Does it actually matter what the specs of a non-gaming Laptop are?

Great Debates
1

One of the things I’ve noticed in the course of my job is that, for your average computer user, the only things they ever plan to do with their PC are

  1. Surf Teh Intarweb
  2. Send E-Mails/Chat
  3. Type stuff for work

I had a phone call from some random person the other day asking for my opinion on which was better- AMD Athlon x2 or Intel Centrino Duo. I asked them for more information on the systems, and they both had WinVista Home Premium, 1Gb RAM, 120GB HDD, Dual Layer +/- DVD-RW drive, 128Mb On-board graphics card, Wireless LAN cards, and 15.4" screens.

“Are you planning on playing games with it- actual games, not solitaire or minesweeper?”

“No”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Positive. I just need it for work and the internet.” says our caller.

“Does your job involve graphic design, making movies, or anything like that?”

“No, it’s just admin work and sending files and so on to clients and so on.”

“Well, in that case, flip a coin. Or better yet, buy the one that costs less. If you’re not playing games or doing graphic design, it doesn’t really matter what sort of processor you’ve got- any new laptop will be fine.”

The caller thanked me and rang off, but after I put the phone down I realised that most modern laptops are probably a bit over-powered for what most people are using them for, and that at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter what’s under the bonnet (processor-wise) unless you’re really into gaming, graphic design, or movie-making.

Your thoughts?

2

Well, what you say should be true, but unfortunately bloatware seems to be able to slow down a computer better than Warcraft ever will.

And of course, with Vista, the OS itself is bloatware.

3

It absolutely matters. In general cheap processors require more power and generate more heat than more expensive ones. My old laptop had a 2 ghz celeron processor in it, which was one of the cheapest when I got it. That mofo ran hot as hell, which caused my fan to be constantly on, which was noisy and drained the battery. Besides that, no, processors have been fast enough for the past 5 years at least to run what your typical user needs. Shoot, if you use your laptop on battery power most of the time it won’t be running at it’s full clock speed. Even for games my piddling 1.1 ghz pentium M is plenty fast. What gets you in games is the graphics card.

On the other hand, RAM and HD speed have a drastic effect on performance. A 7200 RPM drive will boot up and load programs much, much faster than a 4200. 1 gb RAM will improve performance, especially if you have the habit of keeping a lot of programs loaded.

4

I don’t know about 7,200rpm disks “drastically” improving performance - I always use Standby, so I rarely have to boot up, or load my commonly-used applications. And unless you’re storing video or a giant MP3 collection on there, how many people really need more than, say, 40GB? I haven’t filled up my 18-month old 35GB disk yet, and I have my MP3s, some video, and backups of entire servers on there.

Really, these days it comes down to things like battery life, build quality and aesthetics, rather than horsepower, unless as the OP says you want to run things like games. A CPU that provides speed throttling will use significantly less power in everyday use than one that doesn’t, giving a longer battery life.

5

Depending on the OS, memory matters. Processor speed, past ‘sufficient’ is fine. 7200 RPM hard drive is handy but not necessary. Burner is handy if you’re doing powerpoints and don’t want to give your flash drive away. Wide screen is damn handy for spreadsheeting and multiple data interfaces.
WiFi matters, of course, as does an internal nic.

Hinge quality, battery life, weight all matter.

Me, I’m running on a PII 266, mind you, ever since my uncle broke my newer one a few years back. It’s still pretty good.

6

I’d say what you said is basically true of Windows XP, but for Vista, those laptops will soon be bogged down.

7

I only use it for basic office work, email and as a web browser. “Basic office work” depends on your company. In mine, that means running pivot tables, big ppt files, and a host of other hogs. Sure, I don’t create 99% of these things myself, but I use them every day. “Basic office work” can be very involved if you count all the stuff you actually run as opposed do yourself.

If you have a tablet, then the specs seriously matter…

8

I do a good amount of graphics processing and video editing. I need a darned fast computer with plenty of memory and disk space.

