Laptop Specs

Ok! After much help from the boards and my many questions, I think I have finally come to a decision on a laptop. My last question to you all would be: Does it look ok? Here are the Specs:

HP HDX18t
Windows Vista 64-bit (Free Upgrade to W7)
Intel Core2 Duo 2.66GHz
6GB DDR3 RAM
500GB 7200rpm Hard Drive (2x 250GB)
1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M
18.4" (1920x1080p)

I haven't gotten it yet, but really soon! So any feedback would be appriciated!

P.S. If you need anymore info, I can try to find it.

Just as a heads up, as City of Heroes is a 32bit application, it can only use 3.5 gigs of RAM.

As for the video card, it's on the low end for the latest generation... so it might be a bit slow.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

That graphics solution (about the equivalent of a desktop 9500GT) is probably going to struggle in games at that resolution.

-Wolf sends

When I was customizing the laptop, it only gave me the two options for the graphics card, one that would only work for the DDR2 memory, and one that uses the DDR3.

I'll look into other graphics cards...thanks!

Checking HP's website, it looks like the other option is 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT? That'll still be fairly low end...


Have you considered an ASUS machine? Based on the stats you listed, the G71 would be a good fit, costing a bit less, with a pretty damn good video card (the nvidia 260M... as far as I know, the 280M is the only mobile card out there right now that's faster... and I've yet to see a machine with it). I recently picked up a lower end version of that machine as a replacement for an HP system that had the video card just go out just after the warrenty expired.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Well, the laptop was going to double as my school computer in the coming year. Going into Sound Recording, and the HP has a Subwoofer and everything.

Not the mention, when I went to Best Buy and played around with that exact machine, I couldn't seem to get it's strange interface to work. Some Black Screen with Blue media-center-like icons. I'm sure it was because it was just the floor model, but it seemed to have turned me off nearly instantly.

I could possibly go and check it out again before I make a final decision.

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Not the mention, when I went to Best Buy and played around with that exact machine, I couldn't seem to get it's strange interface to work. Some Black Screen with Blue media-center-like icons. I'm sure it was because it was just the floor model, but it seemed to have turned me off nearly instantly.

[/ QUOTE ]Sounds like you were in Splashtop (aka ExpressGate), which is an Instant-On Linux Distribution that ASUS includes on a lot of their machines, it's meant as an alternative to fully booting the OS to get access to your documents quickly... you can easily pretend it isn't there (you have to enter it by pressing the ExpressGate button while the machine is off, instead of using the power button).

Or, it could have been BestBuy's display software... if it's the same as the one I saw, there should have been a button to hide it, allowing you access to the desktop.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

Oh! well, then I would have to check it out again! Thanks for that!

Great, now I'm gonna have to figure out how to hack ExpressGate to be a full Linux distro

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

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Well, the laptop was going to double as my school computer in the coming year. Going into Sound Recording, and the HP has a Subwoofer and everything.

[/ QUOTE ]

You aren't really expecting any kind of deep or rich real sound from laptop speakers are you? I hope not or you will be sorely disappointed.

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Well, the laptop was going to double as my school computer in the coming year. Going into Sound Recording, and the HP has a Subwoofer and everything.

[/ QUOTE ]

You aren't really expecting any kind of deep or rich real sound from laptop speakers are you? I hope not or you will be sorely disappointed.

[/ QUOTE ]Is it just me, or is the thought of my laptop vibrating as much as my sub seem like a horrible idea?

Personally, I'm quite happy with the sound quality of just plugging in a decent 2.1 audio system using the headphone jack... Also, at least on the HP laptops I've seen from about a year ago, none of them included a line-in for audio, just a microphone jack, which traditionally has been single-channel and absolutely horrid sound quality (as in, so bad that you could tell it's bad on laptop speakers).

Also, depending on what kind of sound recording you're actually doing, I'd recommend getting an external sound card anyways (a Firewire one should be very low latency, USB ones should be a bit cheaper and still rather low latency), one with all those fancy ports that most high end equipment use.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

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Just as a heads up, as City of Heroes is a 32bit application, it can only use 3.5 gigs of RAM.

