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Linux - Laptop and Netbook Having a problem installing or configuring Linux on your laptop? Need help running Linux on your netbook? This forum is for you. This forum is for any topics relating to Linux and either traditional laptops or netbooks (such as the Asus EEE PC, Everex CloudBook or MSI Wind).

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Old 07-25-2007, 08:00 AM   #1
bakfupai
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Getting a high performance laptop, recommendations?


I'm thinking about getting a laptop and have pretty much narrowed down my choice to two models:
Asus G1S
LG R500-CB11V

(sorry about swedish link, could't find it on the UK site).
Anyway, do you guys have any experience with getting LG and Asus laptops working in GNU/Linux? I'm not too worried with the graphics card since it's nVidia and they tend to work well. But what about the wireless NIC and ACPI?

If any of you have any experience with these laptops, don't hesitate to post.

Ps. I don't care if it's hard, as long as it's doable Ds.
 
Old 07-26-2007, 02:29 AM   #2
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It is doable on either notebook. Intel's Turbo Memory is mainly for Windows Vista. NAND Flash memory does not last long (limited writes and very poor throughput), so it is waste to include it in a notebook.
 
Old 07-27-2007, 05:18 AM   #3
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I have what was considered the "Top of the heap" two years ago, a Dell XPS Gen 2. But that Asus kinda has me jealous, I only wish I had 160 or 200GB drive, and a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, and 4GB of memory. I suppose I still can have most of those goodies, but I already soaked $ 3500.00 in this bad boy.
I would definitely go for the Asus and I wouldn't cheap out knowing my two year old laptop still leaves most new ones in the dust today because I didn't cheap out. I would get at least 2.2GHz processor and at least 160GB drive, you can cheap out on the Vista and go with the Home edition, I have Ultimate on my XPS desktop and it's just taking up hard drive real estate, unless you're really attracted to it's security feature "Bit defender", I know I don't need it. And no less than 2GB of memory. Quite frankly, it may be worth considering getting the full 4GB memory with 200GB drive and run two or three operating systems at the same time with Vmware. Vmware is free if you look in the right place.
The Nvidia card has given others some headaches, still kinda fresh off the assembly line.
 
Old 07-27-2007, 12:45 PM   #4
bakfupai
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I'm thinking about pulling something like:
"I don't agree with the EULA of Windows. I want my money back."
Not sure if it'll work though. Otherwise I'll probably go with home or something if there's no other choice.

I am looking to do some virtualization but mainly with Xen. I am aware of the Geforce 8xxx series problems (for example that it seems to run A LOT slower on linux). Still, I think this is just because they came out recently. They'll probably be fixed before I get this thing hehe.

If both work under GNU/Linux, I'll most likely go for the Asus G1S since the 8600M GT is much stronger than the GS. Anyway, thank you both for the feedback!
 
Old 07-27-2007, 05:11 PM   #5
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There are many sites that have bare-bone notebooks that you can customize or add.

http://www.powernotebooks.com
http://www.discountlaptops.com
http://www.rkcomputer.net
http://www.hypersonic-pc.com


A faster processor does not mean the notebook will be faster. If you select an Hitachi 60 or 80 GB hard drive, the notebook computer will be faster loading programs. The faster processor is only needed when using intense programs like games. A fast processor will consume more power and produce more heat. I would go with a slower processor and spend the money on hard drive and memory. Certain notebook models can use a hard drive in place of the optical drive, so you can have a fast hard drive and high capacity hard drive in one system.

I do not recommend spending your money on Vista unless you really need it.

Sorry to say, Dell notebooks are very, very expensive for their performance and not as durable as other notebooks.
 
Old 07-27-2007, 05:58 PM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Electro
Sorry to say, Dell notebooks are very, very expensive for their performance and not as durable as other notebooks.
Just like most anything you buy, "You get what you pay for". Dell has allot of cheap models because most buyers are cheap. But they also cater to those who are more concerned about performance than price. I have Everest Ultimate Edition on my USB pen drive because I need it for computer repair, it does some basic benchmarking tests. My XPS machines are still at the top of the comparison list as far as performance goes with the latest edition of Everest, and there is usually a large gap in speed between them and the second example in the list.
Everybody on the large job sites I sometimes work at wants to know where there laptop sits on these lists, so I plug in the USB pen drive and run Everest for them, only takes a couple minutes or so. Haven't come across another laptop that hit the top of the list yet. Which just goes to show that the top of the heap two years ago according to every PC magazine, is still top of the heap. I got lucky, they quit making the XPS Gen 2 soon after I bought it and things got smaller in the XPS line.

