laptop graphic card

[Micha]

On 06/11/2009 18:53, Kfir Lavi wrote:
> Hi all,
> Me and my wife are in the end of our bicycle trip in west europe.
> (www.underadometent.com <http://www.underadometent.com>)
> We are now in Spain and would like to buy here a laptop for my wife.
> I´ll put on it Debian SID. She will use Gnome, Fluxbox or KDE.
> It is mainly for internet, wifi, office, movies... Regular.
> We will buy it here because we will get 10% back as tax return. I think
> it is a very good price.
> The prices here are around 500-600 euros for: 4gb, 320-500gb hd, 15.6 hd
> led screen, G or Draft-N wifi.
> The only thing that had differance where the graphic cards.
> Some are shared memory and some are dedicated.
> One laptop that I put my eye on is a Packard Bell tj65 with Nvidia
> G-Force 240m with 1GB dedicated (600 euros).

I don't have experience with that particular card. I think that it should be 
comparable to gtx 9500 or 9400 IIRC. It should give nice performance.

> Now my questions are:
> 1. Will we notice a differance between shered and non shered graphic card?

Probably not directly if you have enough memory and aren't running intensive 
graphics. On the contrary, cards with dedicated memory generally are more 
powerful and thus drain the battery faster.

On the other hand dedicated cards support higher resolutions and thus better 
screens. One of the things to compare is the screen resolution. On the t61 the 
dedicated nvs 140m comes with a 1680x1050 panel and the shared memory comes with 
1280x800.

> 2. What are the catches I should look for? I would like the computer to
> go to sleep and Hibernate.

For me (with the latest nvidia drivers, the one in sid may be better, but I have 
different priorities), the computer hibernates fine with tuxonice although there 
is a delay of around a minute on resume with a black screen before resuming 
commences. Nigel, the developer of tuxonice reported the same thing at the time. 
Suspend also works but I can't connect an external screen after suspend. 
Everything else works. Didn't delve to deeply into it though.
I also can't restart the X server with the nvidia driver for some reason as gdm 
crashes, startx works though. Didn't find the reason yet (there is some delay on 
second start which may cause gdm to time out).

> 3. CPU T4xxx T5xxx . Will it make a differance what is picked? The T5xxx
> is with 2gb cache.
>

The cache will make a difference mostly with computationally intensive applications.

> I will load Knoppix cd that I carried with me all the way (it was 2500m
> up in the alps) ;-) To do some checking. So if you can advice what to
> check it will be great.
> We are still on the trip, and internet is scarce. So I will not be able
> to unswer promptly. Just in one or two days.
>
> Regards,
> Kfir
>
>
>
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