School Laptop

[Yshynsin]

Anyone here that can help me,

Bascially i need a newlaptop for skuuul, i want to be able to play Daoc on it, and i wantn it to be in XP, not fuckin Vista . It has to have 2 GB ram too.

Been looking for ages and cannot find one, all of them have vista.


Wondered if anyone knows of any that would suit my spec's above.

Ta!!

 

[pikeh]

how much you got to spend?

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/range.html?t=nb&c=gaming&r=X15

thats a quick search on novatech.

 

[Aoami]

Or buy one with Vista and put XP on it?

 

[Stallion]

I had my stationary comp replaced by a dell xps 1710 2 years ago when I started studying at uni, works fine, its a strong laptop, abit outdate gfx card, but you can dual log daoc lag free.

 

[Hawkwind]

I had my stationary comp replaced by a dell xps 1710 2 years ago when I started studying at uni, works fine, its a strong laptop, abit outdate gfx card, but you can dual log daoc lag free.

After two fooked Graphx cards in 18 months I tossed my XPS 1710, now use a Tosh X200-23g. My experience with their shitty support has put me off Dell for a long time to come. One repair took 7 months and was broken again with 3 weeks!

Good luck with yours though, hope it stays good.


On topic. As long as the Graphics card is dedicated with its own RAM it should run DAOC easily enough. Wouldn't worry about Vista, just format and load xp.

 

[Bugz]

Pikeh, that system you posted looks very good value for money.

However, how well will that graphics card hold up in terms of quite-new gaming. Obviously, I'm not bothered about highest-settings and all that crap on a laptop, but will it handle a rather large sample of games if I was to take that ram up to 3 - maybe 4 gb's?

 

[Chronictank]

Studio 15's are very good from dell
Look here if you dont mind buying refurb/returns as its considerably cheaper

Dell Laptop Computers for Business

 

[prodical]

imo go with vista and office 2007 for college.


office 2007 is great software for college work.

 

[Lamp]

Hate Dell. Have had quite a few bad experiences with their products. Their customer service is appalling. Their computers are crass, ugly, really poorly made, look cheap and nasty, and full of horrid bloatware. They are the Ikea-MFI of the computer industry.

And don't tell me a house full of Ikea flat-pack furniture looks nice, cos it doesn't.

 

[pikeh]

my Novatech laptop has served me very well, 3 years old now though so its a bit dated.

I'm not sure Bugz, I'm not all up to date on mobile gpu's.

 

[Overdriven]

Regarding laptop GPUs, NVid is release a new set soon which is meant to be the same (or neas as) the 8800s, has 1gb onboard etc.. Right now, the 9500GS M ones I think are the best, or the HDATI cards for ATI based models.

Amazon.co.uk: Acer Aspire 6920G Laptop Notebook, Intel Core 2 Duo T5750, 2.0GHz, 16" TFT, 4GB Memory, 250GB Hard-drive, DVD±RW, Nvidia GeForce 9500M GS, Integrated Web Cam, Blue tooth, WiFi, Finger Print Reader, Vista Home Premium: Electronics & Phot

I want something like that, minus the BR drive and print-scanner =< and crappy 32x OS.

Or this, but I'd update the RAM..

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Acer-Aspire...4?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1219841441&sr=8-4

This one is Cheaper, a HP machine. Is alright for the price, but the GPU lets it down..

http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/st...null&sm=null&tm=null&sku=340080&category_oid=

 

[Chronictank]

8800 series mobile gpu's are pot luck whether you get a broken one (overheating issues which has been traced to a design fault),

I would stick with ati unless you plan on getting a 9xxx one

 

[Overdriven]

£600. One I'll be buying.

Toshiba P300-156 Laptop - Buy cheap Toshiba laptops including the Toshiba P300-156 at PC World.

 

[Helme]

Vista is only shit if you put it on a shit computer, it'll be fine with a clean installation(without all the fucking bloatware laptop companies ship with).

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

I'm quite the anti-microsoft guy. Really, I hate the company, and most of their products, but I actually was pleasantly surprised by Vista. Got it installed here now, and it's actually pretty smooth.

