Purchase Advice Needed

Yeah, I know all about that. I owned a Summit Eagle wagon, Made for Chrysler in the Mitsubishi plant using a Mitsubishi engine but sold by a GM dealer. That was the agreement the Japs had with them ect..

Mitsubishi also made a wagon of the same exact style, along with the one Chrysler sold them self's that was made in canada using a canadian engine.(Colt Vista) or something like that. The Canadian's engine was garbage and didn't last along with the body rotting out. The Summit Eagle that I had suffered from bad things like cheap interior body parts, cheap seat belt system that had to be replace twice. bearing in the steering post had to be replaced twice due to a plastic race instead of a metal on. etc.... Then the engine decided to start leaking oil (Head gasket), had that replaced at 65k, 15k miles later, one day while starting it, it locks up tight.! broke the starter head off in the fly wheel, they replaced it to find a binding once in a while, I would noticed that periodically. They dropped the cover to find a small fracture crack in the crank shaft in the last bearing going out to the flywheel., after the mechanical looked it all over which was very knowledgeable with Mitsubishi Engines. He told me that the crank shaft looked like it came out of the next size smaller engine that they make, the bearings on the rods were not made of the usual metal etc.... In other words, it was a cheaply made 1.8 Litter Mitsubishi engine.

P.S. In the Mitsubishi version of that same wagon, they don't use that same engine. how quaint.. I don't blame the Japanese, I blame the American businesses that got the Japanese to make a cheaper car for them.

Note the "bow wave":

I just picked up a cheap Compaq consumer type laptop for a project where I require a "transportable computer". I didn't really shop much for it, just dropped into Best Buy an hour before closing.. a few notes:

- HDD is of pretty decent size (160G), but despite a AMD Turion 64 X2 and 1G the machine is noticably slower than my 3 year old desktop machine on most stuff.

- Most only come with 1G, which is pretty minimal. Some might have the ram slots filled with low density modules, so you have to buy 2G to get anothe 1G

- They all come with Vista only. It's a PITA (a real PITA), but not quite as disasterous as it first seems.

- This one came with a 15.4" screen like most of the cheapish ones, and only WXGA resolution, but I don't think my eyes are good enough anymore for the same resolution on a 12" screen.

- a bit of a 'trick' .. all the machines on display have no battery but when you get it home you find that the battery adds almost an inch to the height at the back! (it sticks out so it tilts the back up to a pleasant angle). So, it doesn't sit flat in a briefcase. I guess maybe there's more battery life as a result.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Presumably that's why it's slow.

Why did you buy a PC with Vista ?

Graham

For what it is worth do not expect XP to be all that much faster on the same machine. win98 may not even run. Remember the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

P.S.

I don't actually presume that at all. I think it's slow because the HDD is only 5400 RPM, because the video is a cheap-ass integrated 'card' (probably 1/10 the speed of a modest desktop $300 card, let alone a high end CAD or gaming video) (and I also suspect that 1G RAM is not optimal). It's still plenty good enough to view EDA and CAD files and do MS office type stuff. You'd have to be a masochist to actually try to do any serious design work on a single 15.4" 1280 x

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

2) Because the choice was between that and OS/X, which would probably have been even more of an issue.

I would have rather had XP-pro, for sure.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

dell, lenovo, toshiba ... most brands.

open the paper (or intarweb) see who's advertising the cheapest laptops.

the cheapest laptops, not recommended.

Bye. Jasen

many brands do.

buy a cheap one and overclock it.

Bye. Jasen

A year or two ago a signal integrity engineer at a major computer mfgr (sorry forget which one) reported on the SI list that management complained about the high cost of producing servers compared to desktop computers - more design time, more motherboard layers, higher parts count etc. So they put a bunch of their high-end desktop computers in the server test chamber, where they are expected to run server type data transfer tests continuosly for months while the temperature is cycled, with no errors. All of the desktop machines blue-screened within an hour, even before any temp cycle was started. That was the end of the "make the servers cheaper" whining.

Consumer grade stuff is of course even worse.

I wonder. Anyone know why searchfilterhost.exe would be wanting to call out to Microsoft all the time? AFAIUI that's supposed to be indexing all the stuff on my machine, not calling the mother ship...

Best regards Spehro Pefhany

In another place, discussing Vista, I read it comes with a 'XP downgrade license'. Maybe not with an OEM version but it might be worth checking.

Graham

Freudian slip?

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

I bought a System76 Gazelle as part of my Big Linux Experiment. I'm loving it so far (but then, I haven't tried running any Windows apps yet).

Oh, you probably didn't mean _that_ alternate, did you?

I've ordered a ThinkPad X61s.

...Jim Thompson

What operating system? I wanna see how Vista does on simulations.

Charlie Edmondson was unsure about PSpice and Vista, so I ordered it with XP Pro.

...Jim Thompson

When it's home on the KVM that won't be a problem. Traveling I tend to use the client's conference room projector to demonstrate things.

With today's airline seat spacing I can't even open my Vaio anymore :-(

So we'll see how I can do with a 12" screen.

...Jim Thompson

Smart move, IMHO.

Nice and portable. I'll be interested to see how you do with the 12" screen.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany