Buying A Notebook

[Uncle_Ho]

I am planning to buy a notebook tomorrow and my budget is 30,000 - 35,000.

Primary use are Visio, Web surfing, emails, showing clients their websites, Dreamweaver MX, Flash MX.

Can anyone recommend me something ? Very urgent must buy on Saturday.

I dont know what Centrino is , what Pentium M is.

Any clarifications will be very helpful.

Pentium or Celeron ?

Please help.

Thank you all in advance.

[Firefoxx]

Centrino=the trio technologies of the Pentium M, a supporting chipset (855/915), and an intel wireless network adapter. A centrino notebook has these three things. A Pentium M is the main mobile CPU from Intel. It's speeds are low, but are comparable to normal Pentiums 1.5x their speed (Pentium M 2Ghz performs roughly on par with Pentium 4 3.0Ghz). A Celeron M is also availabe, but has less features and is of course slower.

The budget you specify can't get you much, as most mid-range notebooks cost from around 45,000-70,000 baht. At that price, you'll get a celeron M or a very low spec Pentium M.

Acer is a fairly well-known brand, and sells the Extensa 2308NLCi, a low spec Pentium M, for 33,900 baht. It comes with all the normal stuff and of course doesn't come with WinXP (that only comes with the higher priced models). Like most low-spec notebooks, it only comes with 256MB of RAM, which you should immediately upgrade to 512MB (or more). That's because notebook performance is heavily RAM dependent, since most of their other systems, especially the harddisk, are sub-par. The upgrade will cost around 2,000 baht.

I picked up the Acer brochure, and have noticed a lot of new notebooks with the new Sonoma chipset. Acer have also started offering displays similar to Sony's very nice clearbrite LCDs. The cheapest Acer with this display, the 3202wnxci is only 49,900 baht, but unfortunately is using the older chipset. The 1691WNLCi has both the Sonoma and the new LCD and ATI X600 graphics, and goes for 53,900 baht.

Edited March 25, 2005 by Firefoxx

[Noodles]

I have a pentium ® 4 CPU 2.66 GHz. Compaq Notebook.

Is that slower or faster than the Pentium M ??

Just wondering because I'm thinking of upgrading and would like to know

what direction to go.

Thanks

[Firefoxx]

Noodles, the notebook you have is a Pentium 4 mobile, which is different from a Pentium M. Its ghz speeds are comparable to the normal desktop pentium, and so is slower than a typical Pentium M. It also lacks a lot of the power saving features that make the Pentium M so popular in notebooks.

If you want a fast notebook, I suggest going for the "sonoma" notebooks I mentioned earlier. Try to upgrade to a 7200rpm Harddisk (hitachi makes them) and get as much ram as possible. A good graphics chip (the X600 or even better the X700) is recommended for gaming.

[Noodles]

Thanks Firefoxx

[Sel]

Acer travelmate 290 (a few variation but 290 is the printed name of the general package)

centrino 1500 mHz

standard 256 ram

40 gig hard drive

DVD player (not DVD burner) Cd writer

Bought mine for just over 40,000 but can't remember exact price (upgraded to 512 ram) about 6 months ago in Panthip

Very good battery life

Had no problems

Best I could find for around 40,000

Downside is that the quality of the screen is not great as it isn't very crisp like a sony or others

specs

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/hardware/note...9020004p,00.htm?