[/ QUOTE ] 32-bit Operating systems have a memory allocation limit of 4GB, yes.. but the 32-bit applications themselves are limited to only 2GB, iirc.

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Just as a heads up, as City of Heroes is a 32bit application, it can only use 3.5 gigs of RAM.

[/ QUOTE ] 32-bit Operating systems have a memory allocation limit of 4GB, yes.. but the 32-bit applications themselves are limited to only 2GB, iirc.

[/ QUOTE ]Ah, windows by default uses a 2/2 memory split, and a 3/1 split if you both use a special bootup switch (/3GB) and the binary's header has the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag (64bit applications still need the flag set to address more than 2 gigs).

IIRC, the 3.5 GB must have been the limit for total userland physical memory in XP/(maybe) Vista 32.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

the OS is irrelevant for a 32bit application itself is limited to 2gb, or 3.5 with the 2 switches enabled.

so a 32bit app on a 64bit OS would still be limited to 2gb.

Native 64 bit applications each single process is able to address up to 8 terabytes of memory. Nonetheless, developers will have to update their applications accordingly. Simply re-compiling the 32 bit applications with a 64 bit compiler is not sufficient, as this would result in each process still being limited to 2 GB.

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the OS is irrelevant for a 32bit application itself is limited to 2gb, or 3.5 with the 2 switches enabled.

[/ QUOTE ]No, the design of the OS (kernel, specifically) dictates the limit (4GB being the x86 architectural limit, unless you use a hack like PAE). It's possible to allow almost all of the full 4GB of the address space to be allowocated to the application, but that complicates the kernel design and will introduce even more overhead in system calls, both Windows and Linux chose not to design their kernels to work like this.

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Native 64 bit applications each single process is able to address up to 8 terabytes of memory.

[/ QUOTE ]Native Windows applications. The (current) processor-imposed limit being 256 TB (before the kernel/userland split), with the current limitation being 128 TB on Linux for userland processes. The OS is not irrelevant.

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Nonetheless, developers will have to update their applications accordingly. Simply re-compiling the 32 bit applications with a 64 bit compiler is not sufficient, as this would result in each process still being limited to 2 GB.

[/ QUOTE ]No, unless you manually disable the compiler flag (it's on by default on the 64bit compiler), the application will automatically be able to address the full address space by a simple recompile. Changes might need to be made if the developer made assumptions about the sizes of various primitives (especially pointers), other 32bit-isms, or depends on functions deprecated on the Win32 for 64bit Windows API.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

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[ QUOTE ]
the OS is irrelevant for a 32bit application itself is limited to 2gb, or 3.5 with the 2 switches enabled.

[/ QUOTE ]No, the design of the OS (kernel, specifically) dictates the limit (4GB being the x86 architectural limit, unless you use a hack like PAE). It's possible to allow almost all of the full 4GB of the address space to be allowocated to the application, but that complicates the kernel design and will introduce even more overhead in system calls, both Windows and Linux chose not to design their kernels to work like this.

[ QUOTE ]
Native 64 bit applications each single process is able to address up to 8 terabytes of memory.

[/ QUOTE ]Native Windows applications. The (current) processor-imposed limit being 256 TB (before the kernel/userland split), with the current limitation being 128 TB on Linux for userland processes. The OS is not irrelevant.

[ QUOTE ]
Nonetheless, developers will have to update their applications accordingly. Simply re-compiling the 32 bit applications with a 64 bit compiler is not sufficient, as this would result in each process still being limited to 2 GB.

[/ QUOTE ]No, unless you manually disable the compiler flag (it's on by default on the 64bit compiler), the application will automatically be able to address the full address space by a simple recompile. Changes might need to be made if the developer made assumptions about the sizes of various primitives (especially pointers), other 32bit-isms, or depends on functions deprecated on the Win32 for 64bit Windows API.

[/ QUOTE ]

no