I just want to participate so I get updates on what you folks find/learn. I have a four year old Toshiba Satellite laptop which was the fastest CPU I could find then at 3.01 GHz as a monoprocessor. I use it for the Internet, WORD for writing the book and number-crunching quantum Chemistry calculations. I have run into overheating on long runs but I have a RubberMaid lap unit that I cut holes in under the PC and that helps cooling. I am worrying over a replacement unit and I am disappointed that the duo core CPUs are slower than my mono-3.01 GHz although I do see that running calculations does conflict with Internet action. I think I will look into a local company here in Virginia that makes souped up game PCs and get something fast for calculations; I don't care about super game graphics as long as I can draw still pictures. I use the laptop like a desktop but sitting in my living room recliner with the TV on in the background. The only advantage of the laptop is when I have to travel so I can take my calculations and results somewhere. I dropped a previous laptop on a gravel driveway and lost some data from the hard drive but it still ran. That means maybe the laptops are a bit sturdier in some ways. My wife has a PC which was one of the last available monoprocessor Pentiums but with VISTA. In our effort to put our main program on a CD in the book we found our program (Visual Basic V5 + WATCOM f77 code) would run on Windows 98, Windows Millennium, Windows XP Home and Windows XP Pro but choked on WINDOWS Vista (at first). Then we found that VISTA is downward compatible to a large extent if you go to the trouble to release a LOT of permissions, so that we now can run our same program(s) on VISTA as well, but it is more complicated to use VISTA. My preliminary interpretation is that VISTA has too many security restrictions and that makes it more complicated. I am interested to learn what you folks find/recommend and inparticular I am interested in the top speed in floating point arithmetic. For the nostalgia buffs with Commodore 64s we gave ours away long ago but I do have (somewhere) a Sinclair with the extra 16K memory, wow!
Don Shillady
Retired Scioentist/teen rodder