Markovich wrote on 05/26/12 at 01:02:44:
The obvious question is, what do you want to do with your laptop? Serious chess analysis makes extreme demands on any processors devoted to it. I have eight core on my desktop machine, and when it's calculating, all the cores peg at 100% and the fans are so active that it's a bit like sitting next to a turboprop. I don't think that that kind of computation can be done on any existing factory laptop.
Does anyone really need to do that kind of computation on the road? If so the way to do it is to ssh to your home machine, not try to do it on a laptop.
I have since learned that this remark was behind the times. You can buy a laptop these days equipped with Intel i7 chips (4 core, 8 threads) that is a reasonable substitute for an eight-core desktop machine. You should also buy a good cooler for it (a cooler is a sort of flat stand on which the laptop sits; it has fans in it that are powered by the laptop).
I bought a Zareason Verix 530 equipped with dual i7-3840QM chips, 16 Gig of ram and 180 Gig of SSD. See
http://zareason.com. Zareason specializes in Linux (I would never want a non-Unix computer), but there are many suppliers of custom-built Windows laptops (AVADirect is one; see
http://avadirect.com). If anyone DOES want Linux, I can personally recommend Zareason. I bought this mainly for development (Php, Mysql, Apache) when away from home, but it turns out that it works perfectly well for chess. I run stockfish and scid.
Not everyone will want this much computational horsepower, but for large data base applications like Chessbase or Mysql, I strongly recommend SSD storage (solid state drives). They are WAY faster than the traditional RPM (platter) drives. One little bonus is that bootup is a whole lot faster, as well.
Because my Zareason laptop happens to have an Nvidia graphics card, it's possible to play games on it as well. At the instigation of one of my sons, I've recently been fooling around with Crusader Kings II. Computer games are not really a passion for me, though; I have the nagging feeling that I'm wasting my time.
Stop reading now if you're not a geek.
@ReneDescartes: "The guts may be stable, but the other point of an OS is the interface. That's what makes OS X better than command-line UNIX."
That statement seems a quite odd to me, because OS X has a command line, and essentially all Unix installations on PCs or laptops run a desktop GUI like Gnome, KDE or my preference, XFCE. Only on servers, usually, do you not run a desktop GUI, because you don't need one. Personally I like the freedom to choose which desktop GUI I want to use, not possible on Windows and OSX. I DO find the command line quite useful, but this is a preference that someone with an OSX machine could satisfy as well.
Also, you may perhaps know that OSX is not entirely different from Unix. I believe that much of it was borrowed from BSD.