Replacing my Thinkpad - Part I

In late June I wrote a post on optimizing the performance of my Thinkpad T43p. While the suggestions in that post are still relevant for optimizing the performance of any PC, time has come to move on and replace the Thinkpad.

To buy a serious (read fast/expensive) notebook is a tough task and I spent more quality time than anticipated in selecting a new notebook. But then, I probably will have to spend more time with this fellow over the next two years than with anyone else, so it seems worth the hassle.

Since I already spent the time and made some decisions I thought I'll share them with you. So here we go.

Usually when someone wants to buy a computer and asks me questions on what to buy, most of the issues are related to what the user wants to do and how much he wants to spend. Does he have to go with a notebook, or would it suffice with a desktop and a portable hard drive. After this exploration, the only thing left is to find a computer with the correct balance between usage pattern and cost.

This has been my equation for purchasing computers for a long time as well, but not this time. The main problem is that it is close to impossible to upgrade the "significant" hardware components of a notebook. So it is basically not an option to buy current mainstream components and upgrade later. If you take the notebook lane, you're mostly stuck with what you got. Sure some components can be upgraded, but then they are often prohibitively expensive.

I guess my usage pattern is pretty demanding, but I don't think it's unusual for a developer.

@Work: The following software must all be open at the same time without causing Disk or CPU bottlenecks.

• Multiple instances of SQL server
• Visual Studio 2005 (with CodeRush loaded)
• Office (Outlook, Word, Excel)
• OnTime (AxoSofts bug/feature tracking software)
• A couple of instances of IE 7

@Home: Don't think that my computer is at rest when I get home from work. In our after hours we make home videos of the kids etc. so video editing and casual photo editing at decent speeds is a must as well. The only "problem" with this requirement, is that video editing is very different from my mundane tasks where graphics performance is a non issue.

I'm not into gaming, though I could easily kill a few hours with Half-Life2. (If I only could find those hours).

No, I didn't ignore the upcoming Windows Vista, which will have requirements much like video editing. But I made a conscious decision that I'm not waiting for DirectX 10 to become widely available. By the time DirectX 9 become obsolete I've taken farewell with this notebook anyhow.

I'm running Diskeeper 2007 and a few other utilities and maintenance apps as well, but I have them scheduled to run in the background during nights.

My first problem with this usage pattern was that I didn't know of any notebook that would allow me to run all of this without making the system look like a fish on shore. (No offense to IBM of course, but my Thinkpad with this load behaved like WinXP on a PII.)

Looking at all of the above, I tried to convert it into a set of criteria that I could use to determine the hardware spec of the computer. After that I would look for a specific notebook matching that configuration using online reviews, benchmarks, blogs and newsgroups.

The main factors (In order of importance)

1. Local support
2. Performance (For my usage patterns, see above)
3. Disk space
4. RAM
5. Form factor
6. Portability

Price is obviously a factor, but I left that to the end of the process. If I'll have to make compromises later so be it.

Continued in Part II