Buying a laptop and I have questions! :o
 

So there's this Gateway Tablet PC laptop that I'm thinking about getting (great for Re's artwork with the draw-on screen and great for my shit since I can take it anywhere I go), but I'm not sure about the processor. I've heard stuff about Pentiums overheating on laptops and this one does have a "Pentium M" processor. Here's the specs on the computer:

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Gatew...oductDetail.do
(ignore the Centrino tag in the image, I verified that it's a "Pentium M" processor)

"This cool convertible notebook features the Pentium® M processor 740, 1024MB of DDR2 memory as well as a 100GB 5400RPM SATA hard drive. This capable PC also offers 1.73GHz processing speed and a 2MB L2 cache. "

Anyway, I want to know if this is something I don't need to worry about or something I should avoid.

Any advice/suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thankee :o

Centrino basically means it's a Pentium M with some power management and wireless crap tacked onto the motherboard.

It's the same processor I have in my laptop and it's really good. Everything runs well (even power hungry games like HL2 which use alot of processor time for physics and such).

The X600 (se) graphics should easily be good enough for the things you said you needed it for.

Looks like a nice little tablet.

p.s. The processor doesn't get particularly hot but I guess thats down to the cooling in this particular model and it'd be hard to say what it's like in the one you are looking at. Should be ok tbh.

I would really sugest you go to somewhere other than Circuit City. But thats just my bittered biased opinion.

also a 5400 rpm drive is kinda slow and may drag down your system when you do file searches or install shit or play games that write to the disk a lot ;<

You can't really have a 7200rpm in a laptop without sacrificing quite a bit of battery life. And they aren't that much slower so long as you don't mult task too much.

Honestly, we won't be playing any games on this laptop. It's strictly going to be used for Re's artwork, my writing, and some typical web surfing and email. That's pretty much it.

Personal experience with the Pentium M, it never ran fast. Since the M runs slower to "conserve battery life" it never runs at full speed when you need it. Like any laptop user, when I was near an outlet I would plug in. But when I was on-site, away from an outlet, and I just wanted to get my work done and get out, that's when it would be slow. BTW, that one was a gateway too.

As far as overheating, I'm still not convinced Dell has overcome their heat issues. We had 3 and all 3 cooked due to mobo, fan, or CPU failures. And on one the hinge died in 6 months and wouldn't stay open. But any laptop needs space around it for airflow considering their fans are so small and they need all the help they can get. As long as you're not running it actually on your lap or in the bag all the time you should be ok.

Convertable tablets are so nice, handwriting recognition software is amazing.

I've been thinking of getting a laptop so that I won't be completely SOL if/when my PC starts giving me problems again, and I've got my eye on this one:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1140393564993


Thoughts?

you guys should check out slickdeals.net. Usually at least once a week really great laptop deals get posted.