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Glen Walpert

On Sun, 17 Jun 2007 18:03:53 GMT, (Nico Coesel)
wrote:

Eeyore wrote:

Nico Coesel wrote:

Jim Thompson wrote:

I'm pondering purchasing a new laptop... my old Vaio is absolutely
ancient, heavy, and slow (800MHz).

Specifically I'm looking at the ThinkPad X61s notebook.

Whatever you buy, buy something that is being advertised as 'for
professional/business use'. Computers come in two grades: el-cheapo
consumer grade and professional/business grade. If you want a computer
that doesn't crash all the time, pay more and get the professional
version.

Would you care to elaborate on that ?

Just which components are different and what differences do they make ?

In consumer grade equipment usually the hardware is cheap and crappy.
Bad design practise of critical components like the motherboard result
in timing errors and thermal problems (crashes / strange behaviour).
Also a lot of stuff is handled by the CPU which makes the system
slower than it ought to be. Support is lacking and drivers are hardly
tested.

A year or two ago a signal integrity engineer at a major computer mfgr
(sorry forget which one) reported on the SI list that management
complained about the high cost of producing servers compared to
desktop computers - more design time, more motherboard layers, higher
parts count etc. So they put a bunch of their high-end desktop
computers in the server test chamber, where they are expected to run
server type data transfer tests continuosly for months while the
temperature is cycled, with no errors. All of the desktop machines
blue-screened within an hour, even before any temp cycle was started.
That was the end of the "make the servers cheaper" whining.

Consumer grade stuff is of course even worse.