Laptop for Astrophotography

Just think how many free plain choccy digestives that is though - sat in your lovely warm control centre, below freezing outside, mug of Horlicks... Ah, bliss

David,
try to get a new laptop, and aim for a minimum of 512MB of RAM. Preferrably a Pentium 4, as the current run of Celerons in lappies tend to get clogged when attempting to run a lot of applications simultaneously, or those that require alot of RAM - they just don't hack it.

On saying that, you might say "sure they're cheap, and all I want them for is to take the astrophotography material". Thats well and good, but with the lower end Celeron lappies come a battery that, when being relatively idle, last for about 2.5 hours at most, and this goes down to about 1.5 hours when used goodo. And that's not in winter!

Invest that extra 2 or 3 hundred yo-yo's and you will get a slightly better, faster, longer running lappie well-able to do the things you want it to. It will be worth it in the long run.

My 2 cents worth (ask for a refund when you buy the lappie!)

Seanie.

Thanks lads...
all in all...I guess the only way to go is down new street...
Dell look clear winners on the quality v's value side of things.
What do ye make of this one for 425 Euro from thier site?.....

Inspiron 1300
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 1.70 GHz, 2MB cache
256MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
40GB Hard Drive
6 Cell 56Whr Primary Battery
14.1inch LCD Panel

Frank - looks good to me - assuming you're going connect remotely from a PC located in the house, it doesn't have to be really high spec. But the model above seems pretty good specwise anyhow. It'll certainly do you for remote observing too - but like any laptop, battery power will be the killer. But you should get a few hours I'd imagine.

HTH

Dave

Thanks lads...
all in all...I guess the only way to go is down new street...
Dell look clear winners on the quality v's value side of things.
What do ye make of this one for 425 Euro from thier site?.....

Inspiron 1300
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 1.70 GHz, 2MB cache
256MB 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM
40GB Hard Drive
6 Cell 56Whr Primary Battery
14.1inch LCD Panel

that does not look too bad for the price, although the memory would be a bit low if you are going to use it for processing as well. it looks like it is a centrino processor which should last longer than your standard laptop as it reduces the amount of power used when it is not plugged in so the battery should last longer. most laptops have desktop processors which tend to use more power than ones designed for a laptop such as the pentium m or the turion from AMD.
stephen.

that does not look too bad for the price, although the memory would be a bit low if you are going to use it for processing as well. it looks like it is a centrino processor which should last longer than your standard laptop as it reduces the amount of power used when it is not plugged in so the battery should last longer.

256 isn't much, I'd imagne that XP on its own will be slow with that. In generaly you are better off trading a slower processor for more memory. The bottleknecks in laptops and PC's are around memory usage and input/output on the disk not the processor which will be idle most of the time. Check the performance tab on any XP machine and you'll probably see that CPU usage averages about 3% but that the pagefile useage is high. Basically, the pagefile is a file on your disk that the OS can treat as memory, though accessing it is much slower than getting at real memory, so ideally you never want to use the pagefile.

So if there is an option to take a slightly slower processor and get more memory or a faster disk it will (usually) give you a faster overall machine.

For the price the laptop you have speced out looks good. www.crucial.com sell memory at reasonable prices, probably cheaper than going back to dell anway, if you do feel you need more later.

Cheers,
~Al