[ltp] Buying a T41p

[Aaron Mulder]

On Sun, 28 Mar 2004, Cameron McCormack wrote:
> Well this sounds great!  My housemate has a plain P4 2.4GHz Toshiba and
> it seems a bit sluggish.  If these Pentium Ms are much better and lower
> power, why don't they use them in desktop machines?

	Because they're more expensive.  The margins are so low on
desktops that the manufacturers want to squeze every cent out of it, and
they don't give a rat's *ss about power consumption.  There is the
high-end desktop market, but I think the P4 EE is probably still faster
than the P-M 1.7.  My testing shows that a P4-M 3.2 beats a P-M 1.6,
though not by a lot.  But that's only in Java -- there are probably other
apps where the P4 shines.  And the P-M doesn't have hyperthreading.  
Also, all the desktop motherboard support P-4's, which means it would be a
custom job to put a P-M in a desktop even if you wanted to.

	But Intel has heard this confusion, and they've announced they're 
moving to a non-MHz number system, similar to the Opteron I guess.  
Supposedly the new number will factor in the GHz, bus speed, memory clock, 
cache, etc.

> I probably won't be needing 3D acceleration much, so I'd happily trade
> it for the ability to suspend.  So is there no difference in terms of
> support between the two wireless cards I can get?  What is the
> difference between cpufreqd and powernowd?

	I think you can actually get 3 wireless cards.  The Cisco has
binary drivers from Cisco that work, and there are open-source drivers
that may or may not work (they didn't for me, but they did for others;  
this was a while ago).  The Intel has paid Windows-emulation drivers, and
possibly a free Windows-emulation driver (I haven't got one of those to
try).  Intel has announced plans for a native Linux driver, but to my
knowledge it's still in the development phase.  The IBM card has a native
Linux driver from Sourceforge.  AFAIK it's not in the kernel yet, but SuSE
at least is including it in their distributions.  Personally, while I
think you could get any of these to work, I'd get the IBM, if for no other
reason than it supports 802.11g.

> What are these "Express Savers"?  I can't see any mention of them on the
> IBM site.

	On the US site, if you "view all models", some are marked as 
"think express" or something like that, near the model number on the left 
hand side of the chart.  Many of the models are on sale, though this 
particular sale is set to expire Monday, I think.

Aaron