[KLUG Members] Opinons on a laptop, please?

[Robert G. Brown]

On Thu, 26 Jan 2006 06:26:38 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:

>> >>> 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.
Looks like bad is 5400, worse is 4200. I had to look a bit to find anything
faster in a form factor the MIGHT fit this thing; for $180, I saw a drive
of the same size in 7200 RPM (8 MB cache, too)from Hitachi. While this is 
not a speed demon, I can see how it will perform better than a 4200 RPM device.

It looks like there are very real tradeoffs between cost, size/weight, and
performance. You can probably have (more or less) any 2 of the above. The
drive I did find is almost 1/4 the price of the laptop being discussed,
including the hard drive installed. I just paid about $40 for a faster drive
with twice the storage, for a conventional system.

The laptop is also going to be dropped....

>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.
This unit does have more memory than I would expect for the price, and 
they are probably masking some otherwise poor[er] performance with that.
I suppose they've studied user behavior and see that many run a browser
and one or two other apps, like a word processor and a mail client.

>> >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...
Well, you can add money and buy premium drive that are faster. The limit
is that the installed (and non-replacable, I'm betting) controller will
limit the performance you're going to get; a faster drive might simply be
wasting money.

>This is singularly the most annoying thing about switching to primarily
>using a laptop - one lonely spindle.
Yeah, this is one reason why I'm not switching to a laptop, but I am
starting to see reasons for owning one, and this is one of several options
I'm examining. Another is buying a used laptop from a friend of mine with
about half the resources (except memory), for about half the cost and 
maybe twice the weight.

What would YOU do in this situation, and why?

>> >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.
We know this, but we're not dealing in absolutes here, but in tradeoffs.
If most users are doing browsing and word processing, disk I/O does not
seem to be a major factor in practice, at least not enough to be annoying.
Startup time is a bother, but it happens once per work session, not all
the time.

>> [2] Worst $50 because it really doesn't lengthen battery life.
>Yes
Then there's got to be some other benefit to this, like lowering costs
and thus purchase price to the end-user, which makes the system more
competitive in the marketplace.

>> [3] Some combination of the above?
>Yes
Sure, but wihtout some quantification this answer doesn't help a whole 
lot!:)
I think of these decisions like a surface here you find a place that has
acceptable performance, price, and size/weight values.

To the extent you're strong, patient or poor, you'll make do with something
larger, slower, or cheaper... otherwise your balance will be something else.

>> [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.
Probably this design is dictated by the use of the products, and the current
economics of manufacture, etc.

One of my biggest personal concerns with laptops is that they get dropped 
and kicked around a lot (this is relative, a desktop unit is going to sit
in one place for the great majority of its life), and the drive is going to
get harmed at some point. Overall, is a drive is slower because the money
went to making it more rugged, that's probably a good idea, since slower is
better than not working at all if the thing has been dropped a few times...

Now, *I* will not drop *MY* laptop [:-)], but I don't want my good friend
and client to come back to me desperate to get back critical information
(yes, we all preach the backup message, but do users practice that? Where?)
when (not if) the HDD is past tense....

Thought on this, anyone?
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---