Need a laptop - is this any good?

[Bigtwin]

Out of interest, dodged into PC world this afternoon. There, like a shining jewel amongst the turds, was a dual core 2 Macbook at £699 spankerooney, which put it about 1/2 way up the prices. Job done.

 

[wessie]

I bought this laptop for my son last month.

It's a nice package for the price.

I got mine from http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_5710WLMi_LX.AHB0X.093/version.asp but they seem to have sold out now.

I took out the add on package which covers it for breakdown and accidental damage. I'm glad I did really, as the twat has managed to put a couple of big scratches across the screen already. DHL are collecting it tomorrow.

If you buy this and want some insurance then look at the products here http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/CompuCover_Laptop_Insurance/prod.asp and here http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Warranty_Packs/prod.asp as they are much better value than from many other sources.

 

[ianf]

For all the non-geeks, please ignore this bit...

As you say, it depends on the program. My experience over the last 4 years with a dual processor Xeon system on Win 2k, is that there are a lot of day-to-day applications that just don't make use of the extra power and only work on one processor. That's often very useful as you still have a chance of killing rogue processes when something reaches for the sky and tries to grab all the resources, and I'm still a fan.

My new dual-core work laptop hasn't arrived yet, so I can't comment on how well threading works on one of those.

In my experience, over 20 years on big bastard things costing millions of $ all the way down to laptops...

Having a single logical CPU causes a lot more bother, as you can't interrupt a wayward process/thread easily to kill it, or dump the OS if it does it in privileged code or an interrupt handler.

Windows programs are often retarded and try to handle the screen and other stuff in the same thread, but anything properly written will be threaded.

Multithreading/multiprocessing is something software designers struggled with for a long time in the windows world. I've lost track of the number of dumps I've looked through caused by badly written anti-virus filter drivers over the last 5 years in windows. It seems they are over the hump of this now and get some of the principles involved.

Now that there are 'effectively free' multiprocessor systems available, I'd strongly recommend you don't go for anything less than a core 2 duo based system.

 

[jonnie comet]

In my experience, over 20 years on big bastard things costing millions of $ all the way down to laptops...

Having a single logical CPU causes a lot more bother, as you can't interrupt a wayward process/thread easily to kill it, or dump the OS if it does it in privileged code or an interrupt handler.

Windows programs are often retarded and try to handle the screen and other stuff in the same thread, but anything properly written will be threaded.

Multithreading/multiprocessing is something software designers struggled with for a long time in the windows world. I've lost track of the number of dumps I've looked through caused by badly written anti-virus filter drivers over the last 5 years in windows. It seems they are over the hump of this now and get some of the principles involved.

Now that there are 'effectively free' multiprocessor systems available, I'd strongly recommend you don't go for anything less than a core 2 duo based system.

....fekin obvious..........innit ?...............

 

[Bigtwin]

I've lost track of the number of dumps I've looked through
.

Feck me - it's Gillian McKeith!

 

[ianf]

I guess I could simplify it to...

Get a Mac.

But seriously, the whole world of pain that is windows, grey box pc architecture, shoddy programming, and advice that goes along with it is avoidable in this day and age.

 

[ianf]

Feck me - it's Gillian McKeith!

...and it pays good.