I regularly (weekly, sometimes daily) use 2 or more operating systems
(selected from FreeBSD, Linux, XP Pro, and others). I work on medical
real-time video projects whose graphics hunger rivals that of games.
I seek reliability (minimal downtime due to corruption) in each OS.
Which Dell laptop can keep me productive in multiple OS's and provide
a lot of graphics horsepower?
These are my ideas on multibooting.
I like the Dell Latitude D800 or Precision M60 since they have the
user removable primary hard drive. From the administrator's point of
view, the easiest way to multiboot is to swap out the boot drive.
Unfortunately, I think that Dell now feeds more graphics power to the
Inspiron 9100 or XPS than to the Precision or Latitudes (more on this
below).
Could I multiboot reliably on an Inspiron?
Possibly I could still get a hardware multiboot solution on an
Inspiron. Could I boot from a modular bay hard drive or an external
USB drive (in addition to the fixed hard drive) ?
Then there are traditional multiboot products like System Commander
from V Communications. While I'm sure that's a great product, I
believe that it would be vulnerable to a virus attack on the master
boot record.
Finally there are the virtual products like VMware Workstation. While
this would offer the greatest productivity when everything succeeds, I
believe that a corruption of the host OS would also disrupt activities
in the client OS.
These are my ideas on strong graphics.
Is there any way to compare the results from running the same
benchmark test on the Precision M60, Latitude D800, Inspiron XPS, and
Inspiron 9100? Lacking a benchmark, the comparison is difficult, for
me.
I think that the graphics on each of those models is very strong. I
would configure each with the best graphics card, highest resolution
display, and a low to middle CPU.
The M60 wins due to 2MB L2 cache on the Pentium M 735 (512 KB L2 on P4
in XPS, I would not get the Extreme Edition). The XPS wins due to the
800MHz front side bus (400 MHz on the M60). The XPS wins due to the
graphics card upgrade program (no official program on the M60). The
XPS wins due to the 400MHz SDRAM (333MHz SDRAM on the M60). I don't
know how to compare the NVIDIA Quadro FX Go1000 128MB in the M60
against the 128MB ATI® Mobility RADEON 9700 in the XPS.
Lacking a single benchmark applied to all 4, my intuition guesses that
the models rank from most to least strong graphics in the order (XPS,
9100, M60, D800).
Thank you.
