Percieved performance of laptops - any point upgrading?

TenLeftFingers

I've been looking at new laptops lately and I'm surprised by the lack of improvement with the responsiveness of the desktop (in Windows XP at least) and I'm wondering if people could tell me if the new systems are actually improving much.

I have a Dell Inspiron PIII 800Mhz laptop at the moment. I've had it for the last 6 or 7 years. I've been thinking of upgrading for a few years, but whenever I try a newer laptop, the performance doesn't seem to be a whole lot better, or at least enough to make me consider upgrading.

For example, 18 months ago my friend had a 1.6Ghz pentium M processor that was noticeably snappier, but nothing more. Only recently I tried a relatively new Celeron system (clocked in the gigahertz) that seemed almost slower than my current system.

Just a few weeks ago, I called into PC world and double clicked on "My Computer" of a display machine (dont know the spec but think it was a Core of some kind). I had to wait a few seconds for the window to pop up - just like on my present system really.

A friend of mine has a year old Apple laptop with decent specs (but same ram as me) and the performance seemed merely a nose ahead of my own.

Aside from being a non-gamer, my uses of a computer are fairly typical I think. All internet based stuff, some graphical, mp3 play and watch the odd DVD. I have found that running linux (Ubuntu) has increase the performance a considerably. Are all these new processors and laptops that are coming out just very incremental improvements or have I missed something?

Thanks for reading,
Merlin

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Yea, in laptops, all the processor with high clock speeds have to be throttled because laptops cannot disippate nearly the same amount of heat as desktops.

The pentium M is specifically designed to produce low amoounts of heat and use less power, so these will run noticably faster in a laptop (and a desktop sometimes) than say a Pentium 4 clocked at 3 times the speed.

TerrorFirmer

Merlin the important thing to remember is that generally speaking, once a machine is of a relatively decent speed (700mhz+ roughly), in basic tasks like web surfing, watching DVDs and playing MP3s, you don't see much difference because the system isn't being asked to do much.

Try playing games, encoding video files, or even doing all the above tasks at once - then you'll notice a difference, whether you're using P3, P4, PM or dual core.

And some slight mis information regarding the Pentium M there and its speeds, it's a good processor but nowhere remotely near 'faster in a laptop (and a desktop sometimes) than say a Pentium 4 clocked at 3 times the speed.'

Any Celeron M will be much faster then an 800mhz P3, by a large margin, also its worth nothing that who knows how long the machines have been on in PC World, and they're filled with the preinstalled bloatware, etc.

Thomas_S_Hunterson

HavoK wrote:

And some slight mis information regarding the Pentium M there and its speeds, it's a good processor but nowhere remotely near 'faster in a laptop (and a desktop sometimes) than say a Pentium 4 clocked at 3 times the speed.'

Ok i stand partially corrected, the multiple of 3 was a bit of an exaggeration, but the Pentium M comes out on top on a number of benchmarks

http://www.cpuid.com/reviews/PentiumM/index.php
(they start about half way down the page)

Tom Dunne

HavoK wrote:

Merlin the important thing to remember is that generally speaking, once a machine is of a relatively decent speed (700mhz+ roughly), in basic tasks like web surfing, watching DVDs and playing MP3s, you don't see much difference because the system isn't being asked to do much.

Try playing games, encoding video files, or even doing all the above tasks at once - then you'll notice a difference, whether you're using P3, P4, PM or dual core.

I think Havok has summarised it perfectly there. Also, software is beginning to catch up with hyperthreading and dual core, leading to even greater improvements in speed.

This is why you will almost always see the like of myself, Havok and a few others recommending basic Celeron machines for people who want to do nothing more than surf the net and write the odd e-mail.

There is also the question of reliability. Older machines may be approaching the end of their useful life. Most newer machines are built smaller, less power hungry and with better battery lives.

The bottom line is if your machine is running along nicely right now, I would think long and hard about upgrading. If, on the other hand, performance is degrading and you think it may be about to "go", then perhaps it is time for an upgrade.

BostonB

HavoK wrote:

Merlin the important thing to remember is that generally speaking, once a machine is of a relatively decent speed (700mhz+ roughly), in basic tasks like web surfing, watching DVDs and playing MP3s, you don't see much difference because the system isn't being asked to do much....

HavoK pretty covered everything in his post. I also would recomend a low spec machine, or an older machine for someone doing basic office and internet tasks. You don't need any more.

I eally only notice the difference on a new machine for games, encoding music and video, working with photos.

Also when you are running a development environment like Visual Studio, Eclipse, running a web server like IIS and a database like SQL etc, you really notice that on a slow machine.

On an older laptop probably the only upgrade you really need to do is get a new battery every so often, and have a backup of your files.

TenLeftFingers

Thanks guys. I guess I'll stick with what I have. The main things I would like to have in my current system would be USB 2.0 and a slightly more responsive UI experience - but I can't justify the cost of a new laptop for that.

Just out of curiosity, what would you value my machine at?
PIII 800Mhz,
320 MB Ram,
60GB 7200rpm hard drive,
Wireless Card,
DVD+/- RW,
Newish battery and power suppoly(less than a year old),
1 USB1.0 port,
Ubuntu Linux installed and fully configured with Suspend, Hibernate, Wireless (no dial up under linux), skype and picasa. (Windows ME installation disk somewhere in the attic I'm sure).

Merlin

Tom Dunne

merlin_bar wrote:

Thanks guys. I guess I'll stick with what I have. The main things I would like to have in my current system would be USB 2.0

Do you know that you can get a USB 2 PCMCIA card to give your laptop that functionality?

merlin_bar wrote:

Just out of curiosity, what would you value my machine at?