Most people don't realize the trend that has taken place over the past couple years, two years ago an Intel 3.6GHz or 3.8GHz clock speed with hyper threading was readily available in a high end machine, but processor manufacturers reached a pinnacle in clock speed where you can over clock a 3.8GHz to 4GHz in a consumer level personal computer. Anything higher than that was too expensive to cool in a consumer level personal computer. So they turned to dual core processors to offer something "new & different", but also backed up the clock speed soon after to around 2GHz on most models, so that over the next few years they can still offer "newer, better" technology as they slowly bring the clock speed back to where it was two years ago at somewhere around 4GHz. Hopefully by then there will be affordable cooling technology that will allow them to surpass the 4GHz clock speed in a consumer level personal computer.
A dual core does not necessarily out-perform hyper threading, at least not according to Everest Ultimate Edition, my 3.4GHz Pentium 650 out-performs a 3GHz dual core, because it has better clock speed, and can still multi-task because of the hyper threading.
 
Old 07-27-2007, 08:43 PM   #7
tellef
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You should buy an IBM/Lenovo laptop.
They are predictable, have good linux compatibility and are physically rock solid. At least for the consumer market. I recently got a T60, and it outperforms my desktop which is technically a bit better. And it does not have crappy little things here and there, it is just a computer. With an airbag on tha hard-drive in case you drop it and a coffee-proof keyboard with drains. Have you ever spilled a drink in your lappy?
 
Old 07-27-2007, 10:54 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Junior Hacker
Just like most anything you buy, "You get what you pay for". Dell has allot of cheap models because most buyers are cheap. But they also cater to those who are more concerned about performance than price. I have Everest Ultimate Edition on my USB pen drive because I need it for computer repair, it does some basic benchmarking tests. My XPS machines are still at the top of the comparison list as far as performance goes with the latest edition of Everest, and there is usually a large gap in speed between them and the second example in the list.
Everybody on the large job sites I sometimes work at wants to know where there laptop sits on these lists, so I plug in the USB pen drive and run Everest for them, only takes a couple minutes or so. Haven't come across another laptop that hit the top of the list yet. Which just goes to show that the top of the heap two years ago according to every PC magazine, is still top of the heap. I got lucky, they quit making the XPS Gen 2 soon after I bought it and things got smaller in the XPS line.

Most people don't realize the trend that has taken place over the past couple years, two years ago an Intel 3.6GHz or 3.8GHz clock speed with hyper threading was readily available in a high end machine, but processor manufacturers reached a pinnacle in clock speed where you can over clock a 3.8GHz to 4GHz in a consumer level personal computer. Anything higher than that was too expensive to cool in a consumer level personal computer. So they turned to dual core processors to offer something "new & different", but also backed up the clock speed soon after to around 2GHz on most models, so that over the next few years they can still offer "newer, better" technology as they slowly bring the clock speed back to where it was two years ago at somewhere around 4GHz. Hopefully by then there will be affordable cooling technology that will allow them to surpass the 4GHz clock speed in a consumer level personal computer.
A dual core does not necessarily out-perform hyper threading, at least not according to Everest Ultimate Edition, my 3.4GHz Pentium 650 out-performs a 3GHz dual core, because it has better clock speed, and can still multi-task because of the hyper threading.
Hyperthreading is a gimmick. It turns a processor into two virtual processors that divides its cache in half. Some tasks do not rely on processor speed. Loading programs relies on the speed (accessing time) of the hard drive. The tasks that rely on processor speed are emulators, some games, software 3D rendering, video encoding, sound encoding, and image processing. Soon processor speed will be lower again because DSP will be included for these specialized tasks.

A multi-processor system is not new and different. People that have used a multi-processor computer experience more responsiveness of the OS and programs they were using. Intel and AMD could have added two processors in one chip back in 2000 or earlier even though Sparc and PowerPC processors already contain a few. Intel's multi-processor chips are modular, so the comparison between a single processor and multi-processor design is poor because the connection between the two processors in the chip is not efficient. If you compare an overclocked AMD Athlon64 X2 chip, the Pentium 650 will be beaten because the memory bandwidth is a lot wider, separate L2 cache, and the processor is designed as a whole instead being separate. Though AMD does have a high performance single processor chip.

