Please Guide me in choosing Laptop

English Hardware
#1

I had Acer aspire 4736ZG with dual-core intel and Nvidia graphics. I sold it,

and now going to buy new one with i5 2nd generation processor,

Now confusion is weather to buy Intel HD 3000 graphic or Nvidia 1 GB dedicated laptop.

I don’t play games, all i care is about OpenSuse 2D effects, I need it to work without problem. and watch lot of HD movies with big monitor.

I am web developer and run least 1 virtual machines.

please suggest any of one laptop in below given links. -

  1. Asus X Series X53SC-SX492D Laptop: Flipkart.com: Compare, Review Asus Notebook

  2. Asus K Series K53SV-SX520D Laptop: Flipkart.com: Compare, Review Asus Notebook

  3. Asus P Series P53E-SO059D Laptop: Flipkart.com: Compare, Review Asus Notebook

Thanks in advance.

#2

It’s difficult to say.
The spec on those isn’t very detailed. And even if it were, it’s still a bit of guess work.
Thing to really avoid is: Switchable Graphics
Also newer machines with windows might have a new UEFI secure BIOS, best avoided unless you can be sure it’s possible to disable it.
The next most difficult area is wireless. Though this is now a much improved area.

I use 3 Intel only graphics Laptops and they are fine. All mine will play full screen flash no problem, but I don’t really use them for that. And they are less hungry on battery life than a machine with nvidia or ati

#3

Any chance of you taking a liveCD (or liveUSB) and booting each of these laptops with openSUSE to compare their behaviour ?

Gauging HD playback can be difficult, as a liveCD/liveUSB won’t have codecs to playback an HD video even if you could boot to such a live OS.

I do note the nVidia 520M and 540M are Pure Video compatible (GF108 core type) which suggests they will work with vdpau and hence HD video playback won’t be a problem with those (assuming the proprietary nVidia graphic driver supports the 520M and 540M where according to nVidia they are supported: NVIDIA DRIVERS 290.10 Certified ).

My wife’s Lenovo X220 has Intel Sandybridge Graphics (HD 3000) but I only installed openSUSE-12.1 on it yesterday (just before our dashing off to watch the new Sherlock Holmes movie) so I have not yet been able to test HD video playback with those graphics.

As caf4926 noted, wireless can be a big factor. The webpages you provided have no detail on that. IMHO you need to find out more information there on the wireless BEFORE purchasing. I also can not tell what they have for a webcam. Is the webcam uvc compatible ?

As near as I can tell from those spec’s, none of those laptops have switchable graphics. I note someone claims the Asus X Series X53SC-SX492D Laptop works ok with Ubuntu.

#4

On Tue, 27 Dec 2011 06:46:02 +0000, oldcpu wrote:

> Any chance of you taking a liveCD (or liveUSB) and booting each of these
> laptops with openSUSE to compare their behaviour ?

I’d second that. I bought a Dell laptop at CostCo a couple weeks ago,
but only after booting the floor model from a USB drive and making sure
the system worked with it.

Jim

–
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C