ot pentium to amd

I finally got a custom made to order HP 4100..

Most motherboard choices either left you with amd OR PENTIUM choices.. but not both. A few designs took either.. so i would not bet on swapping chips.

Celeron is a scaled back pentium. There are mobile versions of the pentium and celeron.

A sempron is a scaled back ver of the amd athlon.. there is a mobile version of the athlon.. as well as a chip called a turion.. also meant to be mobile.

Get the most procesor, and ram, and a good video card. Hard drive speed makes less difference onthe larger drives due to realitive data density. For instance.. I had the choice of a 4800 rpm drive at 160gb.. or a 7200rpm drive at 80gb. Looking at each side by side.. I saw no performance difference.. I got the larger drive.

video.. options were basically onboard chipset graphics.. ( sis / intel ) or upgrade to something like ati.. also had choice of shareing cpu ram.. or full onboard dedicated video ram.

I tried the intel extreme graphics, and the sis, and the ati.. intel was a dog.. sis was livable.. ati was a screamer. As fro ram.. dedicated ram, if available and you can afford it, is better. My ati has 128 dedicated video memory.. if I need more video memory, i can alocate system ram to the video card.. up to another 128 meg, in the bios setup area.

Screen.. don't wear your eyes out. I took a widescreen upgrade and a 'clearview' glare freee screen upgrade... do this for your eyes.. gives you greater view angle.. less glare.. also doesn't have that rigid grainy texture.. also.. get axctive scree.. not passive if you can help it... less ghosting.. looks better on games and movies..

Also.. do yourself a favor.. get a gig of ram... way less churning with a swap file.

I ended up getting a 2.4ghz amd65 chip.. it was 200$ cheaper than a 2.2ghz turion.. and only 200$ more than the base sempron / 100/50 more than the 2/2.2 amd..

Also.. get a wireless G adapter.. My laptop screams.. and gets good signal in places with wan's setup.. If I can get 2 bars of signal.. I can get 18mbs data rates.. and 3+ bars I can get 54mbs...

Get a dvd /cdr combo.. nice to be able to watch dvd while on a trip.

Last on the list is battery. I stayed with the basic 6 cel LI battery.. Wanted the upgrade 12 cell LI battery for longer life.. but the add-on's had to stop somewhere.. besides.. i ran out of budget from work!!

On battery, with hdd/cd intensive work.. you get about 1 minute per percent of power used... once you hit single digit percent power.. you are in trouble. Also.. on battery. some stuff works different.. some intel processors ( amd too?? ) slow down while on battery. Also, display goes to a more power saving feature.. reduces backlighting.. etc.

Soundguy

Keith & Shawn

AMD has a very good chip. Pentium's are as well.

Celron chips are the slowest, cheapest Pentiums. AMD makes something similar, be careful you get the quality, capacity, & speed of chip you want. It gets complicated trying to compare them these days.

The M-chips are good, use less power for notbooks. They get more done per clock cycle than a regular Pentium chip, so can't compare clock speeds directly. I would look for an M chip, or it's equivalent class from AMD.

--->Paul