tiedyedave (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tiedyedave) wrote2006-11-20 10:52 am
tiedyedave) wrote2006-11-20 10:52 am
mobile computation
Dear readers, I seek your collective wisdom, as I suspect that many of you know quite a bit about this topic:
I am getting a laptop. I need your advice.
Parameters of usage:
This will be my primary machine away from my desk at UT. My existing desktop is having heat and stability issues.
I will probably dock it during extended home use and use my existing display, keyboard, etc.
I have at this point given up most computer gaming. Unless something truly amazing is due to come out in the non-console world within the next 6-12 months, this does not need to be a gaming rig.
Constraints:
Minimize physical harm. Eyestrain, wrist and arm strain, back problems, etc. Excessive weight might be an issue for carrying, but I really don't know what's reasonable. As this is my first laptop, I have no idea what the typical laptop usage experience is like.
Minimize psychological harm. I am looking for high reliability and extremely good technical support. I want unconditional no-extra-cost maintenance for a minimum of 3 years, and am willing to pay a significant premium for it. This is probably where I need the most data; I'm sure many of you have had bad laptop experiences (indeed, you've even posted a few on livejournal), so I'm looking for a good picture of what to avoid.
Minimize financial harm. I have a good amount of money to work with (wrapped a new small loan into an ongoing student loan consolidation to cover this), but I would prefer not to exceed $2000 without a compelling reason.
Maximize compatibility. If it isn't a Mac, I'll dual boot Vista/Ubuntu. If it is a Mac, I need some reassurance that I'll still be able to run my stuff.
Maximize performance. I can do long-running, compute-intensive tasks on the UT machines, so raw runtime is not my primary concern. The more important issue is whether low performance will impact my ability to work. "Will Eclipse run smoothly with Firefox open and an MP3 player running?" is probably a good acid test.
Other needs: Internal wireless with good reception. Substantial battery life (again, I have no idea what's reasonable here). DVD write capability would be nice.
And thank you! This is new and mildly intimidating territory for me, so I appreciate your guidance.
Update: Looks like I'm going to get a Macbook Pro, 15" model, 2.16GHz core 2 duo, upgrade to 2GB ram, with 3 years AppleCare. After tax, even with student discount, it's still $2375, which is a serious kick in the $$$. But it seems to be worth the price. Now I just have to wait for my loan check to deposit, which will ideally happen by tomorrow. I'm also waiting to see if they have any Black Friday sales; apple.com claims that Something Good will happen, but they're awfully quiet about the specifics.
I am getting a laptop. I need your advice.
Parameters of usage:
This will be my primary machine away from my desk at UT. My existing desktop is having heat and stability issues.
I will probably dock it during extended home use and use my existing display, keyboard, etc.
I have at this point given up most computer gaming. Unless something truly amazing is due to come out in the non-console world within the next 6-12 months, this does not need to be a gaming rig.
Constraints:
Minimize physical harm. Eyestrain, wrist and arm strain, back problems, etc. Excessive weight might be an issue for carrying, but I really don't know what's reasonable. As this is my first laptop, I have no idea what the typical laptop usage experience is like.
Minimize psychological harm. I am looking for high reliability and extremely good technical support. I want unconditional no-extra-cost maintenance for a minimum of 3 years, and am willing to pay a significant premium for it. This is probably where I need the most data; I'm sure many of you have had bad laptop experiences (indeed, you've even posted a few on livejournal), so I'm looking for a good picture of what to avoid.
Minimize financial harm. I have a good amount of money to work with (wrapped a new small loan into an ongoing student loan consolidation to cover this), but I would prefer not to exceed $2000 without a compelling reason.
Maximize compatibility. If it isn't a Mac, I'll dual boot Vista/Ubuntu. If it is a Mac, I need some reassurance that I'll still be able to run my stuff.
Maximize performance. I can do long-running, compute-intensive tasks on the UT machines, so raw runtime is not my primary concern. The more important issue is whether low performance will impact my ability to work. "Will Eclipse run smoothly with Firefox open and an MP3 player running?" is probably a good acid test.
