Wait for Yonah?

[NotebookNovice]

Hi.

My wife is ready to trade-in her five (?) year old Dell pentium II notebook. Should we wait for the Intel Yonah based notebooks to come out? She'll be starting grad school at the beginning of March and will definitely need a new one by then. Does anyone know if the new notebooks will be out by then?

We've looked at a few makes and models that are out now. 14" widescreen looks to be the right size. The Asus W3V seems very nice. We also like the 13" Sony. But that gets very pricey when you option it out. MSI Computer has just come out with a 14" widescreen. Anyone have an opinion on them? Averatec makes a 13" widescreen, but that has a kind of cheap feel to it. Agree or disagree?

Her notebook will be used primarily for work and school. No game playing.

One more thing. How come no one (except Apple) uses a slot loading dvd drive? Is it just cost?

Thanks.

 

[bpgunning]

The Yonah just came out like this week. It is not worth it. For significantly less expensive you can get a regular Pentium M notebook or even better an Athlon 64 (or Turion 64 mobile) processor. The Athlon 64 beats out the Pentium 4 in most categories and still manages good battery life. While the Pentium M gets the best battery life, it is not as performance-oriented. The only thing the Yonah (now officially called Core Duo) is good for is multitasking. Because it has literally 2 processors slapped on top of one another, it can run many programs with little loss in performance. The thing about the Athlon 64 is that it, unlike the Core Duo, can run 64 bit programs, the future of computing. While 64 bit programs are not commonly in use, they will be in the next few years. In addition, the Core Duo is currently only available on 17" laptops, which is not what you are looking for. Go to www.hp.com and check out their 14.1" Turion 64 laptops. They get excellent battery life and will not need to be upgraded in the near future.

From what I understand, you are looking for something highly portable that gets good battery life with still enough power for some pretty tough programs. If I am right, I would go with the Turion 64 or Athlon 64. The Pentium M is a fine choice as well, but will not have as much to offer in the future.

To answer your question, it is possible to find slot-loading drives on certain laptops, but yes they are significantly more expensive and require a small motor to pull in/push out the disk.

And to habitat87, don't wait for the Intel processors to come out on the Macs. AMD overall makes better processors for the money.