Retailer Planning Laptops With Intel Core i7 Chips 142
An anonymous reader writes "The Canadian PC retailer Eurocom is planning to ship a 12-pound laptop with Intel's Core i7 chip, which might go down well with deep-pocketed geeks. The Core i7 was designed with desktop computers and servers in mind; later members of the Nehalem chip family are planned to address portables. The 17" notebook's price, not yet announced, will certainly be in excess of $5,000."
Desktop Replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
Whatever happened to the 'desktop replacement' designation for mobile but not lightweight platforms?
This reminds me of the first laptop I ever owned:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_SX-64 [wikipedia.org].
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The Commodore SX-64, also known as the Executive 64, or VIP-64...
Funny, the name implies it was for business use and yet the picture shows it with a pair of joysticks...
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Did you read the wikipedia entry? It brings back the spirit of the C64:
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Funny, the name implies it was for business use and yet the picture shows it with a pair of joysticks...
Well, without a mouse, you need two hands to edit documents. (Btw I loved that joystick. Now get off my lawn.)
Re:Desktop Replacement (Score:5, Informative)
Reasons for needing such a powerful but heavy and battery-challenged "laptop".
Taking your apps+docs (let alone taking you OS) with you on an HD/USB key doesn't really work for most OSes and Apps. Especially if you need specialty apps, like video/CAD... or whetever really NEEDS an i7.
Being certain you'll have an up-to spec PC wherever youre going, without being dependant on someone to book it + set it up for you.
Gaming in small appartments (I assume the vid card is nice, too).
Of course, being able to maybe use the laptop a little while NOT connected to the mains is.. a nice bonus.
I've been reading forever that Intel+AMD are including "laptop" power-management features in their "desktop" parts. Maybe with heavy underclocking one can actually watch a full DVD on a single charge ?
Re:Desktop Replacement (Score:4, Funny)
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I'd be skeptical with regards to building an i7 laptop. Even the 920 is rated at 130watts; add an x58 and decent gpu to go along with it and you'll easily be up to 250-300 watts. Triple-channel memory (although not a requirement for i7 systems) requires more circuits, and there's a reason why the early x58-based boards were actually eATX.
It may be possible to squeeze that much power and bus width into a 17" notebook, but you'd sacrifice much-needed power management.
A 19-21" form factor wouldn't be nearly
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Whatever happened to the 'desktop replacement' designation for mobile but not lightweight platforms?
It got trademarked by, err, umm, Eurocom [eurocom.com]. (Apparently without registration, however.)
$5K (Score:2)
For 5 grand and at 12#, it needs to come with a hover device to make it follow along behind me.
2 cents,
QueenB.
A laptop... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:A laptop... (Score:4, Funny)
... that's not supposed to be put on your lap, unless you are sure you don't want to have offspring. Given that this is designed for the /. kind of geek, the question of offspring is probably not too much of a problem anyway :)
Oh yeah? Well, your laptop is so fat that a...
It's not a laptop ... (Score:5, Funny)
... it is a compact electric (gonad) cooker. :-)
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Penny arcade already has this covered. Maybe they already knew abotu the i7.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/ [penny-arcade.com]
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Don't you mean Penis Panini?
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That sounds like an awesome name for a new Davinci's Notebook album.
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If you want whore for Karma, include a link!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/ [penny-arcade.com]
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I was trying to be "inclusive" ... :-)
Re:A laptop... (Score:5, Funny)
If you're single and still getting some, a temporary decrease in fertility is a feature not a bug.
Crazy talk (Score:2, Funny)
a temporary decrease in fertility is a feature
Only if the girl's birth control pill fails to work, and in that case the after-oops pill will work just as fine.
I don't buy it as an argument for frying my balls. But feel free to do what you want to your own testicles :)
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Going really into off-topic territory, but how would you know the birth control pill has failed right away in order to take the other one?
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Only if the girl's birth control pill fails to work, and in that case the after-oops pill will work just as fine.
That attitude really must have women beating down your door.
From the inside.