Dell notebooks has the same speed as other notebook manufactures or ODM. I do not recommend relying on benchmarks of one program to do your decision. Benchmarks do lie, so you have to rely what hardware it contains to do a true comparison.
 
Old 07-28-2007, 12:34 AM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Electro
Hyperthreading is a gimmick. It turns a processor into two virtual processors that divides its cache in half.
When it was first introduced it appeared to be a gimmick, but eventually refining the technology made it a viable design. The traditional core before hyper threading was sort of divided in chunks, the largest was somewhere around 30% which was dedicated to graphics only, other sections were dedicated to controllers, others for buses, data processing, etc. The idea behind hyper threading was to make use of those sections of the processor that were not being used/used to full capacity when the component/task it was dedicated too was not in use. Let's face it, when you're playing games on-line at pogo.com, the better part of your processor is sort of sitting idle. Hyper threading allows me to run resource intensive tasks like scrubbing a 120GB image of a hard drive for lost data while I converse here in the forums opening web pages at normal speed (multi-tasking). With my prior computer, it could take 5 to 10 minutes to open a new web page without hyper threading when there's a resource intensive task running in the background, I'm on dial-up, I know the obvious difference between the two.
EDIT: I figured I should also mention that most people look at hyper threading technology through a narrow tube. There is a misconception that hyper threading makes two processors out of one. Hyper threading is designated as Symmetrical Multi Processor (SMP), not to fool the consumer into thinking they get two processors out of one, rather it is for operating systems to take advantage of the technology by not having to make major changes in the kernel to accommodate it, rather just install a SMP kernel to take advantage of the technology which just manages processor resources better, allowing multi-tasking capabilities, it can be minimal at times, it can also be significant depending on the state of the system (it fluctuates).
Although the Core 2 Duo is more suited to a desktop environment, it is an exceptional performer when it comes to power consumption and keeping it's cool. I could have bought a Pentium 640 in a laptop from HP when I bought mine, but I opted to go for a true mobile processor, the 2.18GHz Pentium M which can perform as well as a Pentium 630 because of the different technology (no un-necessary processes running in the background) , the battery life is twice that of a desktop style processor. Something to consider when buying a laptop, are you always going to be near a receptacle? I could also get an extra half hour battery life when using a laptop optimized kernel when I had Mandriva installed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tellef
With an airbag on tha hard-drive in case you drop it and a coffee-proof keyboard with drains. Have you ever spilled a drink in your lappy?
This would surely be a retailer's nightmare. After all, the market is very tight in the "under $1500.00 US" laptop market. The best profit for the retailer comes by selling you an extended 3 year warranty for $300.00, not the profit made from the sale of the laptop. And "spilled drinks" is one of the best tactics they use to get that extra three hundred quid. I found that if you spend more than $1500.00 US you can safely avoid making the mistake I made by buying that extended warranty. Just buy a well padded carrying case or back pack to avoid drop damage. But those laptops for $1200.00 US or less are more likely to develop lost pixels in the display, so you should get the extended warranty on a cheap one, which brings you back to the price of a better quality laptop.

Last edited by Junior Hacker; 07-28-2007 at 01:50 AM.
 
