Thinking about getting laptop, I'm out of date on hardware, need quick refresher

Hi all,

I'm actually an old timer on here (joined in 2001 or so), but I'm not active in overclocking much anymore. I may be looking for a laptop soon. Here's the background: Last time I built or bought a computer, core 2 duo was relatively current. The 4 core chips were out but weren't dominant by any means. That means that my experience with memory ended there, as well as my understanding of current interconnect standards.

Here's the current situation: I have an asus f3j laptop that I'm using as my main computer. It's about 6 or 7 years old. First thing I did was blow vista away on it and put xp pro on, which I'm still running. I put some more memory in it, and I think I probably put a 7200 rpm hard drive in it. It runs fine, but I'm back in college, going for an EE degree, and everyone around me (including all the school computers) is running windows 7 or 8. The machine's age combined with the fact that MS has quit supporting win xp has me thinking it might be about time to upgrade to a newer machine.

Here's where I need advice: I don't know what hardware I should be looking for. I no longer know the comparative performance of different processor families relative to each other. I don't even know which company (Intel or AMD) is ahead in the processor wars now. Last I was in it, the core 2 duo was mopping the floor with amd. I originally got in on this when the athlon was kicking the P3's ***. My first overclock was an athlon 750 in slot A configuration. Overclocking of those was done with goldfingers cards. (How many of you guys remember THOSE?)

I'm not a pc gamer. I want a machine with decent battery life that won't cost over about $500. I value snappiness highly-meaning, I like my machine to be responsive. I don't want to be in a situation where the machine is slow because of having a marginal amount of memory. I'm willing to add memory after the fact to prevent this from happening. Also, I'm not sure what version of windows 7 would be best for me. I think it'll turn out to be either home premium or pro.

If any of you guys can give me a general tutorial on what the current state of hardware is, I'd appreciate it. Specific things to look for or avoid in a laptop setting would also be nice.

You have a couple options. I'm typing this on a 4 year old MacBook (or is it 5 years old?) that has an 2.0 GHz processor. It's been bumped to 4GB RAM and I've upgraded it to an SSD. I paid $20 to install Snow Leopard and the upgrade to Mavericks is free. Performance is acceptable though it does seem a little laggy compared to my other laptop - a similar aged Thinkpad T500. That one has a 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM and also has been upgraded to an SSD. Performance on that is perfectly acceptable and I've used it for the programming projects for a couple Coursera programming classes. I'm using Eclipse for programing Android and web apps. If you are happy with your present laptop you might consider refreshing it. (FWIW, I run Linux Mint on the Thinkpad.)

Otherwise, as far as the various processors, one yardstick of CPU horsepower is the CPUmark. If I google T9400 (the processor in my T500) I one result is for http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Duo+T9400+@+2.53GHz which lists a score of 1753 (single core, 991) for that processor. That should provide a rough estimate of the processing horsepower relative to newer processors. If I look at the modern version of this PC (TP T540p) the second fastest processor is a Core i5-4200M at 2.5 GHz. It scores 4133 with a single thread rating of 1681. It's in the vicinity of twice as fast as the old warhorse. however it has less RAM and uses spinning rust for disk storage. For disk and/or RAM intensive work loads, it may actually not be as fast as the 5 year old T500.

Of course the newer processors make better use of battery and batteries have probably gotten better in the mean time. If battery usage is an issue, the newer Haswell chips have made big improvements there. (I can't comment on AMD's offerings as I haven't looked much at them.)

One downside to a lot of today's laptops is the advent of wide screen displays (based on the popularity of HD TV.) Most have less vertical resolution than in the past. My old T500 has a 1680x1050 screen. The newer one comes with 1366x768 standard and 1920x1080 optional. IMO verticle real estate is more useful than a wider screen unless you are watching movies.