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If you're married with children and still getting some, a temporary decrease in fertility is a feature not a bug.
Trust me on this.
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Lamptop, then?
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HP tech support says that you should always use your nw9440 "Mobile Workstation" on the docking station. That's not very mobile :( (And this is just a 17" widescreen core duo)
Just plain silly (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this design is that the i7 chips put out 130 watts TDP. Even if this laptop has a battery, it's going to last less than an hour.
I should I know. I have a toshiba laptop that has a desktop P4 in it. 1 hour.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Funny)
The laptop is 12 pounds: two pounds for the laptop, ten pounds for the batteries.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:4, Funny)
The laptop is 12 pounds: two pounds for the laptop, ten pounds for the batteries.
Which gives you an autonomy of 1+t hours; being "t" the amount of time you're able to keep your cycling power over 1000 watts.
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The laptop is 12 pounds: two pounds for the laptop, ten pounds for the batteries.
I'm so disappointed... at 12 pounds, they could at least have included a 22" screen. At least I hope it has a quad SLI GPU for crisp Excel rendering.
Maybe next time....
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Funny)
THe good thing is, if you leave your lights on, you can use the battery to start your truck.
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£12? Bargain. Bet it's heavy tho.
Sorry
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Insightful)
At my company *everyone* has a laptop. The battery just needs to last long enough that I can make it to the meeting rooms and back. 'Mobile' computers have more use than just using them away from power for long periods of time. You can sit at another desk, on a whim go out on location with all your files, etc.
I'd love something like this for Matlab processing.
And weight isn't an issue because we all have laptop bags or backpacks. A 20 lb laptop would still be lighter than the books I carried in college.
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Weight might be an issue to you, it is to me. Wearing a backpack is a pain in the ass and it hurts my back after a while. I actually don't take my work laptop anywhere ever, including meetings, because it's a pain in the ass to carry around. The only laptop I'll ever actually move around with is my personal EEE, due to the fact its only 2 pounds and can be carried without a special case.
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Capable? Sure. Comfortable? Not really. I also regularly carry around 2 40 pound bags of water softener salt from my car to the basement, that doesn't make it any less of a pain in the ass.
GP said 10% of body weight... (Score:2)
GP said 10% of body weight... so you weigh 800 pounds?
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Interesting)
And weight isn't an issue because we all have laptop bags or backpacks
It happens to me that I'm walking around for 30-60 minutes on the airport with a laptop bag hanging on one shoulder and rolling luggage on the other hand.
I'll tell you I'm pretty glad if I get to sit down and let the laptop slide off the shoulder.
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Have you ever considered figuring out a way to put the laptop bag on the rolling luggage?
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Several reasons I could think of:
- on my back it's not easily reachable (think being able to fetch PDA, phone, wallet, passport or agenda)
- but much more easily reachable by others
- company doesn't supply a backpack
- when you wear a suit or any other business-like attire, you ruin the jacket with a backpack
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No, we're not comfortable wearing a purse. Purses, shoulder bags, saddlebags, and "murses" are considered gateway-accessories. Soon after, we'll be needing cuff-links, fancy watches, and designer shoes. Next thing you know, you've wasted the entire afternoon buying antique brooch pins and doilys, and can't figure out why everyone is calling you "Nancy."
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Because i intend to keep my laptop. i have no intention of letting my laptop out of my sight on a buzy bus/tube/station, i even know a guy that had his laptop (with a full set confidential documents) ripped of his back by closing tube doors.
Yep (Score:2)
I think part of the problem is that people have a given size of computer in their mind when they hear "laptop" when really it covers a fairly wide range. What this might be called is a "desktop replacement." These are used when you want the power of a desktop, but you need some portability. You aren't looking to cart it everywhere with you, you just need to move it around from desk to desk. For example maybe for security reasons all you work needs to remain on one computer. So your desktop at work is actual
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If you need the computational horsepower and portability, why not have a desktop and VNC into it through your laptop?
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A 20 lb laptop would still be lighter than the cases of beer I carried in college.
Fixed that for you.
