newbie notebook quetsions

[eagle63]

Hi, I'm shopping for a new notebook. (to replace my aging desktop) I've been looking at both gateway and dell, and would appreciate any opinions on either. Also, I'm not sure whether I should spend the extra $$ and get a "mobile" processor or not. From what I understand, a pentium 4 desktop CPU will only operate 1/2 speed when unplugged whereas the mobile will "step down" more gradually to conserve battery power. My laptop will be plugged in the majority of the time. I guess my question is, with everything else being equal is a desktop p4 faster than a mobile p4 when both are plugged in?
Thanks in advance!

 

[RaPTuRe]

There is no difference between P4 and P4-m (they are exactly the same, except that the P4 has SpeedStep disabled, and the P4-m can tolerate much higher temperatures).

The P4-m will SpeedStep down to 1.2GHz on battery (if you want it to, otherwise it will stay at 1.7GHz), I would go with the Dell, because it is more proven, with more support and much better graphics solutions.

Go with mobile

RaPTuRe

Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?

 

[eagle63]

thanks for the quick reply. the main reason I'm considering gateway is becuase there is a gateway store near my home. If I was buying a desktop I wouldn't give a rip, but things do break on notebooks, and it would be nice to have a local shop to bring it to just in case. also, the gatway 600x advertises the ATI Radeon 9000 graphics chip. (64mb) The Dell I'm looking at only seems to offer the 32 mb Nvidia geForce 440. I assume the Radeon is better....

 

[RaPTuRe]

Dell's 3yr Complete Care is very good. They will deliver the notebook to your house to begin with (via UPS), and if anything ever breaks or it needs repair, they will either send a techie to your house, or they will pay for it to be shipped back and repaired.

The Dell does have a M9 64MB. And the Dell is upgradeable, so when u decide ur graphics are in need of replacing, you can put in a new graphics board.

RaPTuRe

Who's General Failure and why's he reading my disk?

 

[eagle63]

Thanks for the answers everyone. One last question I just thought of: how big of a difference in overall performance does bus speed make? I noticed on Dell's website that the Inspiron 8200 advertises a 400 mHz bus speed. I don't know how fast Gateway's chipset is - maybe it's the same?

 

[Skull_Angel]

As far as I know, all the mobile P4's come on motherboards with a 400mhz bus. If you really don't care about battery life (you did say you would be plugged in most of the time). You might look at the desktop P4's with the 533 mhz bus speed. Personally I would go with the battery life because even a 1.7 ghz P4m is plenty fast unless you just have to have the highest benchmark scores