[Cialug] OT: laptop criteria

[David Champion]

Optical drive options. Do you need CDRW? DVD?

Most don't ship with floppy drives, which isn't a big deal to most 
people. You can get an external USB floppy drive for under $20.

Ports - Many laptops don't have serial of paralell ports any more.

Disk speed, if you're doing anything very disk intensive... Many laptops 
ship with 4200 rpm drives - because they're quite, cool, and use less 
power. But if you want performance, you'll want to get a 5400 or 7200 
rpm drive.

There was recently an article on tomshardware.com about laptop HD 
speeds. Even the fastest ATA laptop drive was much slower than a desktop 
drive.

You will shortly (maybe already?) be able to buy laptops with SATA 
drives, which should help a lot.

Graphics cards - not an issue for most office users. IMHO the shared 
memory graphics cards are junk.

Oh, speaking of memory... Make sure you can order a relatively large 
amount of memory on ONE chip, so you can add more on a 2nd chip later if 
needed. Many entry level laptops come with a small amount of memory on 2 
chips like 2 x 128mb, so to upgrade it, you usually end up throwing that 
all away.

-dc

Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> I'm making a list of laptop criteria to guide a future company purchase,
> anybody see anything glaringly absent from this list? I'm going to have
> everybody rate the criteria 1-n where n is the number of criteria to see
> what they *think* is most important to them.
> 
> 
> Weight
> Physical size
> Screen size and resolution
> Built-in Connectivity -ethernet/wireless/bluetooth/modem
> Computer speed
> Disk Storage size
> Battery life
> Strength/resiliency - how many drops after the first one until it breaks.
> 
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -Nate
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