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cases of beer
Smart students drink spirits. Beer is ~95% water, after all.
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carry books? I never did that in college, and all of my books weighed like .8 lbs or less, and I didn't have any reasons to carry them around.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a Mechanical Engineer. I take lots of data from test cells and process it. Gigs of data sometimes, so you can't just install it where ever. Matlab, Vector CANape and the other programs I use aren't cheap and network licenses are even more expensive.
I may have 1 meeting a day, all I said is that the laptop has to last until I make it there, I didn't say that all I did all day was run around to meetings.
It may have to last long enough for me to get to the DC/AC inverter in the test rig or until I walk down to the test cell. Or be light enough that I can take my work home.
Weight might be an issue to you, it is to me.
No one is forcing you to buy this.
If you need the computational horsepower and portability, why not have a desktop and VNC into it through your laptop?
VNC sucks, it's good for maybe setting up something on a computer or two, but you can't work through it 8 hours a day. Plus, then my company would have 2x the computers.
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For 5k, you can get a laptop and a desktop.
If you're at your desk, use the desktop. Are you in meetings 8 hours a day?
When I say VNC, I also mean anything like it (remote desktop etc...)
I'm an electrical engineer and we use laptops and we VNC into linux workstations to do very compute intensive things.
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They don't do that either. They get IT to do that.
They're good at "extending functionality" of firefox though.
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The problem with this design is that the i7 chips put out 130 watts TDP. Even if this laptop has a battery, it's going to last less than an hour.
Depending on who you are, that might not matter. Believe it or not, but there's a market for "portable" in the "movable" sense meaning that you unhook it at one location and plug it in at another location. The alternative isn't a laptop, it's a box, monitor, keyboard and so on. Having it all rolled up into one box is a lot easier than the alternative, and the ability to open the lid and check something or bring it to a meeting for half an hour's demo without plugging in is just bonus. My dream work laptop h
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My dream work laptop has a quad core cpu, min. 4GB ram, min. >200GB SSD and hardware support for virtualization and virtualized IO. I don't even care if it has a working battery or not, in fact my last one I used for a long time even though the battery was bad and would last seconds.
That's not a laptop, that's an all-in-one. Apple calls them iMacs, and I believe HP Gateway have knock-offs of it.
Re:Just plain silly (Score:4, Insightful)
An all-in-one doesn't fold up in a handy package that protects the screen and input devices, nor does it include a keyboard and pointing device. Desktop replacements do have legitimate uses.
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Point taken. Then again, when you're lugging stuff this big around, you might as well carry along the mouse and keyboard, really. That doesn't solve the screen protection, but I'm sure some company has some nifty carrying bag -- actually, I do remember seeing a thing like that once. Wrapped around the screen, had handles, and a pocket for your mouse and keyboard.
But you're right in the sense that that's not half as easy as just closing the machine and picking it up (even if you have to pick it up with a for
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But you're right in the sense that that's not half as easy as just closing the machine and picking it up (even if you have to pick it up with a forklift).
Time to hit the gym, man. Anything under 50 pounds shouldn't be an issue to lift and carry around in a backpack, if that's what was required. Granted, I'm glad I don't need to but 12 pounds is probably a lot less than you'd carry if you were backpacking across the countryside.
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iMacs *are* laptops. They have laptop specs and performance.
Frankly, it continues to amaze me that Apple is able to maintain four separate, remarkably similar laptop lines, one of which has no screen and zero mid-range desktop lines.
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If the CPU dissipates 130w of heat and only uses 130w, then that means the CPU itself requires 0w for anything else ? Perpetual motion patent, here we come.
In what other form does a CPU emit or store significant amounts of power then? If you know it's not heat you must have some idea. It will be sending a little power out of its interconnects, but it will be receiving power that way too.
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No, all of the energy is converted to heat in the end. *everything* that uses electricity is a 100% efficient space heater.
Which is a misnomer, because space heaters are actually 0% efficient. They convert low entropy energy to high entropy without performing any work.
And technically, CPUs are pretty low efficiency, too. Since computation is not work in the thermodynamic sense.
