Bob said:
set me straight o wise one
Drop that on the flowers and they'll grow Really Big. ;-)
Coupla points, first:
- My personal (hands-on) bias against Toshiba notebooks is dated.
- I personally don't use a notebook (at least today) - for a lot of reasons - fodder for a separate post if anyone's inclined. Any suggestions I provided are based on input from friends (sometimes my hands on to fix problems) & coworkers, and info based on corp purchasing trends (mine and others to which I have indirect personal access).
- Any individual's personal experience should override what I have to say. You feel you have a good thing going, by all means stay with it (way to many subjective factors are involved for "absolutes").
I'll take a brief stab at what appears to be 3 questions in your earlier email:
Toshiba had a stellar opportunity for a berth in corp America when IBM was the only other practical alternative (late '90s thru 2K). They failed miserably on that score 6 years running - my hands on period - combinations of design, hardware, and software issues. The fact that they are now predominately a "WalMart" product speaks volumes. And don't get me wrong - I buy a lot of stuff, electronics included, at WalMart & such places - just not computers (at least not yet).
My "buy Dell" bias on the notebook leveraged corp purchasing info (mine and a couple of other substantial operations). Big outfit has to to aim for lowest practical Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) through a 3 year practical lifespan, providing adequate performance for all tiers of users (e.g. developers, accounting, marketing, etc.). TCO is all direct/indirect cost factors (purchase price, ongoing maint., etc.). User down, for whatever reason, is massively expensive - in the vicinity of $500/hr and up depending on how many/much adjacent people/work impacted. More analysis in this area than I (or any other individual) could ever hope to bring to bear on the question. I know what we're doing, couple other smaller & larger outfits same - good enough for me - that simple.
Why notebooks cost more (than desktops) & processor speed much less even then:
- Power. Notebooks have much less to work with. Processors, disk drives, displays eat a bunch of it. Complex power management hardware/software. Processsors, faster speed, more power.
- Size/Durability. Expensive to downsize. Lighter weight, smaller stuff that must be more durable than equiv. desktop stuff.
- Heat. Faster the processor, more heat generated that must be dissipated - rapidly. Limits to how much heat can be disapated in very small space, especially considering bullet #1. Take a look at the ducts/fans dedicated to cooling the processor inside your 3GHz+ P4 desktop (and don't touch the heat sink - it'll burn the crap out of your little pinkie ;-) ).
- Extra hardware & software (complex/durable) to handle all those cute PCMCIA cards. See how your desktop behaves if you jerk out one of the (internal) cards - just kidding - don't do that!
P4 vs Celeron: At same processor clock speed (GHz), differences in internal cache, supporting chipsets and/or internal/external bus speeds that ultimately translate to rubber on the road for even seemingly simple tasks. Intel charges different money for each for a d*** good reason.
"Just email and word processing..." Like or not, MS didn't come up with a reasonably stable OS until WinXP, and that OS chews up a s***load of processor & mem just to wake up and say howdy. IMHO, 3Ghz P4 proc and about 1GB of memory, disable a bunch of usless services, and the OS is
finally running so it doesn't get in the way of doing simple stuff (OK, so you can get away with maybe 1.3GHz or thereabouts and maybe 512KB of mem but you'll spend more time waiting on the machine
).
Got pix in that email? Chews major proc to yutz that around and "display" it. You use MSWord? Saws through about 15MB of mem just to run up and give you a single blank document - go figure. All that draggy-droppy stuff chews processor and mem like it's going out of style.
Final analysis, lot like car buying. Plenty of subjectivity in the decision (unless you're buying Lexus or MB or Jag or Rolls, etc. ;-) all those "will it run for 200K miles" questions are a given at those price points). Funny - folks will agonize over a $300 or so price delta on a computer (admitedly with a projected zero street value in 5 years) but don't think twice about $50-60K on an auto that'll be worth maybe a fourth (or less) that in the same span - $40K vs $300 - go figure that. :?:
