5/10/08

Well, I finally got a laptop! It's an amazing piece of equipment and it boggles my mind how something that small can do what it does. I ended up with an HP Pavilion 6810us which has an AMD Turion and 3G RAM. I would have rather had XP, but everything comes with Vista these days, so I settled for that, thinking that the extra memory would make up for it. The extra memory does make up for the more intense OS and I love this machine. Of course, with a new super-fast laptop, now I have to test it against my desktop. I have recently joined the new millennium and installed XP on the desktop which previously had W2K.

Let me start by saying that this was not a valid apples-apples test. I'm comparing an AMD Sempron 2800 with 2G ram, Windows XP and an ATI all in wonder Radeon 7000 video card to a laptop with an AMD Turion with 3G ram, Vista. and an Nvidia card with shared memory. I just wanted to see how close they were speed-wise. With video preview on, I don't know how much the video cards had to do with the speed, but I imagine they played a part.

I noticed that XP takes up a lot less hard drive space than Vista. I was told that Vista is a resource hog and it seems to be true. I think the only thing saving me is that the laptop has 3G of memory. XP on the other hand, seems to be able to run fine with 512M. My system at work has 512 and it seems pretty speedy.

The Test – video crunching, desktop vs. laptop:

The test was to run the most processor and memory intense thing that I would run and time it on both computers. That seems to be video crunching. Using DVD Shrink, I crunched a video to 56% of its original size with video preview on.

Using the same video file on both computers, the XP machine did it in 29min. This is an improvement over the same machine with Windows 2000 and 512M RAM which would take about 40 min or so. The laptop took only 14 min to do exactly the same thing, but I am happy with the increased speed of my desktop. It would appear that the processor is more important than the memory for video crunching.

At this point I really wish I had tested it on the desktop before installing the memory and XP to get a more meaningful result, but I also would have had to install the memory and test it again before putting on the new OS and testing it a third time.  Most importantly, I would have had to think about that before upgrading.

I will also note that opeining a movie in Nero to copy is much quicker on the laptop than on the desktop.

Upgrading:

Installing XP was easier than installing W2k, but not without glitches. The sound card software (Realtek AC97) apparently failed Microsoft XP testing and I couldn't install it. I couldn't find it on Realtek's website and they refered me to Asus' website. Neither one had updated software for this thing that would work with XP. I ended up finding it somewhere else on the web with a link that linked to an apparently super top secret page on realtek's website containing the new drivers. 

XP also didn't recognize my Samsung DVD burner. It's only a year and a half old, so it's not outdated, and that's way before service pack 3 was released, so you'd think XP would have just seen the thing and made it work. Samsung's website was not very helpful on this one either. Their site sent me after 3rd party software via a link that didn't even work. I found the app, but it didn't fix the problem, so (silly me, I should have thought of this in the first place) I updated the firmware. With Samsung, you can't just update the firmware and be done with it. You have to install their updater software that runs in the background constantly checking for updates (something else to slow me down). There's no option to just update once. So, you install the software, update the firmware, then unistall the software again. Real pain in the neck. 

I haven't gotten to my really old cannon scanner or ATI multimedia center yet, but other than those I haven't run into any software or hardware that I couldn't install and run up to this point. 

I did fix my 2nd hard drive though. It's a Samsung SP8004H, 80g but of course, my computer can only see it as a 32g. So for the last two years it's been a 32g drive and I finally got around to fixing it. One more thing that should just work but doesn't. Samsung has a utility for fixing this, which just boots from a disc and partitions the drive for you . Sounds easy and it my have been if I had a floppy around somewhere that still worked!