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Some people are happy with a computer that is light enough that they can carry it into car, taxi or onto public transport in a single bag, while still having enough hardware performance to run the most demanding applications such as CAD/CAM, visualization, animation and games. The only major limitation is the space requirements for hand luggage on airlines.
If you are going to buy a PC in that class, they you are going to want something that is maxed out in every capability (CPU memory + cores, GPU memory +
Has a GeForce 280 in it too. (Score:2)
The i7 isn't the half of it. The linked stats suggest that it'll be endowed with the mobile version of a GeForce 280. That'll probably take >150W at load.
This is a 'laptop' designed to be used in the set of all areas with a table to put it on that are within 10' of a power outlet.
5 grand?! (Score:4, Interesting)
What I'd like to know is how on earth they can justify charging 5 grand for a laptop that has nothing special about it except being absurdly heavy and featuring an i7.
For that size and weight, you could just throw a desktop motherboard in some plastic, tape a screen and battery on, then ship it out! This machine might justify the price if it clocked in at under 5 pounds.
For more information... (Score:3, Informative)
...on the expected hardware specifications, see Notebook Review: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348239 [notebookreview.com]
Desktop replacement (Score:2, Interesting)
I had an Toshiba P-10 a few years ago. It had an Intel P4 3.2ghz socket 478 desktop chip in it. It was a beast.
I miss having a laptop though, as I don't have much time at home.
This 12pound monster is a little bit overkill unless it has 6gb ddr3 a pair of 500gb or 1tb drives in RAID and a SLI or crossfire-x solution in it.
Then it would almost be worth it if you just had to spend 5k on a laptop.
PC architecture is not ready! (Score:3, Funny)
Because of I/O bottlenecks, on a gaming laptop with 64-bit dual core system and 2+ GB RAM, burning a DVD while copying a file from disk to disk (SATA) will kill the system to low responsiveness.
In theory the CPU is powerful enough to juggle the I/O requests (SATA, nvidia, keyboard and mouse) with the actual computing things in a manner that the user won't experience low responsiveness a-la pre-1990.
In the practice all that power is weasted, unless you run tasks with low I/O needs.
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The PC architecture? Your laptop motherboard chipset with a cheap integrated SATA controller maybe. Nothing about the PC architecture limits you from designing a laptop with a PCIe 8x connected dedicated SATA/SAS controller.
Of course, if it's all from the same hard drive and you're using rotating media, it's the media that is fault not the PC bus architecture responsible for your slow down. The PC architecture is approaching 30 years of scalability.
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Could someone clarify the parent's post up a bit or was it simply a troll? What would be a better architecture to handle all those IO reqs?
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Perhaps I/O would be better, if the average PC had not started to use PCI Express? Throughput is nice, but so is low latency, as well as DMA operations for PCIe switches. I suppose lower latency in parallel PCI-X DDR 533 is why one would find PCI-X slots like those in use with IBM POWER6 systems. PCIe seems to me at least to have been forced down the throats of PC users regardless of its level of appropriateness, which we can than Intel and Rambus for. Many of the patents for PCIe signaling are held by
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Doubling the RAM won't make my system more responsive, as the virtual memory on disk is never used.
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Ram is also used for caching the file system. So unless you have more RAM than HDD space your performance will improve somewhat with more RAM.
and how does the data get onto the ram may i ask? magic? no its limited by I/O throughput (sure a bit of caching means you dant take a seek time hit quite so often but its hardly gonig to help with i/o based tasks.
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My laptop is ASUS G1s [notebookreview.com] which is labelled as "gaming" and should not be using cheap chips.
I run Linux and cannot cope with high I/O loads despite the CPU power and the memory bandwidth.
So I argue I/O subsystem is the bottleneck.
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I was agreeing with you, btw if you are having problems with torrents or other background tasks interfering with your foreground processes, you may want to use ionice -c3 $PID so that they only use idle I/O time.
Deep-pocketed... (Score:3, Funny)
...enough so to afford a Sherpa to carry the thing?
