Which Laptop gives this...?????????

[Gorvid]

I'm confused by the influx of info.


Point me to a laptop that will be great for internet use and last for ages on battery power.

Please..

[off_again]

Without getting into an argument, WiFi will never be as quick as a wired connection. There are lots of factors in place, but if you consider environmental factors, WiFi is going to be variable at best. Little things like RSJ's have a massive effect (as I know in my house) as well as general wiring etc. So a router may be advertised as 54Mbps, but it will rarely get close to 10% of that. Add in a few environmental factors and a bad configuration and you end up with a typical figure of 2-3Mbps real throughput. However, given that most ISP's deliver their network at around this speed, its pretty academic in reality.

The fastest possible quality ISP you can get is going to give the best ISP performance. Even a cruddy laptop will work well, so having the best possible high-end laptop will not affect overall perception of web browsing. I would start with the following though:

1) Check the speed of your ISP - http://www.speedtest.net/ see what you are really getting and consider changing
2) Double check your WiFi router - http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,co... as you can see there is a massive difference with different products and brands
3) Check the configuration of your router - consider changing the settings for security to make it more efficient. More suck and see than anything else, but chances are your laptop driver for the WiFi card isnt great
4) Update your laptop - make sure you have the latest drivers, but check the release notes for information
5) Tune your laptop TCP/IP settings - http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php lots of options here
6) Use a latest browser version - IE 7, Firefox 2 and Safari (for Windows) are all quick. IE says its the quickest, but I find Firefox and Safari better (just)
7) Remove any AV / Spam filter / Content Control from Norton or McAfee - they are notoriously slow and consume a lot of system resources. Check online for smaller and more efficient versions (or ask on here). Most new computers come crippled with Norton for example, remove it and the whole things flies along!

If you have tried those options and really need a new laptop then get the fastest processor, most RAM with the latest pre-installed OS on it. Vista is good for WiFi, but XP does seem to have the edge currently on performance.

http://www.news.com/Windows-XP-outshines-Vista-in-...

So consider an XP laptop. Look at Core2 Duo laptops with the best performance you can go for. Anything with the Santa Rossa chipset has a slight advantage over older ones (to do with shuffling around memory etc). Stay well clear of the ultra-cheap ones though. They are almost always crippled for some reason like processor, lack of memory or slow motherboard. Oh, and plenty of RAM is a good thing. 1GB is the norm these days, so 2GB or even more. I have a 2GB Dell which is OK, but it really could do with more (though that is for my job more than anything else).

By the way, Dell are OK but not great. They do compromise on component quality occasionally and you can get stuck with something crap. I have a D620 and previously had a D600. They are OK but battery life is shocking. My D620 has two batteries and I struggle to get 2 hours out of it, and that is with the screen turned right down and no WiFi! My wife has a Sony Vaio which gets 3 to 4 hours with WiFi and doing stuff! Though she has Vista which has better battery management features.

As a final comment though, consider a Mac. They may not be to your taste, but the new MacBooks and MacBook Pro's are top-end for their core performance. In fact, running Boot Camp (basically running Windows without Mac OS) rates them as one of the best around. They are not without their faults, but a direct comparison between my iMac (OK its a desktop) and my laptop is quite shocking! Safari on Mac OS is blisteringly quick and general browsing is just almost a pleasure.

[Gorvid]

Great post...


Sounds like I should really focus on a decent lappy with a good battery. As the internet speed will be fine whatever..

[Freddie von Rost]

Gorvid said:

I'm confused by the influx of info.


Point me to a laptop that will be great for internet use and last for ages on battery power.

Please..

You'll be lucky. So far, all I can read is a geekathon pi55ing highest up the wall contest.



Edited to state: with exception to off again's post.

Edited by Freddie von Rost on Sunday 16th December 10:02

[Kinky]

I'm not saying a word, other than buy a ThinkPad with the extended battery to give you circa 9 hours (IIRC) but probably more with the battery stretch application.

But to be honest I'm more interested in the 'geekathon' - and wondering at what point the PH posting rules were broken

Totally unacceptable.

K

[neilmac]

You should be well pleased with that result!

This is what I have to work with...

[URL=http://www.speedtest.net][/URL]

Good ole Telefonica

[CommanderJameson]

TheLearner said:

Ordinary Bloke said:

Ignore that bullsh1t, wireless network is much much faster than the piece of wire between your router and the ISP. My ISP can do 2Mbit/s, my router can do 54Mbits/s...

Actually, the laptop and router is much less important than the ISP you choose. As long as you have lots of free disk space on the C: driver (never go over 80%) and a reasonable amount of RAM (512K+ is good) then it mainly comes down to the bandwidth and quality of service of your ISP.

