Hi everyone,


Humble apologies if this is the wrong forum or that this question
seems too basic. However I'm kind of puzzled...
I was wondering why is a laptop slower than a desktop? Can someone
please explain this one to me in like point format??

I ask because I have a laptop (P3 + 128MB ram) *and* an identical
desktop; both machines are running the Windows 98 os. Now, the
applications on the laptop appear slower than the desktop I reckon. Is
this because its a laptop silly or am I missing something?
Greatly appreciate any views that you may have...

Cheers,
Al
The stupid one.

Laptops tend to have slower components, hard drives particularly.

"Al Murphy" <almurph@altavista.com> wrote in message
news:a23daf3f.0308051426.3d1c5b30@posting.google.c om...

Al Murphy wrote:
It's mainly down to the chipset, but there are several other factors.
The thing is the manufactures have different priorities when it comes to
laptops, like space, heat and battery life...

--
©¿©¬

I found it hard, it was hard to find, oh well, whatever, nevermind...

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/s.morrish

Yahoo ID pendragon_kernow

The mobile processors are slower even though they may run at the same MHz
due to things like the internal cache and such. The memory bus is usually
slower as well as the video. The hdd and ide bus is slower too.
But you can put a decent OS on the laptop and some more ram and it will be
pretty fast.

"Al Murphy" <almurph@altavista.com> wrote in message
news:a23daf3f.0308051426.3d1c5b30@posting.google.c om...

Upgrade your ram!
"Me" <enine@columbus.rr.com> wrote in message
news:q3YXa.45464$hc.33241@fe3.columbus.rr.com...

"Chad" <cooperweb@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:0PYXa.73710$Ho3.10839@sccrnsc03...

Chad:

..Now as I recall with Win98 that doesn't help as it is not able to take
advantage of a large amount of RAM. (DOS based OS, not good at using RAM.)
If you were talking about NT, 2000, or XP (yecch!) I would agree.

Rich, you are recalling the issue that existed a few years ago with
older laptops that had the 430FX, MX, VX or TX. It was NOT a
Windows 95/98 problem. You might find the following helpful:

Having more than 64MB RAM in a Pentium MMX utilizing certain Intel
chipsets will actually slow the performance due to uncached memory.
It so happened that many of the P-MMX CPUes used the pre-BX chipsets
and it was misunderstood that this was a problem with the P-MMX chip,
amount of L2 cache or Windows 95/98 which was not the case. It's the
chipset that causes the limitation -- NOT Win95/98, L2 cache or CPU.
This is not an issue with the Pentium II or later.

For a table of the cachable memory and other limitations of the
various Intel chipsets, checkout:

http://www.magsys.co.uk/mbs/intelcp.html

For more detail these sites explain System Caching:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/cache/char.htm
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/cac...cheability.htm

The following was posted by Scott Mueller:

Chipsets including the 430FX, MX, VX or TX support caching only up to
64MB, which means you SHOULD NOT run more than that amount of memory in
any system with those chipsets. Since all protected mode OS and drivers
load from the top down, they would load directly into non-cached memory,
dramatically slowing down the system.

The older 430LX chipset would support up to 192MB, and the 430NX and HX
would support up to 512K, but those were rarely used in mobile systems.
Most Pentium notebook systems like the 770 used the Intel Mobile Module
with the 430TX chipset.

For Pentium II/III/Celeron systems, the L2 cache controller is no longer
in the chipset, it is in the processor instead. Most earlier Pentium II
processors had a cacheable limit of 512MB, meaning that is the amount of
RAM you should not exceed if you want your system performance to remain
high. Later Pentium II/III and Celeron processors with L2 cache have a
cacheability limit of 4GB, meaning any RAM installed up to that amount will
be cached. Usually the chipset will limit the maximum RAM to at or below
4GB anyway.

The following was posted by Bill Starbuck (MVP):

Windows has nothing to do with the problem. This is a hardware issue,
not a software issue.

One 64 MB limits arises from busses. Some busses can/could not represent
more than 64 MB of memopry because they can/could not transmit enough
bits of address information. One of these busses is/was the IBM Micro
Channel. See document Q116256 in the KnowledgeBase. There was a problem
with early versions of Himem: See document Q103557.

There is also a problem with Windows NT, as described in document
Q117373.

Note the following quotation from the PC Guide website:

"One question that people ask a lot is: "How much will the system slow
down if I have more RAM in it than can be cached?"
There is no easy answer to this question, because it depends both on the
system and what you are doing with it. Somewhere between 5% and 25% is
most likely, but you should bear something else in mind: adding real
physical memory to the system is one way to avoid the extreme slowdown
to the system that occurs when it runs out of real memory and must use
virtual memory. If you are doing heavy multitasking and notice that the
system is thrashing, you will always be better off to have more memory,
even uncached, instead of having the system swap a great deal to disk.
Of course having all the memory cached is still preferred."

In other words, users may be better off with lots of RAM even if their
computers have chipsets that cannot cache more than 64 MB.

Hope this helps ... John