Old 07-28-2007, 10:22 PM   #10
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Junior Hacker
When it was first introduced it appeared to be a gimmick, but eventually refining the technology made it a viable design. The traditional core before hyper threading was sort of divided in chunks, the largest was somewhere around 30% which was dedicated to graphics only, other sections were dedicated to controllers, others for buses, data processing, etc. The idea behind hyper threading was to make use of those sections of the processor that were not being used/used to full capacity when the component/task it was dedicated too was not in use. Let's face it, when you're playing games on-line at pogo.com, the better part of your processor is sort of sitting idle. Hyper threading allows me to run resource intensive tasks like scrubbing a 120GB image of a hard drive for lost data while I converse here in the forums opening web pages at normal speed (multi-tasking). With my prior computer, it could take 5 to 10 minutes to open a new web page without hyper threading when there's a resource intensive task running in the background, I'm on dial-up, I know the obvious difference between the two.
EDIT: I figured I should also mention that most people look at hyper threading technology through a narrow tube. There is a misconception that hyper threading makes two processors out of one. Hyper threading is designated as Symmetrical Multi Processor (SMP), not to fool the consumer into thinking they get two processors out of one, rather it is for operating systems to take advantage of the technology by not having to make major changes in the kernel to accommodate it, rather just install a SMP kernel to take advantage of the technology which just manages processor resources better, allowing multi-tasking capabilities, it can be minimal at times, it can also be significant depending on the state of the system (it fluctuates).
Although the Core 2 Duo is more suited to a desktop environment, it is an exceptional performer when it comes to power consumption and keeping it's cool. I could have bought a Pentium 640 in a laptop from HP when I bought mine, but I opted to go for a true mobile processor, the 2.18GHz Pentium M which can perform as well as a Pentium 630 because of the different technology (no un-necessary processes running in the background) , the battery life is twice that of a desktop style processor. Something to consider when buying a laptop, are you always going to be near a receptacle? I could also get an extra half hour battery life when using a laptop optimized kernel when I had Mandriva installed.
You are not understanding about Hyperthreading and what the processor is actually doing. There are no graphic section in Intel processors. The controllers in pre Pentium 4 days were not programmed to handle Hyperthreading yet. As Intel started to notice AMD K7 processors beat them, Intel re-program the controllers in Pentium 4 to handle Hyperthreading. Hyperthreading just shares the resources of the CPU so the OS sees two or more processors. I bet you, if you use two Celeron processors with out Hyperthreading, they will be similar to a single processor with Hyperthreading enabled. Hyperthreading does not widen the bandwidth because it actually gets smaller. Hyperthreading does not help the processor with intense applications because one of the threads are lacking L1 and L2 cache, so it have to go to the main memory for more. The only areas of computing where Hyperthreading shines is multi-tasking of lesser intense programs such as e-mail, web browsing, listening to audio, watching TV and movies, and serving lite FTP and Web (no server side scripts) content.

Go to http://www.2cpu.com/articles/42_2.html

Quote:
Originally Posted by Junior Hacker
This would surely be a retailer's nightmare. After all, the market is very tight in the "under $1500.00 US" laptop market. The best profit for the retailer comes by selling you an extended 3 year warranty for $300.00, not the profit made from the sale of the laptop. And "spilled drinks" is one of the best tactics they use to get that extra three hundred quid. I found that if you spend more than $1500.00 US you can safely avoid making the mistake I made by buying that extended warranty. Just buy a well padded carrying case or back pack to avoid drop damage. But those laptops for $1200.00 US or less are more likely to develop lost pixels in the display, so you should get the extended warranty on a cheap one, which brings you back to the price of a better quality laptop.
A warranty and/or protection for a notebook computer protects your investment more than a desktop computer. A two year warranty is the least that I suggest to get because murphy's law will get you at the last month of your warranty. A well padded notebook computer case does not protect it from dropping it at a four foot (1.21 meter). The padding just adds protection from the abuse of carrying the computer from one destination and then to the next. Mechanical hard drives are not meant to be dropped, so the airbag analogy becomes a useless selling point. Solid-state hard drives can be dropped because they are very resistant to very, very high G forces. Solid-state hard drives are very, very expensive costing several thousand US dollars for few tens of gigabytes. The solid-state hard drives that I am thinking is from bitmicro.

All LCD monitors will suffer dead pixels because the manufacturing of these devices are complex (several steps), so there is no way getting around it. Buying the best notebook computer will always has the same problems as the cheap-os.

I am thinking of buying a Lenevo Thickpad T61. The reason is it is tougher than other notebooks that I have seen and used. Keys on Thickpads are built stronger and it has a Trackpoint which I always liked. The screen and body of Thickpads are stronger too.
 
