Is there any reason (besides price) to get a desktop computer since laptops are able to have so much memory now? I’m shopping for a 'puter and could use some help from the dopers.
As owner of both
If you buy laptop you’re pretty much stuck with it as is. Almost no way to upgrade it. And as for repair costs - they are tuly outrageous, and there is no way to do it yourself. The mother board went poof on one of my laptops, and the only way to change it is with a $900+ replacement.
Laptops are small and funky, but they will never (IMHO) replace desktops, at least for a couple of years.
Laptops have some disadvantages (as I can attest, since I’m typing this on an Insprion 7500):
- the keyboards aren’t as nice
- pointing devices (mouse replacements) aren’t as nice
- hard drives are slower (they don’t yet make the 7000+ RPM drives for laptops)
- you’re likely to have fewer expansion options (drives, memory, specialized devices)
- not very likely to able to upgrade it
Some benefits of a laptop:
- some expansion options are only available to laptops (via PC Cards; yeah, I know that there are a couple of desktops that have PC Card/PCMCIA slots, but they are quite rare)
- portable (duh!)
Unless you have a compelling need for portability, I wouldn’t recommend a laptop as your primary computer. Without being able to upgrade the video, sound or processor options, you’re essentially stuck with the basic machine that you buy now. With a desktop, you have a reasonable chance of being able to keep up as technology improves.
Yeah, pez, what Colin and Cerowyn said! I’ve been repairing and upgrading PC’s for years, and I’ve had the displeasure of tinkering with a balky laptop once or twice. I think the essence of the problem is a complete lack of any architecture standard with laptops.
Incidentally, it’s for that very reason that I recommend that my customers avoid “spacey-looking” desktops, such as the majority of the offerings from Compaq, IBM, HP, etc. The MB’s are non-standard, as are many of the peripheral components, and too often the video adapter and sound card – sometimes even a modem and network card – are integrated with the MB, hard-soldered and difficult, if not outright impossible, to upgrade. I hate to include Big Blue in this category, seeing as how they originated and released the ISA standard, but clearly they’ve since changed their tune. (Micro-channel!!! Give me a break!)
The only reasons I can think of to get a laptop would be space and portability.
We live in a small apartment and the laptop sits on the coffee table and takes up as much room as a few magazines. It’s a pretty remarkable device and it’s good enough for what we use it for but for what we payed for it, we could have gotten a blow-away desktop system. Space was more a concern than optimum performance in this case. I’m about to embark on an experiment (using it in my music studio while I transition away from my old mac system) that will max out this laptop’s capabilities, so we’ll see what it’s made of.
This thread has a definite IMHO taste; here’s my HO:
For the last few years, I wouldn’t think of having a desktop. Yes, it’s true you can’t upgrade the Video or Sound cards, but for me that isn’t important. You can get roughly the equivalent CPU, memory and HD configs as you can in a desktop plus they are (obviously) portable. Of course, the cost (both initial and repair) is higher for a loptop. For my money, even if you only use the portability aspect once a month, it’s worth it to own a laptop as your primary machine.
You can take this next part as a plus or a minus: As an employer, I get all my employees laptops, as I’ve found they tend to be more productive. It’s a lot easier to solve some work problem in your home on your laptop on a Sunday afternoon than to come in to the office, and for me that extra occasional productivity well makes up for the cost.
To add somewhat to what Bill said, you’ll rarely have cutting edge graphics or sound cards in a notebook computer. Of course, this is only useful a) for cutting edge video games and b) if you want to have a surround sound speaker setup attached to your computer (useful only for DVDs and games).
You’ll also have a larger monitor for your average desktop, though since you can attach monitors to notebooks as well, I guess that is more of a price issue.
You’ll also be able to have more drive types (CD-ROM, floppy, zip/LS-120, etc.) attached to a desktop at one time, whereas you’ll usually be limited to one or two of these at one time on a notebook. This’ll rarely be an issue, but it still bears saying.
You guys forgot something… Laptops are freakin SLOW! Even the newly announced Intel Pentium 4 1Ghz laptop only runs at an average of 300mhz, even when using wall power not batteries. It would MELT if it ran at a higher speed, so the only solution is to slow down the processor (they call it “load balancing” although everyone calls it what it is, “processor throttling”). Some of the newest laptops (i.e. Toshiba) are now using liquid cooling to keep from overheating. What a joke.
Of course, none of this applies to Mac Powerbooks. A Powerbook G4/500 will run at full 500Mhz (even on batteries) for extended periods of time without overheating, and will beat the pants off of any Wintel portable computer for speed.
