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Subject: Re: Can someone assess how good this laptop is?

Author: P. Massie

Date: 22:01:31 05/19/05

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On May 19, 2005 at 21:57:34, stuart taylor wrote:

>On May 19, 2005 at 20:34:34, P. Massie wrote:
>
>>On May 19, 2005 at 19:04:33, stuart taylor wrote:
>>
>>>On May 19, 2005 at 19:03:11, stuart taylor wrote:
>>>
>>>>http://netaction.co.il/sale.php?sale=2499362
>>>>
>>>>This is the laptop which I had thought I might a well settle for, and I thought
>>>>it was fairly fast for chess, and competent for other uses. But IS it?
>>>>
>>>>Can you tell me what is great about it and/or what could be better, and how much
>>>>better?
>>>>
>>>>Thanks
>>>>
>>>>S.Taylor
>>>
>>>Main features are listed (in English) after half way down.
>>>S.T.
>>
>>I think it's not bad.  It has a bit more focus on sound and video than you
>>really need for chess, and a bit less processor speed.  If you want to focus
>>just on chess you might be able to save some money on lower-level sound and
>>video and apply it to upgrading the processor speed.  Nonetheless, it's a good
>>all-around system, and if the price is right it'll work well.
>
>Questions
>1). Is its main weakness for chess, the fact that the RPM of the HD is only
>4200? (Or is there something about the structure which compenstates that?)
>2). Would this be called the 915 GM chipset, or not? (I don't know how to tell)
>3).When it says 10/100 Ethernet, is this a network card which is a weaker
>version than 10/100/1000?
>Questions 1 and 2 are particularly important in my mind.
>S.Taylor

The HD RPM rarely matters for playing chess.  The only case where it matters is
where you have tablebases on disk and you're accessing them during an endgame.
Even then it's not a big deal.  It will matter quite a bit if you're running
Chessbase or Chess Assistant with very large databases.  Your search speed will
be much slower.

I consider the real weakness of this system for chess the speed of the
processor.  The Pentium M goes up to 2.13 ghz.  This one is 1.73 ghz, which
isn't quite as fast.  It's OK, but not the best.

I have no idea which chipset it is.  I wouldn't worry a lot about that, since
the HP systems generally follow Intel standards, so whatever they use should be
fine.

The difference between 10/100 and 10/100/1000 is simply that the latter will
support an Ethernet network running at Gigabit (1000) speeds.  If you don't have
access to one of these there's effectively no difference for you.  If you do
have access to gigabit Ethernet this will make a bit difference only if you
transfer very large (1 GB+) files across the network.

Paul



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