Need to be brought up to speed with current LAPTOPS!

It's ours! It belongs to us!

I don't know...... I've had such bad experiences with HPs.

But the warranty/parts/price/free upgrades... Doesn't look bad. Let me know how it works out for you.

 

If you blow all your damn money on that laptop, your wife ain't gonna (F***) make love to you cause you aint got no money for the GI Joe wit da Kung Fu grip!

 

Well George, the Russian wheat harvest ain't gonna be as bad as everybody thinks..........

 

Eoooo OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
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They're panicking out there, I feel it!

 

Hey Mortimer, you dropped your moneyclip!

 

Well done William, very well done!

 

Your 2.7GHz laptop was most probably a Pentum4 based laptop. However in the last 1,5 years Intel Corp. hit a thermal barrier with the Pentium 4 CPU core design. When they wanted to clock it to 4GHz and beyond it started to use so much power (135Watt) that it became literally boiling hot. They initially thought the Pentium4 blueprint will be good up to 10GHz, but it looks like that was only in theory and the engineering reality was not there.

So they had to find a way out of the dead end. They threw the Pentium4 CPU core into the wastebin and applied the earlier PentiumIII-Tualatin CPU core to the Pentium4's bus. This strange hybrid became known as the "Pentium M" (note there are no numbers in the name!) or by the well-known codename "Dothan" or the chipset name "Centrino".

The original PIII-Tualatin was 1400MHz fast, but in the Pentium-M reincarnation Intel tweaked it to 2,2GHz and even faster. However, it will never reach the 3800MHz the fastest-ever Pentium4 got. The two designs are different and Pentium-M is not about pure clockspeed.

True Pentium-M based laptops, also known as "Dothan" or "Centrino" use suprisingly little electricity and run for a long time on batteries (maybe 5 hrs). They also do not get hot because of their low wattage. Their performance is quite good, as the P-III core does more work for a single clock cycle than a Pentium4 core does. Unless you are running CAD or creating Pixar animated movies for Hollywood on your laptop, then Pentium-M CPU is a very good choice.

If you are into ultra-portability and extreme battery life (9-10hrs) notebook then there are ultra-low voltage versions of Pentium-M, which barely uses any electricity. It runs about 1.2 to 1.4 GHz only, enough for office suites and watching multimedia, but not creating it.

There are other alternatives.

Please avoid any Celeron-M or VIA-C3 based laptops, those are cheaper versions that do not have the battery-saving sppedstep technology and also lack the big CPU cache which is mandatory for good performance. The Transmeta CPU is a dead technology now, I don't know if such laptops are still being sold or not, so just mention it.

Laptops powered by regular Pentium4 CPU or "Pentium4-M" use very big amount of electricity and can get extremely hot. Those are only for people who need outrageous numeric performance, that takes prcedent over size and other portability issues.

There are AMD CPU powered laptops, the Turion64 CPU is the most powerful, but it still about at least 2x as much juice as the Pentium-M (centrino). However, it is more advanced, it has full 64-bit architecture, while the Pentium is 32-bit on the inside. I think this issue is NOT yet significant on a laptop, so don't over-emphasize it. The variety of AMD based laptops is restricted, because most big name laptop makers have "soul sell" agreements with Intel, which bans the competitor. But HP and a few other well-known brands now have some Turion based laptops in the portfolio. You can fuel market competition if you buy an AMD based laptop.

You may also consider Apple laptops, which are fashionable and good at multimedia but command extra price. You can get chicks laid in 1-2-3 with that, they will all melt down by just looking at the design. However, the Apple Books are entirely different from the IBM PC compatible laptops, they are separate worlds, so need to re-learn, although Apples are always user friendly.

I'd say its the Pentium-M CPU you should choose probably. Actual laptop brand depends on personal taste, I think the most important issue is the keyboard quality.