Chas, could you leave the mac zealotry alone for two minutes? Jeez.
Anyway, yeah, laptops are generally slower. I believe it’s common to have lower bus speeds and less cache in laptops, which causes performance to suffer. At my last job, I had a 450MHz Pentium II desktop that could do a full software build in about an hour, but my 600MHz Pentium III laptop took 50% longer to build the same stuff. Your mileage may very depending on what type of work you do.
Giving my tuppence worth as a StupidUser; I only use my computah for surfing the net and doing mainly small time stuff so I went for a laptop, not because it was portable but because I could fold it away and it wouldn’t take up any room. I don’t need cutting edge sound cards, I’ve never had a machine break on me and I have never needed to upgrade one, so why take up all the extra room for a state of the art desktop?
For me, the advantages of a desktop computer are a comfortable keyboard and a real mouse. Laptop keyboards are too small for my taste, and I have never become comfortable using any of the mouse-substitutes. Screens also tend to be smaller on a laptop, and good-quality screens add serious bucks to the price. Whether that’s a problem or not depends on what you tend to do with your machine (text, pictures, mix of both?) and how many windows you like to have open at one time.
I would certainly agree that top-of-the-line laptops are good enough that some users would be perfectly happy with a laptop as their primary machine. I just don’t happen to be one of them. I like big fat keys for my sloppy typing skills, a three-button mouse, and a screen big enough to have four or five windows open at one time.
I have one of each, and I’d love to replace my home PC with a laptop. As far as I’m concerned, the main benefit for a laptop is size – I just don’t have room for a whopping great box in my kitchen.
The greatest disadvantage of laptops, and one that hasn’t been raised yet, is that they’re currently the number one target for theft. I was burgled recently and the thieves left my PC – it was too big to take out of the back window and too obvious to carry out the front door. The forensic team that came round said that it’s currently the number one source of their theft work in London at the moment – growing faster than house break-ins.
It’s at the stage in London now where office workers are often issued plain rucksacks rather than obvious laptop bags, and the police had to put plain-clothes officers outside Holborn tube station as muggers were targetting workers leaving a nearby BT building. Apparently in a month there were 80 muggings for laptops in a 100m stretch of a busy road (High Holborn).
My laptop is a two-year old “Wall Street” PowerBook G3. I would never consider getting a desktop computer again.
I’m currently doing jury duty (grand jury) and there is a lot of “dead” time when nothing is before us. Open Targus case, remove computer, boot from battery, hook headphones to sound-out, insert one of my 12 CDs of MP3’s and launch a SoundApp Random Mix for that disk; open FileMaker and start defining fields. Well, you all know the advantages of a laptop, so I won’t dwell on them.
Later, I arrive at work. Hook up the AC, insert the ethernet, and attach the ADB cable that hooks up the full-sized classic ADB keyboard and mouse. Insert the Road Rocket card and attach the monitor cable. Boot. I’m now working from a 500 MHz G3 workstation set up with dual monitors, the primary being a nice 19 inch Dell Trinitron (the secondary being the TFT PowerBook screen), both set to 24 bit color at 1024 x 768, with 192 MB RAM at my disposal. My keyboard is excellent, mouse more than adequate. All in all, it’s more computer than anyone else on this floor has except for a couple people with G4s or dual Athlons.
Expandability: I replaced the original 8 GB internal HD with an 18 around this time last year, burning the original HD’s contents to CD and restoring everything to the new HD. More recently, I picked up an MCE expansion bay device into which you insert any 2" laptop ATA HD, and put the old 8 into it. OK, so laptop hard drives are considerably more expensive than 3.5" desktop-sized hard drives, and you don’t see too many 100 GB hard drives for laptops. I’m still plenty comfortable with ~ 25 GB.
The Road Rocket is slated for replacement as soon as competing faster Type II video cards come out with OS X support. I admit that a good desktop video system kicks my butt, but since I’m absolutely and completely not a gamer, I am seldom frustrated by it. I’d really like to run three contiguous monitors, but two is sufficient for 95 % of my needs, and most folks only have a single monitor attached to their desktop computers (I don’t know how they can stand it).
The original CPU was 300 MHz. The processor daughter-card lifts right out and you put in a faster one as they become available. A 500 MHz G3 is a pretty zippy CPU. The entire system bus runs at .5 the processor speed.
When I want a Zip drive, I eject the battery or the CDROM module and insert the Zip expansion bay module in its place.