Oblig Penny Arcade (Score:2)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/1/30/ [penny-arcade.com]
Clevo (Score:1)
Canada != Europe (Score:2, Funny)
That's no laptop, ... (Score:1, Informative)
and no space station either. Reminds me of that thing Porsche built in WWII: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_VIII_Maus
12 pounds (Score:3, Funny)
12 pounds is quite cheap for a laptop of this spec. But I expect once it reaches the UK, it'll be more like 24 pounds. :)
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I had the same reaction. I bet people would make it through the snow for a 12 pound laptop. Heck, they probably would for a 50 pound laptop.
Exchange rate? (Score:3, Funny)
I know the dollar has taken a hammering lately, but its not really that bad yet is it?
What's a pound? :) (Score:2)
Yes I know you were making a quaint pun at anachronistic units but c'mon, it's the 21st century.
Isn't it time the Brits adopted the euro [wikipedia.org] ?
And the Yanks SI [wikipedia.org] ?
In any case, that's approx 3923 euro for 5.4kg worth of laptop.
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No, it's approximately 4000 euros for a 5 kg laptop.
(If you are going to adopt, go whole hog.)
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I know it's hard to keep things straight, but Canadians are neither Brits, nor Yanks. That, and we've already adopted SI.
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Yes, I'm fully aware of Canada's existence as an independent nation.
Canada? Again no surprise. I was assuming the article summary was assuming a US audience - the original article lists both units. According to wikipedia, the USA is one of 3 backward states not to have adopted SI as their primary or sole system of measurement.
Down here we never refer to pounds except in old cookbooks
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SI is the official system of weights an measures in the US. We even have our own kilogram which is periodically calibrated against the one in France.
But regardless, harassers will still be bitching even if we switch our street signs and whatnot over to SI labels. It'll be the e9/e12 billions rant, instead. And after that, something else.
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Sorry, if I struck a raw nerve. Anyhow, Wikipedia would beg to differ:
Three nations have not officially adopted the International System of Units as their primary or sole system of measurement: Liberia, Myanmar and the United States.
Ob Strongbad Ref (Score:2)
Has some of the same specs as the renowned "Lappy 486"; Battery Life: Half of ten minutes.
Where does the 12 pounds come from? (Score:2)
Does this system have 2-3 pounds of special cooling hardware?
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Eurocom has been offering different "workstation class" notebooks for several years. They frequently try to be first to market in things like SLI Cards, Quadro hardware, the biggest LCD, RAID, or Core2Quad in a "notebook". This time they're first with i7. I doubt I'll ever get one, but I can see the market for this stuff.
where did $5000 come from? (Score:2)
Isn't $5000 a bit speculative, or are they using Canadian Dollars (which is about $1000 less than USD right now)?
Looking at component pricing and comparing to what's out there like the Asus M70VM-B1, which is about $1550 for 500GB less disk, the P8400 CPU is just slightly cheaper than the low end i7 (+800 for high end), a slightly slower GPU with 512k less RAM (my guess is this uses the 9800M GTX MXM platform - let's say +$200), 4GB more of DDR3 instead of DDR2 (about $250), no blu ray player (-?). By my e
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These monster notebooks in specialty configs that can't be purchased from larger OEMs often cost in excess of 5 grand. I think they had a Core2Quad with a Quadro card and RAID running 8grand in 2007.
They don't make a lot of sense unless your time is really valuable.
Fan Noise (Score:2)
I believe someone in our Engineering group has it sitting in a data center as a test machine since you can't hear it.
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DOS ran fine on a 286 also...maybe we didn't need any fancy toys like a Pentium II 266MHz. (Disclaimer: I was only about 6 years old in the 286 era, so may have missed some minor detail in the prior sentence. Point still stands though.)
Secondly, there ARE applications that can use more than one core. Games, Photoshop, video encoding, damn you are a troll and I fell for it. :(
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Who would need Intel Core i7 for XP?
You want to be able to run Minesweeper at the same time, or maybe, perhaps, optionally, some applications. Some people do actual work with their machine instead of just refreshing /. all day.