Thanks Alexm ,

I appreciate your sharing in of experience with Toshibas. These days most of the HD s are 5400 so that a constant .

It appears that celeron has come of age with the core2duo which uses less power than the Pentium dual core and hence increasing battery life in a laptop.

But I agree with your statement that more RAM will help the system perform better.

Gateway is giving the 1st configuration for CAD 600/- @ BestBuy and HP is selling the 2nd for CAD 800/- @ futureshop.

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Fido.

Anyone here using MACs?
I've never used macs before because most of the apps i use are for pc but have been hearing some good things about the macbook especially since they can now run windows os.
Some older benchmark tests
http://macanimationpro.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=45099

Also anyone have any info about the quad proc notebooks due out this year? I'm in 2 minds to wait for them.

I'm leaning towards my first ever mac.

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Fido - If you are ok with refurbished (6 mo warranty) notebooks Dell offers them. You can get pretty good discounts. It depends on your comfort level; I would be ok given the level of savings and that you get the reasonable warranty. Here's the link:
http://dfsdirect.ca/

Jake - Unless you plan on the quad core machine for very demanding simultaneous tasks, multiple cores do not give that much of an advantage. I have an AMD Athlon dual core desktop system and it is plenty fast for what I do. I think I do more than the average user - SQL Server, Microsoft development, multiple browser windows etc. and I have never felt the lack of horsepower.
Personally I don't read too deeply into benchmarks because I have not been able to differentiate (in normal use) between one system and another that may have a 10% difference.
IMHO, MacBook Pros are way too expensive - you pay a lot mostly for the luxury of having a dedicated GPU. The lower end MacBooks are nice systems, a little expensive.

Tnx alexm,
Actually in my line of work it does make a diff since I often render 3d application and like to work on other resource hungry programs at the same time. My work mainly consists of design and high end 3d animation/fx/compositing/editing etc. all of which are resource hungry. Multiple procs also mean faster rendering times for me e.g. a frame takes about 45 mins to render on a 2.8ghz machine can do with 2 -3 additional processors helping out. Especially since we are talking 30 fps for a 10 minute animation.
Dedicated GPU helps in this line of work as you can imagine.

Any idea on when the 4 proc notebooks are due?

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Quote:

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Originally posted by jake3d

Anyone here using MACs?
I've never used macs before because most of the apps i use are for pc but have been hearing some good things about the macbook especially since they can now run windows os.
Some older benchmark tests
http://macanimationpro.digitalmedianet.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=45099

Also anyone have any info about the quad proc notebooks due out this year? I'm in 2 minds to wait for them.

I'm leaning towards my first ever mac.

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Jake - Intel's roadmap seems to indicate that quad core notebook CPUs will be available around Q3 2008. So add some more time for them to be offered by manufacturers.

If you're looking for powerful (GPU) laptops you may want to consider ASUS - if you're ok with Windows, that is. Built more for the gaming crowd, but great hardware specs.

Me and a friend of mine did something interesting over last weekend. We used his wireless network, he using his brand new Dell Inspiron 1525 with 2GB DDR memory and Intel core duo running Vista. I used my 2 yr old Latitude with Pentium 4, 1 GB Ram and XP. Objective was to see the speed difference etc -it was all manual stuff, loading different websites, opening word docs, printing to PDF etc - what ever we do normally. Hardly felt any difference. As a matter of fact, we felt the docs are opening faster in my old laptop!

Makes one think if it is even worth to go for the latest technology (at a premium) or buy a 4-6 month old technology (and save $$). Anyways the technologies gets outdated in an year.