.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT SHOOTOUT
.TITLE Should you replace a perfectly good laptop?
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
.SUMMARY According to Wikipedia, "Planned obsolescence is the conscious decision on the part of an agency to produce a consumer product that will become obsolete and/or non-functional in a defined time frame." In theory, planned obsolescence is bad, because the devices we paid a lot for are no longer functional. But, especially in the world of mobile technology, sometimes the devices we use work for a lot longer than might be practical. That’s the subject of this article. In it, we ask the tough question: should you replace a perfectly good laptop?
.OTHER
According to Wikipedia, "Planned obsolescence is the conscious decision on the part of an agency to produce a consumer product that will become obsolete and/or non-functional in a defined time frame." In theory, planned obsolescence is bad, because the devices we paid a lot for are no longer functional. But, especially in the world of mobile technology, sometimes the devices we use work for a lot longer than might be practical.
Laptops fall into this category. Yes, some laptops die an early death. But if you’re gentle with your laptop, it’s likely to last you far longer than might be practical for the software you might want to run on it or the tasks you want it to perform.
That’s the subject of this article. In it, we ask the tough question: should you replace a perfectly good laptop?
To illustrate this issue, we took a look at two laptops, my personal (and very well loved) Acer Travelmate C100 convertible-style Tablet PC, and a Latitude D410 laptop that Dell was kind enough to provide us for this article. You can see both, together, in Figure A.
.FIGPAIR A Whenever two laptops get together to talk, there’s always coffee.
.TEASER Well, should you replace a perfectly good laptop? Tap here to find out.
.H1 Comparing the specs
Let’s start by talking about the older machine, the Acer Travelmate C100, for which I paid something near $2,200 back in late 2002 or early 2003. First, this machine is a convertible Tablet PC, which means the screen can flip around and lie flat. I love this feature, and use it extensively for PDF reading, Web surfing from a comfy chair, and, sometimes, for making notes in notebook fashion.
Dell doesn’t offer a Tablet PC, so I’m going to treat the Acer as a regular laptop for the purpose of this article. That said, the one feature you’d lose if you moved to the Dell is the wonderful, convertible tablet functionality.
Let’s look at some specs. The Acer is teeny, about an inch and a quarter thick and weighs only 3.2 pounds. It has an 800MHz Ultra Low Voltage Mobile Intel Pentium III, built-in 802.11b (the slower WiFi), 256MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive.
.BEGIN_KEEP
By comparison, the "ultra-portable" class Dell Latitude D410 is a little larger. It’s exactly the same thickness as the Acer but weighs about half a pound more. As you can see from Figure B, the size difference is negligible and I honestly didn’t even notice the half-pound weight difference.
.FIGPAIR B The Dell (bottom) is slightly larger than the Acer.
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Because the Dell has had another few years to evolve, it’s got a lot more power than the Acer. The Latitude D410 has a 2GHz Pentium M processor, built-in 802.11g (the faster variant of WiFi), 512MB of RAM, and 40GB hard drive. And, of course, it’s not a convertible Tablet PC.
Purchased today, the Dell I’m running would cost $1,867 from the Dell site, and would have a full gig of RAM (compared the the 512MB in the review machine).
.CALLOUT If there’s a single issue that’ll convince you to replace an otherwise perfectly functional laptop with another, it’s RAM limitations in the older laptop.
.H1 Performance issues
Although the Acer’s processor is less than half the speed of the Dell’s, the limiting issue for this machine really isn’t the processor. It’s the RAM. In fact, if there’s a single issue that’ll convince you to replace an otherwise perfectly functional laptop with another, it’s RAM limitations in the older laptop.
The Acer can support no more than 256MB RAM. Although we’ve run Windows XP on machines with less RAM, we’ve done so only on machines dedicated to single purpose operations (for example, we’ve got an even older 128MB laptop that does nothing more than monitor our servers and display whether they’re up). In today’s world, 256MB is a very tight RAM footprint and, with bigger applications, that limitation really makes the older laptop difficult to tolerate.
By contrast, the newer Dell not only has double the RAM already installed, it can go up to 2GB, a much more practical RAM footprint for modern applications.
The second key performance issue on the older machine is the hard drive. We had the ZATZ Labs run a benchmark test comparing the performance of the Dell and the Acer, and then comparing those results against a typical desktop machine. The Acer is about half the speed of the Dell, as you can see in Table A.
.BEGIN_TAB_TABLE A Hard drive benchmark comparisons
.TAB_TABLE_WIDTH 200 200 200 200
.TAB_TABLE_ALIGN Left Right Right Right
.TAB_TABLE_HEADER Spec Desktop Dell Acer
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Manufacturer Western Digital Fujitsu IBM
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Revolutions per minute 7200 5400 4200
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Drive capacity 250GB 40GB 30GB
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Transfer rate (min) 33.1MB/sec 16.8MB/sec 3.6MB/sec
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Transfer rate (max) 55.8MB/sec 34.2MB/sec 14.4MB/sec
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Transfer rate (avg) 49.6MB/sec 27.9MB/sec 12.8MB/sec
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Access time 20.1ms 18.1ms 19.4ms
.TAB_TABLE_ROW Burst rate 50.0MB/sec 52.8MB/sec 13.7MB/sec
.END_TAB_TABLE
Here’s a thirty-second course in drive benchmarking. There are two figures that are often discussed: access time and transfer rate. Access time describes the time it takes for the read/write head to get to your data. Transfer rate is how fast the data you need to read is transfered off your drive.
