[KLUG Members] Opinons on a laptop, please?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >>> 80GB 4200RPM hard drive
> >> Ouch, floor sweepings for sure on that one. Nice size, but  
> >> sllooowwwww...
> Yes, sloww....

Agree, whatever it may be worth in battery life a slow drive will ruin
the systems performance;  unfortunately it seems most laptop hard drives
have bad performance, so it is picking between bad and worse.  You can
get around this to a degree by piling on RAM,  one should always
completely max out a laptops memory capacity - get a model that accepts
at least 2Gb.  Otherwise the nicest laptop is like running XP on a PII.

> >hey now! My PowerBook has such a drive, and I'll have you know that  
> >it is fully capable of accomplishing most hard disk I/O tasks in  
> >under 24 hours!
> Very encouraging! :)
> I'll only run "most hard disk I/O tasks" on it!

Right, there is no option to help this either;  you can't add secondary
drives, upgrade to a real bus (SCSI), etc...  This is singularly the
most annoying thing about switching to primarily using a laptop - one
lonely spindle.

> >In all seriousness, i haven't seen any "real" proof that such slow  
> >drives are that much better for battery life... at least as tested in  
> >PowerBooks :) And opting for the 4200 RPM drive in my powerbook over  
> >the 5400 rpm model was one of the worst $50 I've ever saved...
> Why?
> [1] Worst $50 because the slower I/O is really a crippling factor?

Yes.

> [2] Worst $50 because it really doesn't lengthen battery life.

Yes

> [3] Some combination of the above?

Yes

> [4] Something else....

Your hair will turn gray waiting for the system to boot, log you in,
start OOo, or perform anything resembling real database work.  But, hey,
new ones now ship with crazy-fast 64 bit processors,  accompanied by
paltry RAM and a crappy hard drive.