If additional expandability were of sufficient importance, I’d buy a laptop “breakout” PC Card, which gives you a set of PCI slots in an external box, and I’d put standard desktop style video cards, firewire card, gigabyte ethernet card, fast 'n wide ultra SCSI card, etc., in there.
I don’t have the RAM expandability of a comparable desktop, but I could go higher than 192 (to 256 for now, and perhaps more if someone releases a 256 MB RAM module that will fit the slots). Again, enough for my needs.
galt, can you leave the mac-bashing zealotry back in GD? This is GQ. The fellow asked for information on “laptops” and there are at least two major brands of laptops. If you have a problem with my reciting the facts, then deal with the FACTS. Particularly since you AGREE with me, despite your assigning the problem to the wrong cause:
Your speed problem has nothing to do with bus speeds and caches. Software runs more slowly on a laptop primarily due to slower hard drives. The fastest laptop hard drive runs at 5411rpm, most run at 4200rpm. Even the slowest desktop PC disk drives run 7200rpm.
If you are in California this summer, laptops are gonna be a must cause they use less electricity & work during blackouts.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Chas.E *
Um, sorry, Charlie, that’s just not true. I think you’ll find that only high-performance desktop PCs have 7200 RPM disks; the majority of us are still running on 5400 RPM disks (and Quantum recently introduced a series of 4400 RPM drives, taking us backwards a step, although I guess they’re good in a scenario where you need low noise and low heat - Phillips uses them in TiVo, for example).
Yeah, slow disks are part of the cause, but slower buses don’t help either. Only recently, Intel introduced a 133 Mhz bus for the mobile P-III, until then it maxed out at 100 Mhz.
Desktops are better.
- Laptops are expensive. A cheap one is usually ancient, like Pentium class, Small HD, Low Memory, Cheap Video.
- Extras for Laptops are expensive.
- You can barely upgrade them. Memory is about it.
- Laptops are fragile. You break the screen, you’re screwed.
- Laptops are easy to steal in public.
- Laptops have a limited battery life.
- Don’t plan on playing Quake III, Baldur’s Gate, et al…
That said, however. Laptops have one big advantage. They are portable. And as long as you aren’t doing serious gaming, They’re great.
I bought a laptop a couple years ago, and I just ordered a new one. I could never go back. I absolutely love being able to tote my machine from the living room to the office to the bedroom as needed. It’s also great to bring it along on trips if needed.
The only drawback I really see is price. They are pricey, no doubt about it. Upgrade-wise, I can upgrade and/or add new memory, hard drives, and CD ROM players. I’m stuck with the video card, sound card and processor it came with, though.
And, Saint Zero, I use my laptop primarily for gaming. Haven’t tried Quake III, but Baldur’s Gate, Diablo I & II, all the Civ games, all the Sim games, and Halflife run just fine. Black and White won’t run, but that’s because my old laptop is too slow (only 300 Mhz) and the video memory is too small (4 Mb). The new Dell is a 1 Ghz machine with an ATI 32 Mb 3d Video card, and I have no doubt Black and White, along with all the other new games, will run just fine.
About the only thing I’m giving up by gaming with the portable is surround sound. I see that as a reasonable tradeoff for being able to lay on my couch and play as opposed to having to sit in the office or a spare bedroom and play.
Speed-wise, I’ve never noticed much of a problem. I’m not doing extensive software builds or anything with it - just playing games, surfin’ the internet, and occasionally using Quicken/Excel/Word. I’ll have to do some tests on it when I get it here - it’d be interesting to run a build and see how it compares to my desktop at work.
All in all, if you take away the price issue, I think a laptop is WAY better than a desktop. But the price issue’s a biggie, no doubt about it.
SaintZero:
Not true in my experience. See my previous posting. I’ll agree that upgrades (like most everything else laptop) are more expensive, but hardly nonexistent.
so am I correct in thinking that I’ve bypassed some of the slow Hd problems inherant in lap tops by writing all of my big fast files (multi-track audio), to a pretty fast Firewire external HD i bought? I just literally got the laptop today, but got the FW hard drive a couple of weeks ago in anticipation. I’ve been using it on my desk top in place of my SCSI HDs and it its pretty damn fast, (the spec sheet say that this drive van read write at around 20Mb/sec, which i realizre isn’t cutting edge, but it certainly keeps up with whatever audio I throw at it. I suspect that the lap top (with a faster processor: 700 vs. 500 on the Minitower) should perform similarly to the desk top, with the FW drive in line.
Any flaws in this logic?
CJ