OT: Silly me...laptop recommendation clarification

[Fairlight]

Yo, homey, in case you don' be listenin', Jay Ashworth done said:
> 
> It's good you clarified.  Compaq's current laptops vary so widely that
> having the exact model number is pretty much critical.

Funny thing about that was (and the last notebook I had was a Digital
HiNote VP P100, which I got used off eBay, so I wasn't aware of the trend)
I took the model number I originally gave right off the notebook itself.
It's right on the top of the monitor casing as simply "Presario V3000".

It was only when I was looking for battery charging info that's not
actually covered in the manuals (believe it or not) that I found a $100
rebate offer for V3000 series and then found out that it's "kind of"
mislabelled when we looked at the box and manuals.  It should at least
say "Series" after it on the casing, but it doesn't.  I find that a bit
annoying.

But hey, for the NVidia Go 6150 and ability to play World of Warcraft at a
decent speed, in addition to actually just popping up wireless at a hotel
and working at -real- speeds (the 14.4 P100 was killing me), I'm not going
to complain really strenuously.

Oh, and I can actually -type- on this one.  :)  The last one's keyboard was
semi-shrunk a bit...this one is really, really nice.

There are -very- few notebooks under $2k that can handle gaming.  Most
notebooks seem to have iNTEL chipsets, all of which basically -suck-.  I
can't even begin to elucidate on that without turning purple or something.
There are very few with real GFX units in them that make it tenable for
that use.  It's funny--I'm reminded of someone's comment half a year ago
that their Sony notebook wouldn't even play EverQuest, which is (nowadays)
a Sony title...because of the video.  I looked at getting a VAIO, and the
chipset was iNTEL.  That was all I needed to see.

However, beware sales drones trying to sell you upwards.  WoW plays quite
respectably on this despite an fps reading that frankly reads lower than
what I think it's putting out.  It says 15 on average but it actually feels
more like about 25-30.  My wife's Celeron 2.4GHz -reads- 25-30fps, but it's
choppy and bursty.  Most of that is actually the CPU and the very, very
limited cache in the chip.  This is an AMD Turion 64 X2 1.6GHz and it plays
it at a 15fps that's far more fluid and steady--and actually feels more
like 30fps, definitely.  I've played more than enough to know how a game
feels compared to the numbers presented.  I'd swear it's under-reporting
by 10fps on average, easily.  Across-the-bus throughput is far more
consistent.  I was told by sales drone #2 that he wouldn't trust it because
it had shared VRAM and it would perform worse than the Celeron, which has
an ATI 9200 (ancient at this point) with dedicated VRAM.  He couldn't
have been more wrong.  We felt that at the store, as he kept trying to
talk us up to the $2300 model that he said would actually perform well.
Personally, this performs 3x as well as the supposedly-faster Celeron
configuration, although obviously not as well as my P4-3GHz with an ATI
Radeon 9600XT.  Still -way- faster than they said it would be.  Biggest
problem was actually having to get an external mouse and keypad so I could
use my custom control layout.  USB is a wonderful thing!  :)  Actually, and
I hate to say this, I kind of like Win XP Home Edition.  *cringe*  Seriously,
it worked out some of the kinks in Win2K.  PnP is a lot more Play than Pray
with the newer OS.  Once it's dechromed from what my wife said looks like
the "Fischer-Price" look-n-feel back to Windows Native look-n-feel, it's
actually about the same to work with as W2K--just less taxing for the user.

Which point actually came to something security-minded.  The hotel wireless
popped right up and was usable.  Brought it home and had tiny issues.  It
wasn't so much the OS as it was my personal configuration.  You know, a lot
of people make a big to-do about open hotspots, lack of encryption, etc.  I
personally use WEP (I don't use WPA-SPA because Win2K won't auto-login to
that as it will with WEP, and damned if I'm going to log into every share
I auto-mount every time I reboot) and MAC filters.  I had to configure WEP
manually, then I still had issues and realised it was MAC filtering, so I
fixed that.  It still wasn't working.  Why?  Duh...I use static IP's here.
I entirely disable DHCP on every system I own, including the router.  I
suspect that it's harder to actually break onto a wireless system that
uses static IP's than it is one that uses DHCP.  Pick an obscure subnet
and random gateway number...  The odds of finding both out of the pool of
available private numbers is probably relatively low within any usable
period of time.  You can't sniff because wireless is effecively switched.
And this is actually the only network I have that has a gateway -not- at
.254 or .1 on the subnet. :) But it dawned on me that half this stuff is
really meant for those standard DHCP configurations that companies won't
support you if you don't use.  (D-Link won't help you anymore unless you
change back to DHCP, for instance.  Neither would Linksys.  Even though the
product supports static.)  Interesting thought that besides encryption and
MAC filters, I've got another layer of semi-security working for me that
most people don't because I refuse to use DHCP.  Granted, it's through
obfuscation, but it's still harder to get into.

mark->