Most of the time, the PC is waiting for more info from the network...

Fail troll is fail.

Latency is the magic word.

Fail! Your average wireless LAN is easily capable of outperforming your ISP by an order of magnitude on latency.

I ping <15ms to some BF2142 and HL2 servers, and I'm on an measly 11g connection to my router.

Oh, and a 20mbps Virgin Media cable connection to the interwebernet.

Behold! ("router.tranquillity.lan" is my Buffalo wireless router)

$ ping router
PING router.tranquillity.lan (10.200.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.200.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=3.008 ms
64 bytes from 10.200.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.074 ms
64 bytes from 10.200.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.108 ms
64 bytes from 10.200.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=1.107 ms
^C
--- router.tranquillity.lan ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.074/1.574/3.008/0.828 ms
$ ping www.pistonheads.com
PING www.pistonheads.com (195.225.218.139): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 195.225.218.139: icmp_seq=0 ttl=116 time=19.022 ms
64 bytes from 195.225.218.139: icmp_seq=1 ttl=116 time=16.791 ms
64 bytes from 195.225.218.139: icmp_seq=2 ttl=116 time=16.411 ms
64 bytes from 195.225.218.139: icmp_seq=3 ttl=116 time=19.485 ms
^C
--- www.pistonheads.com ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 16.411/17.927/19.485/1.343 ms

Edited by CommanderJameson on Sunday 16th December 10:19

[CommanderJameson]

TheLearner said:

randlemarcus said:

Ordinary Bloke said:

I know what a troll is.

But I can't believe someone who thinks she's in IT suggesting that Gorvid needs a DNS server to make the internet fast! FFS...

funnily enough, using public DNS servers rather than the F2S ones has cured a rather annoying intermittent DNS failure I have been having for a while. I know this is highly coincidental, and not hugely pertinent to Gorv's issue at hand, but hey

Well, he wants to eek out every last byte from the connection and that means everything working as swiftly as possible. To my mind going balls to the wall speed on home user kit over WiFi would follow these general pricipals.

• Disable all form of WiFi security. It makes the router AND PC work just a fraction harder.
• Poke the router and make damn sure the MTU setting is spot on and not the generic setting of 1500.
• Mirror this new MTU speed on the WiFi adapter, again less packet fiddling.
• Check the small print of the specs for the adapter, if it's Atheros based junk it for a hardware based card. Hardware is faster than software.
• Check for alternative and less utilised DNS servers, a LOT of ISP's will just throw bind on to any old shit heap of a machine and leave you wondering why your browser is sat there spinning its wheels "connecting" or "looking up" a certain site. NTL's DNS servers for example are shit, fall over and generally sit there with a thumb up their asses... sometimes for several seconds.
• Play with google and find the magic drivers. Basically it'll be a certain revision of driver for your hardware which everyone reported as being faster/quicker/more efficient. It might however not be the most stable release ever... but this is balls to the wall speed.
• Stop any other traffic on the network, even updating the time automatically.
• Make sure nothing is interfering with the WiFi signal, it's very weak and in the 2.4Ghz range... pretty much anything electronic will increase the noise and thus cause slightly slower.
• Periodically reboot the router, amazing how much quicker and responsive that can make a network; again home user kit.

As to freakishly long battery life I would purchase a Dell laptop (replace Dell with your favourite OEM, I find them all to be so similar as indistinguishable), one of their small units. I would then set about Windows making sure everything was using as little power as possible; not just setting the power applet to "max battery" but also flipping through the device manager... some WiFi cards can be made to enter low power mode but don't by default as it can have a knock on effect... like network speed... natch. I would then also hunt down one of those lugable battery pack things. Which if the laptop is pulling off 5 hours on a single charge will give another 5 - 6 hours on top.

That's a lot of work for pretty much no reward the second you hit a real world web server that's not saturating your connection, which is most if not all of them.

[CommanderJameson]

Gorvid said:

I'm confused by the influx of info.


Point me to a laptop that will be great for internet use and last for ages on battery power.

Please..

MacBook Pro.

OS X will do better on battery life than Windows XP or Vista on the same machine, but you can Boot Camp it (i.e. dual boot) if Winders is a necessity.

ETA: Ooer. I see your budget there. So a MacBook Pro is out of the question. MacBook. Get the middle one (so you get the dual-layer superdrive) and max the RAM.

Edited by CommanderJameson on Sunday 16th December 10:30

[MiniMac]

CommanderJameson, what BF2142 servers do you play on? Whats your name? Might pop on and grab your tags

[agent006]

TheLearner said:

Fail troll is fail.

