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Should you replace a perfectly good laptop? (continued)
Because the Dell has had another few years to evolve, it's got a lot more power than the Acer. The Latitude D410 has a 2GHz Pentium M processor, built-in 802.11g (the faster variant of WiFi), 512MB of RAM, and 40GB hard drive. And, of course, it's not a convertible Tablet PC.
Purchased today, the Dell I'm running would cost $1,867 from the Dell site, and would have a full gig of RAM (compared the the 512MB in the review machine).
"If there's a single issue that'll convince you to replace an otherwise perfectly functional laptop with another, it's RAM limitations in the older laptop."
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Performance issues
Although the Acer's processor is less than half the speed of the Dell's, the limiting issue for this machine really isn't the processor. It's the RAM. In fact, if there's a single issue that'll convince you to replace an otherwise perfectly functional laptop with another, it's RAM limitations in the older laptop.
The Acer can support no more than 256MB RAM. Although we've run Windows XP on machines with less RAM, we've done so only on machines dedicated to single purpose operations (for example, we've got an even older 128MB laptop that does nothing more than monitor our servers and display whether they're up). In today's world, 256MB is a very tight RAM footprint and, with bigger applications, that limitation really makes the older laptop difficult to tolerate.
By contrast, the newer Dell not only has double the RAM already installed, it can go up to 2GB, a much more practical RAM footprint for modern applications.
The second key performance issue on the older machine is the hard drive. We had the ZATZ Labs run a benchmark test comparing the performance of the Dell and the Acer, and then comparing those results against a typical desktop machine. The Acer is about half the speed of the Dell, as you can see in Table A.
| Spec |
Desktop |
Dell |
Acer |
| Manufacturer |
Western Digital |
Fujitsu |
IBM |
| Revolutions per minute |
7200 |
5400 |
4200 |
| Drive capacity |
250GB |
40GB |
30GB |
| Transfer rate (min) |
33.1MB/sec |
16.8MB/sec |
3.6MB/sec |
| Transfer rate (max) |
55.8MB/sec |
34.2MB/sec |
14.4MB/sec |
| Transfer rate (avg) |
49.6MB/sec |
27.9MB/sec |
12.8MB/sec |
| Access time |
20.1ms |
18.1ms |
19.4ms |
| Burst rate |
50.0MB/sec |
52.8MB/sec |
13.7MB/sec |
Here's a thirty-second course in drive benchmarking. There are two figures that are often discussed: access time and transfer rate. Access time describes the time it takes for the read/write head to get to your data. Transfer rate is how fast the data you need to read is transfered off your drive.
As you might imagine, if you're accessing a ton of very tiny files, the access rate measure might be more important. But in the real world, access time is pretty much irrelevant. It's the transfer rate that you need to really pay attention to because you're spending most of your time transfering data on or off your hard drive.
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