[roscolo]

Been a desktop user for many moons. Buying a notebook - narrowed it down to 2 - and actually have purchased both but will return one. I'm a pro photog and do a lot of photoshop type work.

My choices are a Compaq v6210 with an AMD Turion 64 mk-36 2Ghz processor or a Gateway MT6451 with an AMD Turion 64 x2 tl-50 dual core. Other than that specs are similar. The compaq has an 80GB 5400 rpm hd and the gateway has a 120GB 4200 rpm hd.

Hesitate to load photoshop onto these machines to do tests since i'm returning one of them. The compaq has a vista base number of 3. the gateway has a vista base number of 2.7 Something about the video processor there.

Someone said the dual-core gateway would be a little better / faster, but on the contrary, the compaq seems a little faster. Don't know what's up with the gateway, but it takes forever to load web pages. slower than dialup. I'm on a wireless network, but the compaq is on the same network and pages load extremely fast.

Which one of these processors is preferable for mostly photoshop / graphic work?

The compaq has a NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150. The Gateway has a ATI RADEON XPRESS 1150. Not too crazy about the ATI Radeon 9800 pro I've had in my desktop. the compaq is $599. the gateway is $699.

Can someone help me choose between these 2 notebooks? I would post links to the specs but the links are to a retailer.

thanks

[vonnieglen]

We also purchased two Compaq V6210US laptops loaded with Microsoft Vista. They have very good specs for $599. Unfortunately Windows Vista Premium Home is enough of a resource hog that the typical junkware that came installed on our compaqs slowed both to crawl.

The dual core processor in your gateway should give it an advantage using many video or photo-editing software packages, although the 4200 rpm hard drive would be a definate demerit. I would suggest going to the Sysoft website and downloading their free version of Sandra and running some of the benchmarks included.

The V6210US uses the Quanta 30B7 mainboard with an S1 Socket which accepts both the mk36 or a multicore X2 processor. It is the same mainboard used in some of other Compaq V6000 series laptops that come with multicore processors, so it appears to have a possible upgrade path in the future.

I believe for $10 Dell will sell you a set of OEM Vista discs from which you could perform a clean install of the operating system. The sluggishness issue you describe is most likely a combination of Vista with all the crapware that comes pre-installed.

The only option I currently know for the HP is to manually remove all the extra programs using "Programs and Features" in control panel. Ours are now running considerably quicker. For video editing I plan on making them into dual boot machines with both vista and windows xp. Vista is causing some problems with the editing programs I am currently using.

[roscolo]

Thanx. A family member got the Compaq V6210. I settled on the Toshiba Satellite A135-S4467 Much better machine for a little bit more $$$

[vonnieglen]

After a year and a half... I am still very happy with the v6210us laptops that we purchased. The motherboards have a CPU socket so I was able to upgrade to dual core when the price dropped. The latest bios mods support up to 4GBs of memory. Unfortunately unless you upgrade to 64bit Vista only 2.7GBs are recognized.

The Turion X2 TL-56 dual core processor cost $80 with shipping found using Pricewatch.com, and the OCZ 4GB (2 x 2GB) 200-Pin DDR2 SO-DIMM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Laptop Memory cost $67 with shipping. Four times the memory and almost twice the processing power allows this year and a half old laptop to keep up with the newer ones.

The complete service manual and service videos are available through HPs website. I will warn you that every single screw and piece is taken out to get to the processor. You will also need a small tube of heat sink grease for the CPU.