Other needs: Internal wireless with good reception. Substantial battery life (again, I have no idea what's reasonable here). DVD write capability would be nice.
And thank you! This is new and mildly intimidating territory for me, so I appreciate your guidance.
Update: Looks like I'm going to get a Macbook Pro, 15" model, 2.16GHz core 2 duo, upgrade to 2GB ram, with 3 years AppleCare. After tax, even with student discount, it's still $2375, which is a serious kick in the $$$. But it seems to be worth the price. Now I just have to wait for my loan check to deposit, which will ideally happen by tomorrow. I'm also waiting to see if they have any Black Friday sales; apple.com claims that Something Good will happen, but they're awfully quiet about the specifics.
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You can dual-boot Darwin and Vista if you get a MacBook and really need to, but I've never seriously been tempted to. Still, it comes down to your reasons for needing to dual-boot Ubuntu/Vista.
Neither Cat nor I have had any hardware problems after eight and six months of use, respectively; that's not a terribly significant sample, though. Rolf can probably give you a much better story about overall reliability and technical-service quality. At any rate, I'd say it's better than Dell, but only because I don't know a single Dell laptop user who hasn't had horrible problems at some point or another; of course, that's hearsay.
We do get inconsistent wireless reception on the exact same model of laptop, but in either case it's quite passable. We have mild reception problems at home, but I think that's our flaky router.
Performance is excellent. I've run WoW smoothly with iTunes, Emacs, and Eclipse all open in the background. Typing in Eclipse always feels sluggish to me, even running solitaire on Windows, so I can't really judge that; at any rate, it doesn't feel worse, and the non-typing aspects feel better.
If I put the screen on its dimmest (non-trivial) setting and turn off wireless, I can get a bit over two hours of battery life, which isn't great. Korell (my old Vaio) really could get up to 13 hours under similar constraints, but that's exceptional among laptops; it was fairly expensive to get, and I had to sacrifice a lot of power for that capability. Still, you shouldn't settle for anything less than two hours.
The word on the street is that IBM laptop quality has gone drastically down over the last several years.
Macs are generally about $200-$300 more expensive than comparable laptops from, say, Dell. Some of that is buying you a much better graphics subsystem — many of these low-end PC laptops don't even have specialized graphics memory, so it all comes out of core — but some of it is just the higher cost of owning a Mac.
I hope this helps.
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Do you have a MacBook Pro, or just a regular MacBook?
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I might also be giving you a bad measurement; it's very rare for me to run on battery. I just unplugged myself with a full battery while at medium brightness, and the predictor said 2:46; I lowered the brightness to the minimum and told it to optimize for "better battery performance", and the prediction changed to 3:06. I have no idea how accurate those predictions are, though — oh crap, they're probably low, because I just remembered that I'm running BitTorrent in the background, and it's probably performing a steady stream of disk traffic. Anyhow, I wouldn't put much faith in my two-hour figure.
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Well, okay, recently the wireless has died and the hard drive usually doesn't work.
But for the most-of-my-graduate-career preceding that, the only problem I had was with the power cable.
That said, a web search for "Dell customer service" produces results that are... telling.
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You don't even have to dual boot - you can just use Parallels. Ask Igor.
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First, the Apple laptops are, overall, not such a great value. The only compelling reason to prefer them is the ability to run some commercial software and some games alongside Unix software without dual booting. If you need the specific software and want to avoid dual booting Windows (why Vista anyway? let other people work out the bugs! XP has life left in it...) and Ubuntu, then you would have a real advantage with a Mac.
The MacBook Pro is also not necessarily a better choice than the MacBook, although a larger, more comfortable screen is hard to argue against. I lean towards less expensive hardware on the assumption that some of it will break; as others noted in this thread, the warranty is useless if they refuse to cover some damage. Because laptops are moved around, placed where they shouldn't, etc. all the time, the line between damage that can be blamed on you and normal wear-and-tear is VERY thin; I'm not talking about it getting dropped or coffee spilled on it either.
2G of RAM seems gross overkill; 512MB is adequate for most purposes, at least, and 1G would seem to be more than sufficient. You should also avoid ordering RAM from the laptop manufacturer with the product as they usually massively overcharge, and it's an easy third-party upgrade.
