Looking to upgrade

[ToyotaNSaturn]

Originally Posted By: Nick R
Originally Posted By: Bill in Utah
I've got 2 gig in the Netbook.

I was commenting more on the longer battery life (IE the SSD draws almost no power. "much longer" than the usual HDD")




Ah. I've heard tales of this happening. I can't imagine why that would be, since even under load they draw less power than a typical HDD. Very interesting.


It happens because the cheaper SSD vendors will create an internal RAID-0 array inside the SSD drive. Tom's Hardware.com (or was it Anandtech) has a rather lengthy write-up on this phenomenon. Purchase only SSD's that don't have this "feature"

 

[Bill in Utah]

Kingston is a cheap vendor?

 

[greenaccord02]

I'd say they're a cheap vendor whose products are overpriced.

 

[ToyotaNSaturn]

what model kingston did you buy?

 

[jaj]

I got the SSD because of vibration - I was doing data capture in a moving car and the anti-shock software kept shutting down the HDD and leaving gaps in the data.

My laptop is fairly fast anyway and it has the 6-cell battery, but the SSD makes it now so I can use it almost all day. In power-saving mode I get about 8 hours a charge.

As for booting, it's now fast enough that I just turn it off instead of putting it to sleep. The switch-on time from Power Button push to completed finger-print log-in is 35 seconds.

My laptop wasn't intended to be an inexpensive solution for home, although it is my personal machine. It's a light-weight high performance unit and it costs accordingly. All in, with Office 2007 and the rest of the "corporate" stuff, it cost about $2k, including the $500 for the 160GB Intel X-25M drive. I use it pretty much all day, every day.

Originally Posted By: Bill in Utah
Originally Posted By: Nick R
If you have a desktop with SATA, use it as the boot drive in that. And use the existing HDD as the storage drive. That's what I do, with only a 40GB boot drive now. But it's well worth it.


I hardly ever reboot (maybe twice a month) and the desktop is plenty fast so I'd rather have the $100 for the drive I think. Maybe I'll try it just to see if there is anything there.

But most likely it will get sold.

Bill

 

[Bill in Utah]

Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
what model kingston did you buy?


This one.

Bill

 

[saberz]

When it came time to sell my gaming pc, i bought a cheapo Acer Aspire laptop for 500 bucks. I upgraded the processor, memory etc and used it for a year but needed something more powerful for gaming(missed it).

Sold it, and I went to ebay and bought a full fledged Vostro 1500 with a nvidia gaming GPU for 500 SHIPPED. Less than 5 months old. Used it as is for 6 months then dumped 200 into it.

C2D 1.6 to a Penryn C2D 2.4ghz - $75
1gb of memory to 4GB - $36
120GB 5400 to 320GB 7200 - $98

The machine is a beast and plays even todays games very well(8600M GT with 256 vram). Ebay is a good deal if you can find the seller(99%+) and the pricing being excellent.

The Vostro new with the 8600M GT ran roughly $900.

OR you can do what I still do today on occassion. Haggle sellers.

visit http://www.marketpro.com

it's a list of a Computer Shows/Venues in your area usually on weekends. The prices are as cheap if not cheaper than Newegg/ZZF. You can haggle them down to.

I priced down a Dell XPS gaming laptop from $1k to $850 cash + a boat load of accessories. Cash speaks to them in spades. You basically cut into their profit margin big time.