Old 07-29-2007, 02:50 AM   #11
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The original article I read was from Tom's Hardware guide (.com), way back when hyper threading was still in development. I vaguely remember a simplified explanation using a boxed graph to sort of interpret how certain percentages of the earlier Pentiums were allocated/dedicated to certain tasks, the largest single demanding process being graphics. Let's face it, there are only so many transistors in a processor and no software layer is going to add to that. Sounds to me like were kind of saying the same things only different.
As for warranty, I do allot of computer repair, high end desktops are rare in my shop but have been in my shop. But genuine hardware failure is normally not the reason it made an appearance, it's usually neglect on the owner's part that brings them here. Cheap desktops make up at least 95% of the business, and genuine hardware failure is common. High end laptops have not been here, mostly because very few people buy them, and those that do, take it to the dealership if need be, but not too many high end laptop owners complain about their unit, but the human reaction may be to blame, (don't want to admit to wasting money, "it was money well spent"). Cheap laptops, people do ask if it can be fixed, but usually chuck it and buy another when they here the hourly rate, most of them don't buy the extended warranty.
You may call it Murphy's law, I tend to call it strategic sales tactics. I bought a new car audio for a good price that came with free installation. The salesman asked me if I want to buy the extra one year warranty, "if you don't use the warranty and the device does not come in for repair, you get your money back" he said. I figured, well how can I loose, so I fell for it. Over the course of the next year and a half or so, I had to bring the device in four times to get a resistor replaced, the fourth time the store owner said "this is the fourth time for the same resistor?, maybe we should tell the shop to fix it good, right?" and I said "well yeaaaah!". The warranty ended two months after and here I am a year later and the damn thing has never broke down again. In hindsight, I ask myself????, was this unit rigged so that I would not come crawling back for the $90.00 warranty refund?.
 
Old 07-29-2007, 04:42 AM   #12
bakfupai
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Thanks for the replies but I doubt I'll go for a laptop with a P4 (hello overheating). Anyway, Electro, the links you provided doesn't seem to ship to Sweden very easily but I did find a similar company here in Sweden so now the choice stands between the Asus G1S and a custom configured laptop that is slightly cheaper and actually performs better (I went with your advice and configured it with a 100GB SATA 7200RPM drive instead of an 5400RPM disk).

Also, I'm thinking, is it really worth putting 4gb of memory in it? Will that really give that much of a performance boost? I mean, most OSes I run in Xen only use about 128 mb each. And as for games, I haven't seen any that require more than 2 gb. And I can get 2gb of 800 mhz memory for a lot cheaper than I can get 4gb of 667 mhz memory (4gb of 800 mhz memory isn't an option).
 
Old 07-31-2007, 12:24 AM   #13
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Rarely a faster RPM hard drives are faster. In my previous post, only Hitachi 60 GB and 80 GB SATA hard drives are the fastest 2.5 inch devices. This does not mean that other brands for 2.5 inch with 7200 RPM will also be fast. Hard drives with high RPM keeps the sustain rate high, but does not improve accessing times. If manufactures takes the actuator (voice coil) of the heads from a SCSI drive with ~5 ms and put them in a hard drive unit that has an RPM of 4400 or 5400, the accessing time will be around 5 ms. The reason why they do not do this is because consumer grade hard drives are test beds for server grade units.

When using 4 GB of RAM, a 64-bit OS needs to be used unless you do not mind losing about 800 MB to help address the space. I suggest go with 2 GB. An Intel Core 2 Duo has very, very good memory fetching algorithms, so faster memory becomes costly for no gain in performance. Though faster memory will help better with Intel's integrated graphics.
 
Old 07-31-2007, 12:54 AM   #14
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I suggest going with 4GB memory if you plan on setting up a virtual machine or two. I'm quite pleased with 1GB right now, but I sure would like to go back to a virtual system, I have vmware and have run Windows XP as a guest within Debian. But Debian was ridiculously slow compared to when it had the full GB of memory because Windows needs memory also, which is borrowed from the host, and Windows was retarded also because of a lack of memory. My hard drive was grinding non-stop because it was working from swap due to a lack of ram. I got rid of the virtual system till I get more ram, and 2GB will not be enough as far as I'm concerned because I need to run Mac OS X also. I'd rather not be working off the hard drive (swap) for memory needs as it severely reduces battery life, not to mention the mean time of the drive, and slow responsiveness.
 
Old 09-02-2007, 03:21 PM   #15
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I agree with tellef: buy a T60 or T61, business line, rock solid, I never broke anything in the last ten years. Had 3 of them and still in use... linux compatibility perfect... performance depending on the money you would like to spend and the ingredients...

dell business line nevertheless is also an option...

both are quite expensive, thats for sure*g
 
  


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