Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
This is really a mobile desktop replacement. I do a lot of freelance .NET/SQL/Web programming/consulting and often work at my client's offices so I like to have something akin to a desktop with me wherever I go.
No doubt, this would be a great gaming machine. LAN PARTY! But those days are past. I used to spend countless hours playing Quake, Doom, etc, and also played many RTS games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Age of Empires/Mythogy, Red Alert/Command & Conquer. Now, at the ripe old age of 40, I spend my late nights gaming the market instead Actually, when I do game it's usually something on the Wii with my kids, or some casual game (Plants vs. Zombies, various tower defense games) or something on my iPhone. Now, I avoid anything rated M, I don't want to play anything I don't want my kids (9 year-old triplets) to play or see me playing and I don't want me/them to be de-sensitized to the violence.
Platform: "I trade, therefore, I AM!"; Theme Song: "Atomic Dog!"
Trading: EMD, 6J, ZB
Posts: 796 since Oct 2009
not to bust your bubble, but you could have bought the same resoultion in a 15.6" form factor, in fact that was what I was considering, because the latest and greatest laptop bags do not go above the 16" sizing, including those new airport screener carry bags.
either way, the specs you gave are available for huge discount on the Alien-PC form factor that Dell now sells and the Taiwan fabricator that supplies both major outlets and rebranding outlets. Clevo is that fabricator. The only differences between these machines are the bells and whistles, such as keyboard lights and back lit color schemes and such.
either way, have fun and report back on what its able to do....
oh, its not the size of the screen but the pixel-ation factor, the highest that I have seen is 1920x1200, of course there are higher on fixed monitors, but we're talking laptop luggables....
curious why you chose Win7 pro over the baseline version?, not significant difference, and not likely you're going to node your laptop for very long periods of time to make a difference with the configuration changes necessary to compensate between the software versions...
curious why you spent on 8gb also instead of the baseline 4gb?, the 64bit & i7 combination won't allow most things to remain memory resident very long before returning to a pause state, as those 8 processors literally shread the workload, unlike any quad processor before it....
The Dell I originally ordered was a 16" but, if you read my blog link, Dell kept canceling my order because of problems on their end so I gave up on them. I like that size better as these 17"+ sized laptops are pretty heavy and bulky. I'm willing to give it a try though.
I've never heard of Alien-PC. I'll have to check it out. I also want to get a light 13.3" notebook for meetings or quick mobile situations while my 18" is docked at the office all attached to monitors and other external devices. I'm considering a 13" MacBook pro as I am now Mac-less (sold my 3+ yr-old MBP to my sister) and I like the Mac for certain things (LAMP, Ruby on Rails, iPhone development, iLife slide shows for my wife who is a photographer, etc) but I'm waiting for another rev of the MacBook pro line, hopefully with new Core i7 chips so I'm holding off on that for now. The last rev of the MBPs was in June.
I chose Win7 Pro because I often work at my client's offices and need to attach to their domain. The Home version doesn't support attaching to Windows domains. Plus, I often develop websites on IIS and I know with XP and Vista didn't support IIS so I've always stayed away from the Home versions for that reason as well.
I maxed the RAM out because, well, because I can! I thought it was a decent price to do so. I hate disk thrashing/VM swapping so I usually max out the RAM when I can. Also, sometimes I have some really big SQL databses running so MySQL or MS SQL can use up a good chunk of RAM.
As for the screen resolution, most of these newer laptops now are all 16:9 aspect ratios, hence the 1920x1080 screen (instead of 1200 height). Plus, 90% of the time this thing will be attached to a 26-28", 1900x1200 2nd monitor, keyboard and mouse and the notebook is the secondary display.
I have a MacBook 13.3" (black), a MacBook Pro 17" (pre-December 2008 release), and a 42" LCD TV/monitor; and I'm enjoying them all. I still have to reluctantly use Windows on my Macs (specifically and only because of NT) using VMWare Fusion, and all these are working for me very very well. I want to be Window-less, I don't want to be locked in a gate either; I'm Unixy; I'm Mac-full !!!
So, don't hesitate on Mac; go for it as soon as the new Mac series are out (very likely to be December).
Build your own, get x64 Windows 7 with at least 4GB of memory, a cheap dual-DVI video card, and a fast processor like i7 920. There is another thread about this here. You can do it for well under $1,000 and get plenty of horsepower. Or you can keep adding more memory, etc, but as for what NT7 or trading needs, anything more than above is just 'icing on the cake'.
If you can hold off on the next release of Mac Mini + Snow Leopard Server (which expectedly should have up to 8GB RAM), then it will be "worth the wait". I'm holding off to have one too, as my desktop (I don't currently have a desktop). Snow Leopard Server is a full 64-bit OS. You can pump in your Windows 7 (for NT7 only) or Windows XP using VMWare Fusion ($80) or Parallels ($60) and have peace. Current Mac Mini + Snow Leopard Server configuration is $999.
On the other hand, if you want to build a PC, then build an Ubuntu Linux + Virtual Box (all free stuff) machine, if you can.