Opinions needed: Choosing between Laptops

I'm looking for opinions on these two laptops:

Toshiba P25-S676

Dell Inspiron XPS (possibly Extreme Edition)

Let me say a couple things before I get comments.

First, I know they are VERY heavy

Second, I know they are different screen sizes

Third, I know battery life is not as good as most laptops

I'm only interested in these two. I do a GREAT DEAL of work with AutoCAD, Photoshop, and a few other intense prog's so I need a full P4 and the most I can get out of it.

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It seems what you need is a portable workstation with all the power you can get bar none. I've had good experiences with Dell (across various model lines) so far. If you can, go for the corporate laptops (Latitude, Precision), you tend to get much better premium support on those free of charge. I get routed to the priority queue when I have to make a call.

Whichever choice you make, stock with with plenty of RAM, it really does help, especially for laptops. Always better to have the data you need cached in RAM by Windows than retrieved from a hard disk, no matter how fast the disk may be. 1GB, 2GB is NOT overkill these days. Especially not on a workstation-class laptop.

Even then, sometimes stuff has to be loaded from disk. If possible request a 7200rpm hard disk, the extra RPM and higher transfer rate will make a difference. These are the two things I find most helpful in my laptop (application development workstation).

If you're at your desk, dual-monitor capability may be helpful. I love my Radeon 9x00 series cards with twice the display space - toolkit, code, IDE in one window, 'live' preview of the application in the other.

You CANNOT beat Dell's warranty. Something breaks, anything, call 'em up and a couple days later you've got the part. I'm on my Dell Inspiron right now, I've had it a little over a year, and I use it about 6 hours every day. Only problem has been a bad battery - which they quickly replaced. Before I had this laptop, I bought a toshiba. The worst peice of crap I have ever seen. I had to take 3 of them back to the store, all with different problems, before I finally said just give me my money back.

I have a Dell now that I've been happy with, it's just getting to the point where I need more speed and I need to match my desktop.

Keep 'em comin!

I'd go for the Toshiba. I've owned several, and even have a few older models running 24/7/365 as a web server and mail server. They've been on line since 2001. Very dependable.

Toshiba has also been pretty good about making patches and drivers available for older systems. This may mean a lot a few years from now if you need to rebuild it or upgrade the OS.

I've never had a Dell that felt as "finished" as the Toshiba, but that's purely subjective.

Daniel

Would the Powerbook be another option for you?

BTW, I voted for Dell, my sister has a Inspiron and so does my friend, I havent heard any complaints. Pretty good bang for the buck too!

I have 2 toshiba laptops and one Dell.
They all work perfectly with zero failre in more than a year.

I voted for the Dell, though I absolutely second KevinL's suggestion that if you can you might want to spring for the Precision M60 with Dell's superior business support. You get knowledgeable phone support, and they really will send you parts etc overnight (with a shipping tag for the replaced part) and if you can repair your own machine you're set. This is based on my experience with a Precision 530 (on which I ran AutoDesk's Inventor series).

Be forewarned that it's reported that Dell's "next day" service, if you expect a person to come to your place to help you, is reported to be contracted out and actually (reportedly, mind you) takes a minumum of 2 days, usually 3 or more. It is also reported that this misguided definition of "next day service" is quite common among all the vendors, Dell or otherwise. (it's false advertisement in my view) Read the fine print. If you can service your own equipment then you'll get the repair parts as promised.

Another reason I voted for the Dell is that in my experience (including 6 yrs in support at a university) while all companies ship a lemon out once in a while, Dell doesn't make you live with it and is willing to make it right. Also, I saw fewer lemons from that company at least at the higher end.

I took a serious look at the Precision M90 as well as a couple others. I need to match or exceed my desktop speed as I'm getting rid of the desktop and old Dell laptop altogether. The XPS and P25 both have Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz with Hyperthreading. I need that.

Thanks for the opinions!! Keep 'em comin'!

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Would the Powerbook be another option for you?

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If he was just doing Photoshop yeah, but he is doing a lot of AutoCAD work too and although VirtualPC works pretty well, I wouldn't subject anybody to 8-hour days in it for AutoCAD.

I'm going to have to vote for the...Toshiba. We have some dell XPS systems running around school and they feel like bug, clunky, poorly built Powerbook imitators. We have a Toshiba here at home that is old enough to be a P-266 with a 4 gig hard drive. It runs Windows 2000 and although the screen looks HORRIBLE, especially compared to, say, my Powerbook screen, the laptop itself just keeps kicking. Maybe that was a good generation for Toshiba because you sure seem to see a lot of those old things running around, but it seems a solid system and if I were to buy a PC laptop today, and IBM Thinkpad was not an option, I'd probably go to Toshiba second.