Laptop recomendations (1 Viewer)

[PhillJones]

I'm looking to get a laptop. I've never owned one so it's very exciting. The thing that it must have is an in-built DVD writer other than that my vague wish list is

1) Tablet. Would be nice but my word doesn't it make it expensive.
2) Not too heavy. I'm not sure how heavy too heavy is but it seems that all the reviews I've read so far say that the particular laptop they reviewed is heavy. I don't know who makes all these legendary light laptops.
3) Screen res of 1280x1024 or thereabouts
4) 1Gb of Ram and with enough power to do a little data crunching without it being too painful but I know I won't be able to get anything with any serious power.


I think that's it. The budget is $1000-$1500 which seems to put a tablet with a built in DVD writer out of reach. I really like the look of the Fujitsu Lifebook T4215 but the cheapest I've seen it is $1700 which is a couple of hundred too much. The Toshiba R25 looks like it might be okay and it's well within budget with a little searching but I've read that it's a brick.

Any thoughts or advice?

 

[Shadow]

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htf/...44#post3184044

 

[Ennsio]

What are you going to use the Tablet aspect for? I just did an evaluation for a college of the use of Tablet PCs by their instructors so I can give some insight on its uses and draw-backs, based on how you would plan to use it.

Another thing I would look at when picking a laptop is the reflective screens that most seem to have now. Many people here on the forum don't like them at all, myself included, because it makes it hard to see the screen from anything less than directly head-on and acts like a mirror to show what is behind you. See if you like that or prefer the regular matte screen.

 

[PhillJones]

The tablet would be for two things

1) Reading articles in portrait mode and making notes directly on the screen
2) Making notes in seminars and conferences where I can have the abstract of the talk up on my screen, make notes and check previous articles by the author at the same time.

 

[Ennsio]

Two very important uses for the Tablet, especially #2, that cannot be achieved on a regular laptop. The instructors I spoke to loved having the ability to take notes in meetings on their Tablets in a way that was not obtrusive at all (can just hold the Tablet in their lap and write on it), and the fact that they could bring up notes from previous meetings or any other supportive files that had relevance. With a Tablet, you've got your whole hard-drive with you in the seminar, but don't have the obtrusiveness of a regular laptop as you don't have to set it up on a table and you're not typing.

My advice would be to figure out how important these uses are for the laptop, and then decide if you need to increase your budget a little bit to get the Tablet aspects. People that have used the tablet aspects of their laptop, such as in the ways you have mentioned, could not imagine going back to a regular laptop again as it made their work so much better.

 

[Shadow]

Interesting. I can see how being able to input text and graphics directly on the screen would be useful. I have done that on my Palm PDA for years and I find it essential on certain circumstances. The thing is that the PDA is always with me, while a larger form factor device might not. On the other hand, having that ability on a larger form factor device than a PDA could be useful, especially if you do that a lot. I guess it depends on your needs.

 

[Francois Caron]

Important detail about tablet PCs: the digitizer could be different along with its behaviour.

I have a two year old HP tc4200 and a new HP TX1220. Both are tablet PCs, but the tc4200 has a proper ACTIVE touchscreen contrary to the TX1220's PASSIVE touchscreen.

A passive touchscreen behaves like a PDA where it only works when there's physical contact with the screen. And the TX1220's touchscreen needs a decent amount of pressure to work properly.

An active touchscreen however doesn't need direct contact to start working. All you need to do is move the pen just above the screen surface just to move the mouse. And writing on the screen of my tc4200 requires LESS pressure than writing on paper (unless you use a fountain pen ).

Even more important, the active touchscreen responds immediately to your every move, making the writing experience almost indistinguishable from writing on paper. A passive touchscreen however can have enough of a delay that the computer needs to catch up with your writing which could be a bit confusing.

But in the end, the determining factor could be price in that a passive touchscreen tablet PC is almost always less expensive than a model with an active touchscreen. In fact, when comparing specs, my old tc4200 is outright anemic when compared with the new TX1220 (Intel Pentium M vs AMD Turion 64, 512 MB vs 2 GB, Intel integrated graphics vs nVidia Go 650, 1024x768 vs 1280x800, 40 GB vs 200 GB). And the tc4200 cost me $2000 while the TX1220 only cost me $1600!

Hope this helps you and doesn't just confuse you even more.

 

[Shadow]

Francois,

How is the battery life affected by each different screen type?

 

[PhillJones]

Thanks for all the input guys. I'm now leaning towards a IBM X41 tablet with the X4 expansion thingy. Now that the X61 is about, the prices of the X41 are real low and you can still get them as open box and factory refurbs with warranty's for less than 1100 including the expansion with in built DVD/CDRW.

The reviews say that they're really well made and the spec seems good enough. The screens lower res than I'd like but you can't have everything.

 

[Francois Caron]

Unfortunately, I have no idea. I suspect it's minimal in both cases since even for the active type, the amount of current required to pick up the location of the pen is probably marginal at best especially when you compare it with the power consumption of other items such as the screen, the hard drive and the processor. Even if I did do a touchscreen test, the two computers have such widely different specs that the results will be meaningless. Already, media playback on the tc4200 lasts half an hour longer than on the TX1220.

 

[PhillJones]

My Thinkpad X41 Tablet and X4 docking station turned up yesterday.

First impression out of the box was that it was thing of beauty, light, small, very well made. The hinge doesn't wobble, the screen doesn't flex and the keyboard feels like it's solid. It was supposed to be refurb but it looks brand new to me, although it didn't come in the original box.

I turned it on and I was a little disappointed at first. It was really slow to boot up. It's also got a lot of bundled software on it which keeps starting up and demanding to be configured and system tray is very bloated. There's no instructions about what all the crap is so I've got to figure out what's actually useful and what's dross that I can just uninstall. So far I've figured out that the 'connection manager' which is some third party thing is pointless and redundant so that went and after doing that and killing the themes service, things seem to be running a little more smoothly. I've yet to figure out what the productivity center and message center do yet. My instinct says they're dross but I don't want to remove anything that's going to actually be something I need because there's no way to put anything back apart from doing a factory system recovery or doing a drive image onto and external hard drive and then restoring if I change my mind, which is kind of limiting and sucky.

I'm going to upgrade the Ram to a gig tonight and at least get rid of the zinio magazine reader. I'm hopeful that it'll be a lot more agile when I've figured out how to optimize it better. I know people with lower specced thinkpads that love them.

So, some questions:

Symantec Firewall: Indispensable security tool for the laptop or pointless duplication of the Windows firewall?

PC-DR: It's going to save my ass one day or it's about as useful as the Windows troubleshooting wizard?
"Make sure that the PC is switched on."
"Did you find this page useful?"

Symantec Antivirus that shipped with the laptop or McAfee 8.5i via the corporate subscription I have access to?

What does the Thinkpad message center do? It sits in the system tray and therefore I suspect it of consuming resources. I suspect it's just going to pop-up every once in a while and try and sell me things.

Cheers guys.