PentiumM is a very good chip. It's Pentium3 architecture based. Overall, Pentium4 is not as great as most consumers recognize. It's created for high-clocking sales strategy of Intel. Intel starts discarding P4 and switching to enhanced-PentiumM line for desktop. PentiumM > Pentium4 (some highclock P4 chip is a bit faster than PentiumM, but with much more heat and power consuming) I also recommend AMD Athlon64 chip, this is the King. This is also low heat, low energy consuming chip. Athlon64 > PentiumM > Pentium4
i have a Pentium M 1.7 gHz. I run my trading platform (tradestation) on it with no problems. The only times I do have problems is running radarscreen w/ intensive filters. Then again I've ran it on a Pentium 4 2.0ghz w/ 1Gb of ram and that had problems too. I also do optimizations on it and seems to run fine. Definitely faster than my Pentium 4 desktop. The only thing I would say is that when on battery mode, the calculations (optimization) is definitely slower! There's no comparison. But most of the time my laptop is plugged in. So far so good. I'm very happy w/ it.
Centrino does not refer specifically to processors themselves; but, rather the application of certain Intel components to create a mobile computer that "travels well". Read more here: http://www.intel.com/products/mobiletechnology/centrino/ As far as comparison of specific processors this is a good chart to illustrate their relative differences: http://www.cpuscorecard.com/all_cpus.htm I don't believe that any current Centrino notebook would have an issue with most trading software as long as you had sufficient memory of 512M or greater. Where you might have an issue, is with serious back-testing where you are pulling a lot of historic data off the hard drive. Many notebooks have 5400 RPM hard drives which are much slower than your standard desktop.
Hey everyone: I am considering either upgrading my old IBM laptop (390X) or buying a replacement. This is my backup. I wonder if anyone has recommendations for "best buys" for a laptop. I am considering Dell and Gateway so far. Any Comments? Best to all. Steve46
Have lost count of how many laptops I have had, both private and from employers. LArge number have been Toshiba's but the last few have been IBM's. Have been sufficently impressed with the after sales service, in particular their driver / software support and automatic detecting which drivers require replacing plus their backup / restore facilities that I am buying IBM again. Keyboard is about the best in the market. Have neighbour with a Dell, have had Dell's myself and am staying away from them. Liked the Toshibas for their robustness but software support (drivers etc) was nowhere as good as with the IBM's. Do not forget how much downtime you may have if it breaks. (and the cost associated with that, like unable to trade). You may want to check out the Dell discussion groups and see what the comments are there.
Both Dell and Gateway have gone down hill in recent years. I wouldn't consider either and I used to love Dells. Try looking at IBM, HP, Toshiba. Consider Sony if the screen is very important to you and customer support is not. Choose IBM if the keyboard and build is most important.
If you're a serious gamer or trying to simulate weather patterns on your PC then go with the latest P4. Otherwise Centrino is fine. Charting and trading uses hardly any processor speed. They need plenty of memory and stable bandwidth. Backtesting would benefit from a faster processor, but the latest processors would be huge overkill. It's the marketing machine that wants you to buy.
Hey folks: for the record, I have a Dell Dimension 4550 that I use for trading only. I bought the computer a little less than a year ago on the internet and it came with standard dell keyboard and standard (wired) mouse) all having the dell label. For a monitor I am using a ViewSonic A70F+. This is a pretty simple setup, and for that reason I thought it would be less likely to have problems. I noticed that every once in a while the screen would scroll up and down and then stop. Couldn't figure out why but it got so bad that I had to take the machine over to a tech to check for virus, trojans, malicious code and the like. He couldn't get the problem to duplicate on his bench. So $170 later, I took the machine back to my office, set it up and boom it does the same thing. Well, what I did was to remove the mouse and hook up an optical mouse (Targus) that I took off my back up computer (IBM 390X). So far, no problem. by the way, for those who are interested in Dell computers, I contacted them by internet to ask about the problem early this afternoon (about 6pm local time). It is 11:30pm currently and I have yet to hear back from them. I know it is a holiday, but frankly, this is pretty poor service as far as I am concerned. Anyway, buyer(s) beware. Thanks, Steve46
This may be a really dumb reply, if so, my apologies, but..Steve... did the old mouse have a mousewheel? if you depress the wheel it locks into scroll mode and then any mouse movement makes the screen jag and up and down...by design of course...another click of the wheel disengages this... when you mentioned the 'problem' went away with the mouse swap, was the first thing that came to mind...
Eminence: I appreciate the thought. A couple of people have mentioned this and I have made a couple of quick tests with the optical mouse. You are correct in that when you click the center wheel, a scroll "icon" appears on the screen, and then the screen moves when the mouse moves. This problem however occured (past tense) in the absence of a scroll icon, and I am lead to believe that it (probably) not because I had inadvertently engaged the scroll. So far no more occurences after hooking up the optical mouse (I am keeping my fingers crossed). Thanks for your comments. Best Regards, Steve46