On Sat, Jan 7, 2012 at 8:57 AM, Rich Shepard <[email protected]> wrote: > Newegg has a Dell Vostro 1540 at a good price. Dell supports linux, and I > found a vendor in South Africa that sells them with linux installed. So > there should not be an issue of putting xubuntu on it here.
Rich, You seem to have settled on getting a new laptop to solve whatever problem you are having with your old laptop. Since you don't know what the problem is with the old laptop, a new laptop very well may not solve the problem. The main reason I have seen for laptops being slow is that they have a finite amount of ram. This ram gets filled with lots of web pages running tons of javascript and flash, images being edited, movies being decoded, applications that have memory leaks, etc. Once the ram gets filled they have to use swap or crash. Unless you have a solid state drive, swap is a hard disk. Default laptop drives run at 5400 rpm, moderately fast ones might run at 7200 rpm. Hard drives are the bottlenecks in most everyday computer systems and hard drives on new laptops are not any faster than hard drives on old laptops. The only thing you can get on newer laptops that will improve things over old laptops is more ram, lots more ram, and faster ram. Since the cpu is not usually the bottleneck, faster cpu's will not help much. There is a caveat to all this, if you are doing something all the time which uses lots of cpu like numerical analysis or movie editing, then a faster cpu might help. Otherwise what you really want is more ram. The other problem with laptops is cooling. There is not much room in there for air circulation and so they sometimes have loud noisy fans. In fact if your laptop always stays sitting on the desk in the same place, a nice desktop computer can be cooler and quieter and probably last longer. Bill _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
