that's extremely fast. In fact I just upgraded my daughter's computer from W98 to XP and it performs better under XP than it ever did under W98. However, you might want to fire up the Windows Task Manager and see if there's anything running in the background that's sucking down excess CPU. Also, remember that overall system performance is not exclusively the result of CPU speed nor the operating system. Most performance issues involve the I/O and memory subsystems. Could be the disk drive is slow for some reason, you've got a poorly performing device driver (did you think it was slow before you installed the wireless LAN?), etc. Also, I just exterminiated a nasty virus on a friend's machine a couple of weekends ago that was making the machine run extremely slow. Seems they didn't realize it but they launched a trojan horse when they thought they were opening a JPG picture and the damn thing installed itself on their machine and would run constantly in the background eating up a lot of CPU and slowing the whole machine down. Re: battery - lithium ion batteries typically don't exhibit any of the problems that older NiCad and NiMH batteries did and the power and recharging subsystems on the new laptops is a lot better than a few years ago. So leaving your computer plugged in when you're normally using it should not cause any problem or shorten the battery life.
Not to be obnoxious, but a lot this is just not correct. The Celeron, P4 and AMD's use the SAME instruction set: 32 bit x86 w/ MMX. If they didn't, they couldn't run the same programs! The difference between the Celeron and P4 is amount of L2 cache on the chip; the P4 has more which means less RAM reading because more data is stored on the processor itself. Operating system bloat has definitely happened, but please don't recommend WinME. That OS flat out sucks. As for 95, it's no longer supported. 98 is on it's way out. I am running XP Pro on a 333Mhz PII from 1993. Aside from having 384 MB of RAM, this is a very pedestrian machine. XP Pro has outperformed NT4 that was previously installed on the machine. Finally, Hyper Threading is an interesting improvement but not too noticable with a lot of apps b/c they have to be written w/ multi processors in mind to take advantage of HT. And in fact, a good number of apps actually run slower w/ HT enabled.