Salesman must love me

[Striker]

I went into Harvey Norman today to purchase a laptop for $999....as advertised......It was well worth the money but saying this I ended up leaving the store with a high performance Laptop costing $3,500....lol

P4 Pentium M 2gig Processor
1 gig DDR2 ram
Radeon X700 video card
100Gig hard drive
4 x USB ports
Bluetooth
Firewire

Plus lots more but no steak knives.

No wonder the Salesman was happy enough to throw in a leather carry bag and a wireless Laptop mouse for free......lol

I am pathetic.

The $1000 lappy would have done the job but only just...hehehehe

[[1ponders]]

:lol: Tony you're terrible :lol: And I suppose you told Mrs Striker it was only $150. :rolleyes: Well I hope it serves you for many long and fruitful imaging years.




BTW
I'm really sorry to be the one to break this to you Tony, 'cos I know you find yourself cute and cuddly :scared: but I reeeally think its your money they are in love with. I know that's painful to hear but its better that its out in the open now and done with quickly.

[avandonk]

You made a wise choice my son.Let me know how you explain? What should we do if you go missing?


Bert

[Striker]

I have 2 more hours to think up a believable excuse.

At the moment I am going with it's a rental that I pay off over 2 years at $35 a month...the same it costs her to ger her nails done...this one will be easy...even easier then the G11 at $250.

I dont have any money Paul.....my bank Manager keeps lending it to me.

[davidpretorius]

great computer.

i have the latest dell about 5 months ago and it is still not fast enough to cope with processing 1500 frames and then raw conversions and birds centring program.

computers are a monthly rental. best way to buy them and new software.

she can watch dvd's on it, listen to music......

[avandonk]

Had to go to another 21st of one of my nephews and offered to pay for GF hair do , $135 Aus. Nearly a good filter!

Bert

[iceman]

Nice one Tony! That'll keep you going for a couple of years.

[Robert_T]

as I sit in front of the $999 Harvey Norman laptop you should have bought (was it the Compaq Presario?), as It chugs ever so painfully slowly :mad2: through the valley of registax optimisation I shall not let avarice for the P4 2Ghz CPU cloud my path....:wink2:


just tell me one thing Tony... is it shiny?

[matt]

Y'know ... that opens up an interesting and timely question i'd like to ask:

What are the minimum requirements (HD size, processor speed, amount of RAM etc) one should aim for in buying a lappy solely for astro use???

I know it's like asking "how long's a piece of string" and depends on what you want to do and how hard you want to push it etc,

but let's say it's only going to be used for capture and processing of astro stuff.

Let's also say we'll be using periodically moving processed images onto external storage devices, CDs DVDs etc

I'd want something which is reasonably fast ... but not Deep Thought fast:lol:

What specs should I aim for, and what's a fair price new/2nd hand?

Thanks

[Robert_T]

Hi Matt - yoy might have picked up that I feel my 1.2Ghz laptopy is a little challenged but it does the job. The most important thing in an astro laptop I reckon though is a DVD Burner to save away 5-6 Gig worth of avis after every session.

cheers,

[h0ughy]

something with lots of Ram, at least a 15.4" screen (preferably a clear superscreen version) a dual layer dvd (although single layer is cheaper) as mush hdd space as possible (you can offset this by having a 3.5" portable HDD of any size to download information to ) USB2, firewire, its up to you if you require the wireless connectivity, if your on a battery is sucks the life out of the laptop battery. but in saying all that, if you can't afford a "new" laptop and I would say the $1000 lappy would be a good beast with at least 512MB to a gig memory, they only ship with 256k, 64 of which goes to the video driver. 512MB memory is cheap, so throw a stick in, your lappy will love it and run heaps "quicker". also only have running essential programs, if you are not networked, on the net or reading data from other peoples HDD's or DVD's then turn it off, also any spyware programs and any other nice window dressing software you have loaded. I have 3 laptops, a compaq e600 - P111 866Mhz 256mb, 15gig cdrw/dvd, 14" tft, a toshiba 2.4 gig p4, 15" tft, 512mb, 60 gig HDD with USB2 and firewire cdrw/dvd, andthe one I am on at the moment, a P4 3.04Gig, 768MB ram, 40 gig HDD, clearscreen 15.4" dvdrw. they all work well. I rebuilt the compaq one from parts to make it up and only cost me $100 - I may use that for driving the scope, leaving the others for more labor intensive work.

[asimov]

Are you trying to tell me my 4 year old lappy with 64MB ram could be a tad slow!?....NAA! Surely not!:lol:

I'll swap U robert if you reckon you got troubles with that one! :P :)

[Striker]

Also remember that the Pentium M class processors are a lot quicker then the standard P4 HT chipset's you see in most desk tops.

For example they are comparing my Pentuim 4 M class 2.0 GHz as being the same as a 3.8GHZ P4 with HT...but this does depend on what tests you do and what it's used for...so these results really dont mean anything.

So dont be put off by lower Clock ratting on M class Pentium chips...they are much quicker and get lots of ram.

Unfortunetly they charge a lot more if you want a seperate video card but this is optimal.

[ving]

these people who are afriad of thier wives/partners! I'll never understand!

(dont tell cheryl i said that :P)