I think IBM/Lenovo has actually gotten better in a couple of ways; most notably for the last few years, they now provide a trackpad like everyone else, supplementing the most likely item (the trackpoint) to break in the whole laptop. I don't have a lot of recent data on quality customer service of various companies; Dell is probably still hit-or-miss and Apple has had some notable problems of their own. All of the companies, without exception, now use many of the same contract manufacturers in Taiwan and China, and the differences in quality are more likely to be a result of design than major differences in QC.
Also, I would avoid digging deeply into student loans to buy equipment; you will have to pay those back eventually.
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I don't think 2GB is overkill. I would settle for 1.5, but I don't think 1GB will cut it anymore. I use Eclipse a lot, Firefox is no longer a lean vixen (if it ever was), and I'm a big fan of having umpteen things open at a time.
I take your point about third party memory being cheaper, but I'd rather not add any third-party stuff that they could use as an excuse to sleaze out of the warranty if something goes wrong. Especially not RAM, which is notorious for being flaky in unpredictable ways. The advantage of getting RAM directly from the vendor (besides not needing to crack open the laptop itself) is that they're also accepting at least some responsibility for the reliability of that RAM.
Thinkpad is my second choice.
I will also admit to a weakness for aesthetics: Macbooks look sexy. I think I will ultimately go with the Macbook if Apple has some nice Black Friday deal going on, but until then I will continue to wait and consider.
And as for digging into student loans: My current student loan debt already exceeds $65k, not even counting what I owe to my parents directly. Comparatively, this is a drop in the bucket. I have thought about this issue a lot, especially given that I hate being in debt and plan to aggressively pay it off when I graduate. But right now, a suitable laptop is sufficiently important that I'm willing to steal money from my future self, even at a poor exchange rate, to make it happen.
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The idea that having 1GB or 2GB of RAM is "normal" comes from IT purchasing droids like cluster managers (and the people who sell to them) who are used to spending X amount of money on equipment and don't want their budget cut because they didn't spend all they were allocated. 512MB seems normal to me these days; I could see 512MB being a little tight depending on what you do with it though.
If you do buy the RAM, though, there appears to be no point in getting it third-party. 1GB (in 2 laptop size modules of DDR2) sells for $125, while 2GB is $250, and Apple charges $175 for the upgrade, so you'd have to sell the factory provided modules for at least $50 to break even, and then you wouldn't have them to swap back in if you had to send the laptop in for service.
As far as aesthetics, the MacBook hardware -- at least the Pro version -- screams nothing louder to me than "conspicuous consumption". It is the Rolex of laptops, and the sight of a whole bunch of them in one place is frankly grating to me.
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Obviously, hitting the end of physical memory is not the end of the world, especially given that a lot of that memory is cold, but I still don't like being too close to the top. I'm guessing that this is even more important with a laptop, because spilling to disk increases disk usage, and therefore consumes more power.
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total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 906816 422556 484260 0 37412 188404 -/+ buffers/cache: 196740 710076 Swap: 1542200 0 1542200Take "used" (422556) and subtract "buffers" and "cached" (which will expand with file usage to fill much of any memory you have at all) to get 196740 actually used.
I would agree overall with Abe's statement that a cheaper laptop generally does fine as far as most tasks go. Obviously, a nice screen, warranty plan, and sufficient RAM, etc. will cost you a bit more. I don't really have a sense for going rates these days but over $2000 seems definitely on the high side.
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1. Quartz used to keep the bitmap of every window in RAM. It plays more conservation tricks than it used to (e.g., compressing the bitmaps), but AIUI this is still basically true.
2. Firefox leaks a lot of RAM. My primary workload on my 1 GB PowerBook G4 is Firefox, which regularly starts swapping after it's been running for a couple weeks. (My regular tab load is ~50 open tabs.) After a month, it's swapping so badly it's hardly usable. Given that I hate shutting down Firefox (I use SessionSaver but don't trust it hugely), 1 GB isn't really sufficient. YMMV.
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start with whatever form factor you like the most, then buy what you can afford.
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