As you might imagine, if you’re accessing a ton of very tiny files, the access rate measure might be more important. But in the real world, access time is pretty much irrelevant. It’s the transfer rate that you need to really pay attention to because you’re spending most of your time transfering data on or off your hard drive.
.CALLOUT In the older machine’s case, it’s swapping more often to the slowest performing drive — a double-whammy.
As you can see from the table, the Acer averaged 12.8MB/sec while the Dell had more than double the performance, at an average of 27.9MB/sec. Even that was slow by comparison to our desktop 7200RPM drive, which performed at 49.6MB/sec. Of course, unless you’re lugging a huge desktop-replacement laptop, laptop drives are always going to be slower than their desktop big brothers.
Drive performance is always an issue, but it becomes a critical issue when the system has relatively little RAM. Windows works by swapping out the less-used memory data from RAM to the hard drive, so machines with less physical memory will tend to swap more. In the older machine’s case, it’s swapping more often to the slowest performing drive — a double-whammy.
.H1 Subjective needs
As I moved forward with this article, I chose to use both machines interchangeably. I had the ideal testing environment this summer, when we moved from New Jersey to Florida. During the move process, we had to take a long house-hunting trip down to Florida, and then, we had to move.
During the actual move, both my working office and our home was in the moving truck, so I had to rely on the laptops to do everything from manage my email to writing articles and getting the issues out each week.
I found that I could use both laptops interchangeably for writing articles. The Acer was obviously slower, but it really wasn’t more than an annoyance. Likewise, I could use both machines equally for browsing the Web, with a slight edge going to the Acer because I could flip the screen and read the Web in tablet form, just like I’d read a book.
Where the Acer completely failed was email. Between press releases, business correspondence, and spam, I get more than 7,000 messages a day, which I read in Outlook 2003. Rather than keeping the mail on our company’s servers (located in the former command and control center of a former Air Force base in Illinois), I download my messages each day to my computer. The way mail works, if your mail client doesn’t send a "I got the message" notification back to the server in a reasonable time, the server doesn’t consider the mail delivered.
The older Acer couldn’t keep up with the processing of my mail, which required downloading, spam filtering, rule processing, and eventual display. The overload resulted in my getting two, three, and even four copies of my messages. Imagine, if you will the following scenario. Everything you own is in a truck somewhere between New Jersey and Florida. You’re in a hotel somewhere in the middle of North Carolina. You’ve been driving for ten hours and you’ve got to get your email, write an article, and put out five magazines.
All of a sudden, your email decides to download three times over. You’ve now got 21,000 messages downloading, you still can’t get the latest, critical messages from the server, it’s after midnight, and you’ve got to be back on the road the next morning.
That was the exact point when I realized it’s reasonable to replace a perfectly good laptop. In my case, it was easy since I was purposely carrying both machines with me. I just powered off the old Acer, fired up the new Dell, cleaned up the mess, and eventually got four hours of sleep.
.H1 Should you do it?
Your scenario, of course, is likely to be different. You might have a large photo you need to edit that won’t fit into your older laptop’s RAM without wheezing. You might need to do software development and your development environment is just too slow for reasonable compiles. You might be doing video editing and need a more practical machine.
.CALLOUT There are, in fact, justifiable reasons for replacing a perfectly good laptop with a newer model.
Whatever you might need to do, there are, in fact, justifiable reasons for replacing a perfectly good laptop with a newer model.
Were I budget conscious (and had I not been as fortunate as I was to have Dell’s help in this test), I might have tried to "save" the Acer. For example, I could easily upgrade the hard drive. I just checked Pricewatch.com and found an 80GB, 5400RPM drive for just about $100. But, without being able to upgrade the physical system RAM, there’s really no way to bring the older laptop into the modern world.
Another possibility, if you’re budget conscious, is to consider selling off the older laptop to get some cash for the upgrade. The going rate for my Acer C100 appears to be about $450. However, you should be extremely careful selling (or buying) laptops on eBay. There’s a lot of fraud when it comes to laptops, iPods, and similar high-value items. Be sure to check the history of the buyer and be sure to get paid before you ship the item.
Obviously, everyone’s needs are different. You need to very carefully examine your needs, wants, and budget before making a decision.
For ease of use, performance, quality, and reliability, we give the Dell Latitude D410 a four-out-of-five.
.RATING 4
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Wikipedia, visit http://www.wikipedia.com.
For more information on the Acer Travelmate C100, visit http://global.acer.com/products/notebook/tmc100.
For more information on the Dell Latitude D410, visit http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d410.
For more information on Pricewatch.com, visit http://www.pricewatch.com.
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