Buying a New laptop: I need urgent help!

[AlexMR]

[Rhound50]

[Kuso]

go for dell or ibm... hps are hit and miss.

[Johnny Hughes]

Check out the wonderful answers that I got for the same question under Help. I Want to Buy My God Daughter a New Computer

[MVPSPORTS]

[AlexMR]

Does somebody know the difference between the Pentium M and and the Pentium 4 processor??

That is what I want to know because I havent worked with the M and i know the Pentium 4 is extremely fast. I´ve notice the systems with P4 are more expensive also..in some cases.

[MVPSPORTS]

[GooperMC]

The PM is a great processor. Clock cycle for clock cycle it destroys the P4 (which means a 2.4 PM is much faster then a 2.4 P4).

Checkout this link: http://www.systemshootouts.org/processors.html

The only think that the P4 has over the PM is hyperthreading, which is suppose to help multitasking (I can give you more details if you want them). Overall, the PM is a much better laptop chip then the P4. It gives around the same performance with much less power usage. That also means less fans, which means a quieter laptop, and a cooler laptop.

I concur about the Inspirion 9300. Dell occasionally has great coupons, wait for one of those and buy it, or you can get refebs on ebay for cheap.

[tetsuo]

From what little I know..

Pentium M is effectively a kind of souped-up PIII (big onboard caches etc) but optimized for mobile technology in that it uses less wattage. It is also less powerful and costs a bit more right now. It's normally part of Intel's Centrino solution which is pretty much the standard for Wintel laptops at the moment.

Standard Pentium 4 costs less ($/Hz) and is more powerful but will suck your battery dry a lot quicker.

Roughly speaking, if performance is your main priority then you should be looking at a desktop anyway, so go for an M for mobile. Get 1Gb RAM and a speedy disk and you'll be flying - unless you plan to re-render Lord of the Rings or something..

One last thing - I don't think you can compare PM and P4 speeds directly, they're a bit like apples and oranges. From what I know you can multiply an M4 speed by around 1.5 or more to get effective performance (because of the optimizations like bigger caches, different cache algorithms etc).

HTH.

[Cardman]