I am looking to get a laptop soon, and I wondered what you all thought I should get. The following are my requirements and a possibility for critique:
This laptop will essentially be used for two things: 1. As a portable DVD/DivX/MPEG player and 2. Normal workstation, web-browsing, coding, etc. Neither use requires too hefty a processor, but I’m not sure how slow I can go. I want to make sure that there’s no clipping on movies I’d watch.
Constraints:
DVD/CD-ROM drive
Fast enough processor/video card for excellent playback (I’m not sure what DivX takes. Someone with experience please respond)
14+ inch viewable screen. I want these to be worth watching
Objectives:
Low cost. I really do want to pay as little as possible. I have a hefty desktop for everything power intensive I want to do, so I don’t need to go overboard on this 'puter.
Long battery life.
Mac capable of running OS X if possible (I know it’ll be more expensive than a PC, but how much of a hit will I take)
Ok. With this in mind, a friend suggested getting a Powerbook G3. He says that the power consumption is incredibly low, so the battery lasts for a long time. Please give your opinion on what specs I would need in a G3, or another laptop if you have a suggestion. Finally, if there is a site with good reviews and/or good prices for this kind of thing, I’d appreciate a link. Thanks a lot.
I’m typing this on a WallStreet, which is at this point considered to be a positively ancient G3 laptop. (It is not, in actuality, a G3 laptop any more, as $300 and change put a 500 MHz Sonnet G4 in the processor’s seat). I suspect you could pick up a used WallStreet very cheaply on eBay, just make sure you get one with the 14.1" screen. You could score the 'Street and the accelerator card for a total of less than $750 with a little shopping.
In all honesty, a better deal would probably be the Lombard model that followed, insofar as it will have USB built in, and will decode and play back DVD without a dedicated CardBus card (the WallStreet requires the card). The Pismo that followed next gave you FireWire as well. All of these are upgradeable to a G4 processor, I believe, from either Sonnet or PowerLogix. Of course, a used Pismo or Lombard may cost more since they are more recent.
The performance of MacOS X is substantially better with a G4 than with a G3 of identical MHz (I guess some of the routines use AltiVec); MacOS 9 doesn’t show any real difference (although individual applications such as Photoshop do). RAM is cheap, so max out your PowerBook’s RAM, especially for MacOS X (X loves RAM). Even with a G4 and 512MB RAM, these babies are good on batteries.
Thanks for all of the information. Firewire and USB would be nice… How good on batteries are they? How long will one battery generally last?
Batteries…
I used to ride the Long Island Rail Road for an hour and a half’s worth of transit. I’d boot the laptop, toss in a CD full of MP3s and start them playing, then launch Bryce or Photoshop (if I just wanted to fool around making pretty images) or FileMaker (if I had some database design changes to make and felt like messing with them during transit).
Once, there was a train ahead of us that developed engine problems, and we were delayed by nearly two hours. Eventually we got moving again. I was grateful to have something to play with and listen to while the train sat there motionless on the tracks. Anyway, around the time we were about 2 stops away from mine (~ 15 minutes’ travel time), I got the warning message and the screen dimmed to conserve the remaining battery charge. Saved my work and shut down.
So figure “always more than an hour and a half” and “sometimes less than three and a half hours”. That’s with no energy saving options, with the CD drive running constantly, and repeated hits to the hard drive (Photoshop swap file, FileMaker temp files/main files; don’t know about Bryce).
You can get considerably more time by avoiding apps and processes that make the hard drive spin up and get accessed all the time, and by using the Energy Saver Control Panel to spin it down when it’s inactive.
I believe that the PRAM battery will supply juice to the machine briefly if you put it to sleep and remove the regular battery, thus enabling you to swap in a second fully-charged battery and awaken the computer from sleep and pick up where you left off. Since I didn’t have a spare battery back then, I’ve never tried it. The WallStreet (uniquely, doesn’t apply to Pismo or Lombard) will accept a battery in either expansion bay, so you can put one in each if the work you’re going to be doing doesn’t involve CD or DVD (or other expbay media such as Zip or 2nd hard drive, obviously).
I think the general consensus is that the PowerBooks get good battery life (generally significantly better than a comparable PC laptop) although not quite as good as Apple’s claims unless you’re not actually using it for much of anything.