Tired meme is tired.

[Noger]

CommanderJameson said:

OS X will do better on battery life than Windows XP or Vista on the same machine, but you can Boot Camp it (i.e. dual boot) if Winders is a necessity.

ETA: Ooer. I see your budget there. So a MacBook Pro is out of the question. MacBook. Get the middle one (so you get the dual-layer superdrive) and max the RAM.

Edited by CommanderJameson on Sunday 16th December 10:30

Even with the Mac's better battery usage, if huge battery life is really key (rather than just pretty good), then you will still need to look at Window's based hardware I think. The Lenovo extended 85-95Wh batteries are up 8-9 hours. These are 12-cell and not tiny ! Although maybe you could use an external battery pack (or extended battery ?) with the Mac.

Dunno, depends what you mean by Massive Battery life ?

[plasticpig]

If you want long battery life then the Sony VAIO VGN-TZ range is pretty good. Unfourtunately the one with the SSD hard disk dosent seem to be available in the UK. This has an 11 hour battery life whereas you can ony squeeze 6 hours out of a normal one. Not convinced I would buy one at £1800 though for just browsing the internet.

[FunkyNige]

jimmyjimjim said:

If you do buy Dell (not a bad choice for VFM), you can usually order an extra capacity battery.

Watch out, the battery sticks out a few cm out the back, lasts about 6-7 hours browsing the net on 'Dell reccommended' battery settings, not sure how long it lasts on the 'power saver' setting.

Gorvid - buy a Dell with a big battery and turn all the settings down. If you're really desperate for a few hours more battery life then buy an SSD hard drive (solid state, no moving parts), they cost £250 for a 64GB one mind...

[CommanderJameson]

MiniMac said:

CommanderJameson, what BF2142 servers do you play on? Whats your name? Might pop on and grab your tags

Often to be found on the Timeless servers and the FDS/xkillax/BFB ones. Look for "fiver_driver", "reggie_perrin" or "nursie".

[TheLearner]

CommanderJameson said:

That's a lot of work for pretty much no reward the second you hit a real world web server that's not saturating your connection, which is most if not all of them.

Indeed, but Gorvid wanted balls to the wall speed from a wireless network <-> internet. Diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly with such things but I wasn't in the mood to point that out... I'm still not as I have a hang over.

[CommanderJameson]

TheLearner said:

CommanderJameson said:

That's a lot of work for pretty much no reward the second you hit a real world web server that's not saturating your connection, which is most if not all of them.

Indeed, but Gorvid wanted balls to the wall speed from a wireless network <-> internet. Diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly with such things but I wasn't in the mood to point that out... I'm still not as I have a hang over.

Tailoring the message to the audience is a key tenet of effective communication. A non-techie asking for "the fastest connection possible" is really asking for "the fastest connection possible without any fannying about".

[Gorvid]

CommanderJameson said:

TheLearner said:

CommanderJameson said:

That's a lot of work for pretty much no reward the second you hit a real world web server that's not saturating your connection, which is most if not all of them.

Indeed, but Gorvid wanted balls to the wall speed from a wireless network <-> internet. Diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly with such things but I wasn't in the mood to point that out... I'm still not as I have a hang over.

Tailoring the message to the audience is a key tenet of effective communication. A non-techie asking for "the fastest connection possible" is really asking for "the fastest connection possible without any fannying about".

^^ He's right.

In fact.

What I really want is a great laptop that won't break and will run things fast and be cool for under a grand.

[_Lee_]

CommanderJameson said:

TheLearner said:

CommanderJameson said:

That's a lot of work for pretty much no reward the second you hit a real world web server that's not saturating your connection, which is most if not all of them.

Indeed, but Gorvid wanted balls to the wall speed from a wireless network <-> internet. Diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly with such things but I wasn't in the mood to point that out... I'm still not as I have a hang over.

Tailoring the message to the audience is a key tenet of effective communication. A non-techie asking for "the fastest connection possible" is really asking for "the fastest connection possible without any fannying about".

Good point.

[Hooli]

Gorvid said:

Great post...


Sounds like I should really focus on a decent lappy with a good battery. As the internet speed will be fine whatever..

Gorvid, i take it your on a BT homehub there? if so put 192.168.1.254 in your browser address bar & see what speed the hub says its connected at. you'll never get more than about 80-90% of that speed in the real world, so you may be trying for the impossible if its the actual line speed limiting you.

if its a BT voyager, same thing but use 192.168.1.1



i've just used that TCP optimiser from page 2, definatly seems to have stablised my browsing to what was a 'fast moment'. only took a few secs to run as well, impressed so far.