New laptop is a PITA.........and suggestions?

brettw22

My old laptop took a dive and I got a newer Toshiba laptop. They've stopped making Pentium4 systems and instead are making Centrino systems now. I got the M65-S909, which the biggest thing I liked was that they took almost a little under 3 pounds off the size of the thing. They went with a keyboard (slightly shorter on the right side) and a 10key to the right. I like the 10 key, but the shorter keys on the right have screwed my typing up completely.

The other probem, and this is more of a warning than anything to anyone, is that this keyboard doesn't register keys very well. Unless I'm coming down on the key straight down and center, the keys don't read and I end up missing letters ALL the time. It's so irritating that I'm loking to take this back and start over. I did have some problems with the demo model they had out for public use with the keys, but I thought it might just be a proble because of it being out for everyone to touch........not so.

Fry's Electronics is where I got this one, and the only other brands they carry other than Toshiba are Sony, HP, and Fujitsu. I won't EVER own another Sony computer product, and I'm not really stoked about HP, which leaves the Fujitsu. The keyboard is a full size with a 10 key and typing is reall fluid on that one. I just haven't ever heard of Fujitsu and never known anyone that had one. Do any of y'all have any experience with their laptops and if so any issues/complaints/praise for them?

Muchas Gracias...........

brettw22

Oh ya.....the Fujitsu screen is one of the best ones I've seen........that's a bonus......the one negative is that it's back to another just under 10 pound laptop.
Edit: One of the negatives is that the Fujitsu is only a Centrino 1.86 GHz processor, which I really don't like when comparing going from a 2.8 p4 laptop previously.

Any other suggestions are welcome........

disneyjoe7

Sorry you don't like your new Laptop, my wife gave me a new Dell XPS laptop for Christmas. It's pretty sweet, with 4 USB jacks / no printer / no infrared / no serial jacks but most new Laptop don't have these I wish they did. I'll miss the infrared port thing a laser printer at work would see my old laptop and print just fine from this port. Other then that gives it a thumb up.

Jstas

That Centrino techonolgy actually does use a Pentium class processor. It's a Pentium M processor designed to use less power, generate less heat and fit in a smaller package. Also, it has a 1MB or 2MB L2 cache. To get that out of a Pentium 4 package, you have to go with the super expensive Pentium 4 with Hyper-Threading support and even then, you only get the 1MB L2 cache with the top of the line model.

The nice thing about the huge cache size is that the processor doesn't have to swap out commands as often and repatitive commands can be kept in memory to aid in expediting processing of said commands. This make the system faster at the most basic level so you spend less time waiting for things like memory swapping, disk accessing and so on. The 1.89 GHz processor may be physically slower but it will probably benchmark just as fast as your old 2.8 GHz P4 becauce it probably has 3-4 times as much cache space. You just think it's slower for most stuff because you are psyching yourself out. If it really is that much slower, get a memory upgrade for it. You didn't say how much memory it had but honestly, if you can swing it and the motherboard in the laptop will handle it, go for a gig's worth of memory. You really shouldn't have seen that much of a difference though unless you are doing things like AutoCAD or Adobe Photoshop work that requires lots of clock cycles and system memory for number crunching and not just sheer speed.

shack

Just get a Dell. I have a Dell desktop and a Dell Inspiron laptop we use at home and I recently bought my daughter a Latitude 810 because she needs heavy duty graphics capabilities for her Autocad architecture stuff. I have never had any issues with them.

mhardy6647

Dell, Dell, Dell...