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Rob Beard wrote:
Thanks for the advice. As I said in a previous reply I like a large screen so I would probably not consider a notebook. I would not want to carry it about really, so weight would not be a problem.At the moment I'm pretty much solely using my laptop (my desktop died about a week after getting my laptop and I haven't had disposable funds to replace it). I find that using a laptop is fine, in fact I do like to put my feet up on the sofa and use my laptop (which is no doubt no good for my posture, and it annoys the wife somewhat). I'd say generally a laptop will be fine depending on what you're doing on the desktop. If you say need some specific hardware (such as a super duper graphics card) then you may not be able to manage, but if you just do things like web browsing, e-mail, then I'm sure a laptop (or maybe even netbook) would be fine.I've found with my notebook, I can do everything on it which I could do with my Quad Core desktop (I've got a dual core Core 2 Duo notebook with a 250GB hard drive and 4GB Ram). I'd say for me, a Phenom X4 CPU was overkill, it's just I got it free from AMD, before that I had a Pentium Dual Core which the wife now has (in fact I'm using it to write this). I tend to do all sorts on my notebook, browsing the web, playing videos, e-mail, a few games, running more than one OS.There is the advantage with a laptop that you can always connect an external display, USB keyboard and mouse etc, pretty much whatever you connect to a desktop, so if you find you need an extra screen etc then it's just usually a case of plugging them in.I'd say the only thing to bear in mind really is that with a laptop it isn't as easy to upgrade some of the components (CPU and graphics card for instance). I upgraded the CPU on the wife's laptop from a Celeron M 1.4 to a Pentium M 1.7, although that's about the highest spec CPU her notebook will take. I also upgraded the memory and hard drive (these are usually fairly easy to upgrade on bigger laptops, on some smaller ones you may need to undo a few more bits to get to the memory slots, and the hard drives tend to be in an easy to open compartment or they slide out the side).So I'd say go for it. I'd personally suggest Dell, I've never had any problems with Dells myself, I've seen a couple of HP/Compaq machines that have dead motherboards which are generally expensive to fix, and a recent Toshiba I used didn't like various Linux distros I chucked at it one bit!Rob
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