Need a new laptop

[joel]

shaun, just wondering if your laptop came in yet and what your initial thoughts are.

[se7entse7en]

No, it hasn't come in yet. There was a bit of a shipping address issue so it was a bit delayed, but I think they sent it out on Friday. Hopefully it'll be here by the end of next week.

[nature boy]

whoa two weeks shipping? where is it coming from?

if it's out the door already even the slowest ground shipping from the southernmost part of the states shouldn't take more than 5 business days.

[se7entse7en]

They say 1-2 weeks, plus it's the Christmas season.
I ordered bike parts from the states and it took over 3 weeks for them to get here.

[nature boy]

wow, crazy stuff. i can see the processing of the order taking a week or so, but not the actual shipping aspect of it.
when i ordered winnie's imac it took like a week and a half to process the order and they sent me an email saying that it was out the door and it showed up the next morning.

[jeSteR]

We do the Logistics for Apple, so the stock is basically coming out of Toronto or our warehouse here. For Thinkpad customized builds. They don't build it until you pay, so Shaun's machine is probably coming from either overseas, or Carolina... either way at least a week.

[se7entse7en]

It came in on Friday. I spent some of the weekend trying to get it setup and stuff. Not really a task I was looking forward to. I didn't finish, but got a few of the bigger things installed.

I don't care for the touchpad. The one on my old laptop is recessed so it's easier to find the edges (especially for scrolling). Overall though, I like it. It opens up my VS2008 projects much quicker (likely due to SSD). ie. <1 min vs >10 min.

Windows 7 on the other hand... well... It's a fungus so It might grow on me. I couldn't stand the 'feature' where expanding a selected folder would automatically scroll it to the BOTTOM though. Had to find a tweak for that right away. (What's M$ thinking???) Haven't found any real problems with x64 yet.

[jeSteR]

See... it all worked out in the end... aaaaaand once you go SSD, you'll NEVER want to go back.

[geForce]

Are you comparing Win 7 with XP? Or Vista?

[se7entse7en]

XP. Vista originally came with my old laptop. I lasted two weeks before I went out and bought XP.

[geForce]

Oh yeah.. I can see how it might take some getting used to Win 7 then. It's a pretty big change in how things feel.

[joel]

shaun, a win 7 book if you need it. price = free.
http://redflagdeals.tradepub.com/free/w ... p=w_make13

[se7entse7en]

Ok, so I ran the Windows Experience Index on my Win7 system and my SSD drive came back with a value of 5.9. Is this typical for an SSD or is something messed up on my system configuration? The actual drive is a Samsung MMCRE28G8MXP-OVB in case that makes a difference.

[jeSteR]

Not all SSD's are created equal I'm afraid. It's highly dependant on the quality of the Cache ram and the controller drivers. Apart from some intel's and some OCZ's not many will hit the 7.8 mark.. even my intel only hits 7.6.

5.9 however is on the low side. it's still faster than any normal platter drive though... probably at Raptor 10K level

I would still nose around the config... I would have thought that it could get close to a 6.8

[se7entse7en]

It was strange because when I first got the laptop it had the ssd rated at around 7.3 or so. I thought it odd that I'd suddently be getting 5.9... which is why I was thinking maybe it was defective or something.

However, after googling around a bit, I found out a few things that I thought I'd share in case others here might find it useful.

Before data can be written to an ssd drive the existing data must first be completely deleted. Deleting files through the OS (ie Windows) does not zero out the file contents but rather, merely frees up the location for further writing. On a new drive, there is no pre-existing data so nothing needs zeroing, therefore, the ssd's performance benchmarks are high. Having to zero out the pre-existing data before writing new data hinders performance.

Many drives and BIOS's support a TRIM feature which zeroes out the data as soon as it is deleted by the OS (as opposed to zeroing it out prior to writing). Although my SSD supports this feature, my BIOS does not (appear) to have this capability.

To test whether this is what I am experiencing, I created a large zip file and zeroed it (using PGP Shredder) and then I reran the WEI benchmark and found that my HD performance was bumped up from 5.9 to 6.7.

Sounds like there's nothing wrong with my drive. Phew.