Regarding laptop computer selection, and alternatives to dell and other well know brands - does anyone have any experience with powerpro or sager. I have never had a laptop computer before, and while doing web searches ended up at the following website: http://www.powernotebooks.com.
Hi, I bought a Dell Inspiron 7500 four years ago. It has been working flawlessly. The problem with Dell notebook is that the default configuration is really the absolutely minimum, that is, surfing the web is among the few things that it can perform well. Upgrading can be very expensive. For example, increasing the memory of a Dell notebook from 256 MB to 1 GB can cost close to $1,000. It is ridiculous, as memory is getting cheaper and cheaper. Recently, Dell offers free memory upgrade for some of the laptops. Things may be better now. Some of their desktop replacement notebooks come with ATA hard drives capable of 7,200 RPM. I think the best Gateway notebook can offer is 5,400 RPM. In video editing, the software(eg. Adobe Premiere) needs to input/output/handle tens of gigabites of data regularly, a 7,200 RPM ATA 100 drive is usually the minimum requirement. For other applications, I am not sure it is necessary to have this type of performance. Of course, if you need to travel frequently, notebooks with Pentium M processors are better, because of the long battery life and their weights.
excellent comments I guess then, adding the Duron chipset to that equation would look like: Athlon64 > Duron > PentiumM > Pentium4....?
Sager rocks!!!!! more solid than a Dell, more reliable than a Dell/Toshiba/IBM, etc. epecially than a Compaq or HP