Laptop memory

[minduka]

Hi
I am playing to buy a laptop for college in a few months. My choices for company are Compaq or Toshiba. I was looking at the memory and I found out that some had 256mb at 266Mhz and some with 512mb at 133Mhz. Can you tell me which is faster?

Which company would you reccomend, performance, service, compatibility, design and portability wise. Thanks

[stant093]

i would say go with 256mb at 266Mhz. if its just for school you probably wont need 512, and the 256 has a faster bus speed.....just my $.02

266mhz is faster, as for a company i have always been fond of Dell. A friend just got the inspirion 8600, very sweet machine

[minduka]

I am also going to use programs like photoshop 7, flash mx and 3d games.

I'm asian so I don't know much about dell, but i heard it was a huge company in the US. Wouldn't toshiba be better for portability? And i'm planning to buy it here, since they have korean windows and other stuff..

Can someone also tell me about L2 cache? 1mb compared to 512kb. Thanks

[Omardeth]

if you plan on doing photo editing i would put 512 in at least . i would go with the toshiba over the compaq , in my personal experence it seems that the displays on them are better . the fujitsu display is stunning if you have them in your market .

as far as L2 cache . that is memory that is on the die of the cpu . it really doesn't come intoplay unless you use a program that takes advantage of it . games don't really use L2 but programs like photo editing do . flash mx might , i don't know for sure if it does or not i have never used it . so if the programs that u use take advantage of the L2 cache memory then the more you have the better it is .

[SeanC]

Go with Toshiba. We've never had problems with them at my work. We have like 6 or 7 of them from the Pentium 133 era.

Stay away from IBM and Dell, every new IBM and Dell I've bought at my work have had the displays fail after 1 year.

As for Compaq, I only have limited experience with their equipment. One P3 600. I find it gets VERY hot, VERY quickly. So be careful of those as well.

Sean

[minduka]

Thanks for your replies

Do you know if there are centrino processors with hyperthreading technology?

[HeadBand]

i would say toshiba or dell

there are no centrino's with ht because ht uses up a LOT of power and centrino is ment to be low power

i would go with a P4 unless you really care about battery life centrino is usually about 6hrs per charge and p4 should be around 4

[minduka]

I heard that the actual running time is 2hrs, and not 4hrs.

Companies should work trying to improve battery life instead of making such crazy processors or adding a whole bunch of useless things

[PoonDoggy]

If you are doing high graphics programs...ie: Photoshop, video etc...Do not go with the Centrino. Even though it has a 1 mb cache the processor is slower.

You are looking for a desktop replacement, it sounds like to me, P4 is the way to go.

Centrino battery life on a full charge will get you 6 - 8 hours...depending on what you are doing.

From what my clients have told me and my own research I have done, Toshiba is one of the better laptops.