Choosing a laptop can be a pain in the backside. I have been doing research on various models for several weeks now and have concluded that the laptop that closest suits my needs is a Toshiba Tecra S3 the S2 is very similar to the S3, but has a 15.4″ widescreen LCD. I think the S3 wins in the which laptop is best for me, because my car’s model is also an S3, and I like the tiein.
The most difficult thing to fulfil when choosing a laptop (for me) was finding one that had a decent graphics card (6600 or better) in a notebook that had a 15″ screen. I found many that had a Radeon X700 graphics card, but in testing this card proved to be slower than the 6600 by a significant margin as per I was very tempted by the Acer Ferrari 4000 which looks like a sleep laptop, and has the AMD Turion (Mobile Athlon 64 CPU) in it, but I wanted that little bit more from my graphics hardware. There were many that are available with the 17″ laptops – even 6800 series and 7800 series graphics were available, but the 17″ formfactor is just that little bit too big.
I also considered the Apple Powerbook 15″ which would almost be perfect, but the aging 9700 graphics chip in it, does not have enough grunt to power World of Warcraft the way I like it, which means this lovely beast is left on the sidelines :(, (the other issues I personally have with it is that its CPU is less than 2GHz actual, which is my personal sweet spot atm, and they are likely to be replaced with an intel based powerbook in the next 6-12 months that will make PowerBook owners cry.).
The Toshiba Qosmio F20 also appears to be a nice notebook, but I like to support people in the channel that I know, and Toshiba have decided in whatever passes for thier wisdom that they will not be offering this notebook to the public in any form other than through major retailers (Hardley Normal, David Jones, Dickkies etal) this makes me grumpy so I will not recommend this notebook to anyone :P).
Upgrades that will be performed instantly on the S3:
100GB 7200rpmHDD
2GB RAM
😀
M