Styles have also changed. Many machines now have only one spindle, forgoing the optical drive. Were I to replace my T500, I'd seriously consider an ultralight like the Asus Zenbook. This one looks pretty sweet. The Core i7-4710HQ 2.5GHz processor scores 8035/1881. And it comes with an SSD and 16GB RAM. (I have to admit I'm a fan of CPU horsepower. ) I have a USB DVD reader that I can use for those occasions when I need to read an optical disk.

If portability is not a concern, there are the monster desktop replacements that come with 17" screens and three spindles. You can hook them up to a keyboard and couple monitors and have a very capable workstation.

So many choices!

Edit - I just looked up your old laptop. Probably not a good choice to upgrade. I think you've gotten your money's worth out of it and anything you replace it with will feel a lot faster.

IMO intel is still doing better than AMD in the mobile space regarding processor performance and efficiency. At something for less than $500 price point your going to be looking at something with Intel i3 processor 4GB ram and 500GB hard drive which is ranging about $400-$500 unless you shop outlet, used or chance upon a deal.
Your best bet would be to try getting something as close to $400 and swapping out the hard drive for a SSD which should give you the responsive feeling your looking for.
If you dont know what a SSD is take a read here.
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

Wow guys, thanks! This is exactly the kind of input I was hoping for. Anyone else want to chime in, feel free.

Those haswell chips sure do look attractive for a laptop! Some of the battery life stuff I've been reading seems almost like science fiction. Power-wise, I'm pretty satisfied with my (now "old") core2 duo-at least in a win xp setting. How much more demanding of the hardware is win 7? Is the memory limit imposed by a 32 bit machine a concern with it, does it take advantage of enough memory to make that limitation important?

Nope, no more ram concern... it uses roughly 1/1.2GB of ram. Grab an i5 machine (2 cores/4 threads) with 4GB of ram. iGPU if you are not gaming. Add a 250GB ssd and 4gigs of ram. You should stay in the 500/550 bucks budget.

Ok, I decided to go somewhat beyond my original budget, as it happens that my old laptop died yesterday. I'm sure glad I started asking questions when I did. What I ended up with is an acer aspire m5-583p. Translated, it's a 15.7" touch screen with an i5-4210, 6 gig of ram, 500 gig hard drive, running win 8.1. I don't like windows 8, but I'm learning to deal with it. This is the first computer I've owned that had anything newer than xp, though the last laptop did have vista for about 10 minutes before I blew it away in favor of xp. This new one was trouble right out of the box-the touch feature of the screen did not work. At some point I got it to work after rebooting it-then the keyboard didn't work. I restored factory settings and got that working again. A chat session with acer support netted me a recommendation to send it in for service. I didn't buy it yesterday so I could not have it for weeks. As a last resort, I set it to doing a full system restore before I went to bed last night. I think it formats the C partition when you do that, then reinstalls everything. In any case, that did the trick. I oughtn't have had to do this on a new computer, and it cost me much valuable time that should have been spend studying and doing homework. But, it's apparently fixed.

Here's a link to make windows 8 like windows 7 (which you'll find very easy to work with after coming from XP).

http://www.overclockers.com/install-windows-7-windows-8-windows-7-time-boot/

The laptop is decent, definetly need to put in an SSD though. It's a world of difference having one, and for around 110 you can get a 250GB SSD, and 210 a 500GB one:
http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-MX100...&ie=UTF8&qid=1411397041&sr=1-1&keywords=MX100

I know you went over budget, but the money spent on an SSD is absolutely worth it. The biggest change to personal computing in the past 10 years is SSD's and multi-cores. You've saw what dual core did about 5-10 years ago, the jump to and SSD over HDD is the same major difference.

Intel i3 at the very least.
Wait for a sale at Office Depot / Office Max.
They can't be overclocked.
I would consider hp brand i3 latops becasue I've noticed their keyboards are a lot sturdier and longer lasting.

You're right about the ssd, and I do plan to get one. I've never had one in a computer and I've wanted one for a while. Thank you for the link about making 8 like 7, I'll read that soon when I have a chance.

No need to read the article , just do this, simply and quickly:
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/...-book-9-lite?p=7732667&viewfull=1#post7732667