 

[Iceforge]

going to repeat the last two.

I got Windows Vista, was very sceptical about it, having heard so much shit.

Sure, was totally anoying for the first 2-3 months, hated it and was going to install XP.

Then came SP1 for Vista.

Everything just works now; Beyond the stability of XP, smoother and quicker than XP and it is just wonderfull with the nefty features of it. I would hate going back to XP now, it would feel so sucky.

So got to ask if the thread starter has actually tried Vista post-SP1 or just bashing due to having heard bad things about Vista?

 

[prodical]

the majority of people bash vista without even trying it out. until they use it and get used to it which takes about a month or even less really if you use it alot you will not want another OS.

 

[Raven]

Vista is only shit if you put it on a shit computer, it'll be fine with a clean installation(without all the fucking bloatware laptop companies ship with).

Wrong

I have

Vista Ultimate (64 bit)
8800GTS 512
4GB ram
Intel Q9300
Asus Republic of gaming mobo
Drivers and bios all downloaded fresh on Saturday

Its a pile of shit with Vista and I will be installing XP again at the weekend. Sure some of the features are nice and it runs crysis with all the bells and whistles but it struggles in other things, if you rush it, it gets confused and hangs. It maybe that it just doesn't like my configuration but I would have thought they would have it stable enough after what, 2 years? to actually work on up to date gear.

 

[Helme]

Lockups are VERY very rare for Vista, so it's very much likely that it's some kind of driver conflicts. And regarding performance, it might take some extra time the first week or so before Vista has indexed your entire drives, but after that it's smooth sailing.

A fun statistic btw is that nVidia was responsible for 45% of Vista's crashes before SP1, the 8800 cards were especially bad, not really sure how it's now.

Another fun thing is that Microsoft took a few computers to San Fransisco and grabbed a couple of random Vista bashers and told them they were going to live-beta test Windows 7, all of them loved it - they were testing Vista.

 

[Yshynsin]

I tried Vista post SP1 and found it horrible.

The whole reason i don't wnat it is when i get into a lesson i don't want to have to wauit 10 minutes for my laptop to load due to it being slow as fuck, thats 10 minutes of lesson wasted, meaning i would have to write down notes taken on paper, not why i am buying a laptop haha.

 

[Chronictank]

or you could just leave it on one night and let it index

if that doesnt solve it theres something wrong with your install/laptop is not powerful enough

 

[Helme]

Yeah after indexing it boots faster than XP and rather than opening every program from scratch all the time, it has them cached due to indexing.

 

[Yshynsin]

What do you guys mean by indexing it?

 

[Chronictank]

vista basically creates a database of the files on your pc/laptop in the background (thats why your hdd goes mental when you first install it)
This process takes a long time and if you don't let it finish, every time you turn your machine on it will try and index as much as it can

Once it is done seraches and such are faster as a result

If you want to turn it off simply disable the service
http://4sysops.com/archives/how-to-disable-vista’s-desktop-search-indexing-windows-search/

 

[Yshynsin]

Aha! i hear you, cheers

 

[soze]

Another fun thing is that Microsoft took a few computers to San Fransisco and grabbed a couple of random Vista bashers and told them they were going to live-beta test Windows 7, all of them loved it - they were testing Vista.

That made me laugh some of them were IT Admins who had ruled out a move to Vista as it was unstable but all said they would run Windows 7

I had problems with Vista 64bit on my machine turned out to be a bad Keyboard driver they said it was vista 64bit but it caused random bluescreens when i got rid of that driver everything was fine. So not a Vista fault a driver fault.

And with indexing you can leave it on but speed it up alot by telling it not to index file content ect.

 

[Helme]

Yeah I just think the hardware companies fucked Microsoft over in the start with Vista, by not being good enough or fast enough to release 64bit drivers, if that part had gone smoother I think there would be alot less Vista bashers.

And while Microsoft is responsible for parts working on their computers, they can't really write drivers either due to legal reasons or simply put, not enough time.