If I were ever to start heavy-duty programming again, I’m sure that I’d also need a mighty powerful machine.

9

I just use my laptop for the Web and iTunes, really. When I bought it in August I was almost swayed by all the £400 laptops with superficially high specs, but they run so hot and have such short battery life.

I took a bit of a risk and spent £200 on a used laptop that /was/ top-range some years ago (a compaq evo n410c), and asked the seller to stick an extra 256MB of ram in it (taking it to 512). I couldn’t be happier with it - the build quality is excellent, the batteries last a fair while and it is oh so light and sturdy. And it doesn’t run too hot to actually function as a laptop.

More to the point, I can treat it with a fair amount of disrespect - it only cost £200, not £400 or £700.

zhongguorenmin

10

Well, if you’re me, trying to run a MacBook and run WinXP in a virtual machine as well several other programs simultaneously, that second gig of RAM would be really helpful. This thing just crawls with one gig. So I don’t use it for gaming–that’s what my desktop is for–but some of the demands I place on it make me wish I had gotten the faster processor and definitely the increased RAM.

11

I agree. Memory is more important to me than processor speed. I might disagree a little with harddrives. We use a couple of desktop computers as department servers for our own data and speed matters there but that is different than the subject line.

My office laptop needs to be as user friendly as possible for the office environment. I take it into meetings so battery life and the ability to undock seamlessly are my needs. WiFi is extremely important because I can’t access my email software unless it is onlne.

A little office humor along those lines. I got stuck in a meeting a while back that was catered. I was dying of thirst but didn’t want to interrupt the presentation so I emailed the guy next to the drinks with the subject title “Dr Pepper”. The body of the message was “por favor”. He started laughing out loud in the middle of the meeting and I got my drink.

12

I should point out that the 266 is running Ubuntu. OpenOffice is slow as a dog but functional on it.

… as of last week, Office 2000 is also slow as a dog but functional on it. Except Access. That should be working next week sometime, I think.

13

I have always argued it does not. I have the cheapest Dell there is (celeron processor), use it for internet, music playing, and the occasional small excel or word document, and with high speed internet have no speed issues or other problems at all.

14

I think it’s worth noting that distinctions such as Celeron vs. Pentium are just marketing terms. Often, the letter following the brand name is a better clue to the peformance of the processor. For example, compare the Pentium M to the Celeron M and the Pentium 4. The Celeron M is actually much closer to the Pentium M than the Pentium 4 is, despite the latter’s “Pentium” tag. A lot of people got burnt, sometimes literally, by choosing supposedly superior Pentium 4s over Celeron Ms.

15

In my experience, specs for a non-gaming laptop do matter, but the “bare minimum” for a non-gaming, non-graphic design laptop are way lower. You do need a certain minimum amount of ram, processor speed, and HDD size to run most modern office applications. I was cleaning up a friend’s c. 1998 computer he hasn’t used in years–there’s a program he discovered which lets him donate the computer for something around a $500 tax write-off but he had to have it completely cleaned of the OS and et cetera first.

Man, that thing could barely run IE. So there are minimums you don’t want to fall behind or even basic software like web browsers and word processors will barely work, office apps aren’t that hardware intensive, but the better hardware gets the more resources all applications tend to use, so even low-resource apps like word processors or spreadsheet programs start using more and more memory and other resources.

Also, for gaming while in general graphics card + ram are king for most games, some games are extremely processor intensive. A few games in particular which I play are “grand strategy” games that run in real time or turn based. So many different variables are being done every second (or turn, if it’s a turn-based game) that a weak CPU can lead to very poor performance. A game distributed by Shrapnel Games and developed by Ilwinter called Dominions 3 has extremely basic graphics, video card/ram aren’t really important at all. But I’ve ran it on a comp with an older processor and processing individual turn files gets prohibitively long once a game has progressed very far.