Around the €200 mark. Bear in mind most people buying a 2nd hand laptop wouldn't be interested in Linux.

Love the sig, btw.

TenLeftFingers

tom dunne wrote:

Do you know that you can get a USB 2 PCMCIA card to give your laptop that functionality?

I hadn't thought of the PCMCIA option, thanks.

tom dunne wrote:

Love the sig, btw.

Yes, I am the King of Copy & Paste. Shocking story, I'd put the URL on a t-shirt if it wasn't so long, and I didn't think it would be a female repellant.

Thanks,
Merlin

i71jskz5xu42pb

merlin_bar wrote:

Thanks guys. I guess I'll stick with what I have. The main things I would like to have in my current system would be USB 2.0 and a slightly more responsive UI experience - but I can't justify the cost of a new laptop for that.

Just out of curiosity, what would you value my machine at?
PIII 800Mhz,
320 MB Ram,
60GB 7200rpm hard drive,
Wireless Card,
DVD+/- RW,
Newish battery and power suppoly(less than a year old),
1 USB1.0 port,
Ubuntu Linux installed and fully configured with Suspend, Hibernate, Wireless (no dial up under linux), skype and picasa. (Windows ME installation disk somewhere in the attic I'm sure).

Merlin

For what you have and what you're using it for I'd consider an increase in memory. As other posters have pointed out CPU does not really come into it for internet/email/basic office stuff. But with the OS, window manager, and a few applications open you might fill 320mb - after this you'll be paging memory to disk which will kill the snappiness of your system.

From a terminal try a

cat /proc/meminfo

or

free

to see what your system shows.

Laptop memory can be easily sourced and installed for not much money here:
http://www.crucial.com/

TenLeftFingers

Thanks Paschal. The command you gave me shows that my memory is almost completely being used and that swapping is going on. Unfortunately, my system cannot be upgraded beyond 512MB of ram so I dont know how worthwile an upgrade would be given that I already have 320MB.

Here's the output, and thanks for the info,

Merlin

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:       320716 kB
MemFree:          8412 kB
Buffers:          8500 kB
Cached:         113540 kB
SwapCached:      22868 kB
Active:         182408 kB
Inactive:       108620 kB
HighTotal:           0 kB
HighFree:            0 kB
LowTotal:       320716 kB
LowFree:          8412 kB
SwapTotal:      939760 kB
SwapFree:       820352 kB
Dirty:             956 kB
Writeback:           0 kB
Mapped:         214968 kB
Slab:            14484 kB
CommitLimit:   1100116 kB
Committed_AS:   765156 kB
PageTables:       2360 kB
VmallocTotal:   704504 kB
VmallocUsed:      3544 kB
VmallocChunk:   700652 kB

i71jskz5xu42pb

merlin_bar wrote:

Thanks Paschal. The command you gave me shows that my memory is almost completely being used and that swapping is going on.

Be very careful how you read the meminfo output - not for the faint of heart. The swap system gets setup on boot so you'll always have something allocated. Memory that is not being used (e.g. idle programs/memory) will be swapped out so there'll usually be something using swap. Really what you're looking for is how often pages are being moved from swap to real memory i.e. page faults.
Something like this
http://chrismiles.info/unix/mrtg/squidsample/cachesyspagefaults.html

I don't know a command line prog that outputs this data - there may be something on the Ubuntu desktop (I'm not familiar with Ubuntu)

merlin_bar wrote:

Unfortunately, my system cannot be upgraded beyond 512MB of ram so I dont know how worthwile an upgrade would be given that I already have 320MB.

What makes you think you can't go beyond 512?
That said going from 320 to 512 is a 60% increase.

i71jskz5xu42pb

Actually this explains it better than I have/could
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8178

TenLeftFingers

Thanks Paschal,

That explains things clearly. I remember that 512MB was the max ram that the system could handle from the Dell website when I ordered the machine about 6 years ago. A google turned up a page that confirms this
http://www.memoryx.net/inspiron4000.html

And crucial also confirms it
http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Inspiron+4000+Series

That said, I can throw out the 64MB ram slot and get a 256MB slot for €80 incl. postage. I think I'll go for it considering everything.

Thanks to everyone for their time and input, I would have gone a completely different direction without it.

Merlin

bushy...

Maybe try a different desktop for ubuntu / try a different distro/BSD and see how it goes ?

TenLeftFingers

Although I'm using Gnome for the last 8 months, I've been a KDE user for a few years prior. On my system KDE was definitely faster, but that could be because of the applications I was using as opposed to the desktop. I use Evolution in Gnome as opposed to KMail/Kontact in KDE for example.

I did try XFCE, which wasn't any faster really, especially since I was using pretty much the same applications. I asked on the ubuntu forums and it seems most people have the same experience lately - not much difference between XFCE and Gnome. EDIT When using the same applications /EDIT http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=324314

At the moment, my system is functioning perfectly so I wont go changing my software if I don't have to. I've ordered more RAM from crucial and I'll adapt the way I use my more intensive applications as Paschal pointed out with his link.

TenLeftFingers

I've installed my upgrade and the differnece is great. Everything is snappier and I can see from the system monitor that swapping/paging rarely occurs. I can even have superflous programs running in the background and still have a smoothish system.

In fact, I'm now wondering how fast a new system would be. I have a 750Mhz/512MB system. A 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo (4MB L2 cache)/2GB system is available for €1500 from Dell. Ironically, although my requirements are met now, my geek appetite has been whetted for a full spec system

Timans

Was it easy to instal RAM?

TenLeftFingers

Simple. Just remove plate from the bottom of the laptop (powered off of course). Push in two clips to allow the old chip to slide out. Pop in the new ram - it 'clicks' into place. Job done.