Laptops

[Walleee]

Been looking on the dell website today and have thrown myself together a laptop for £350, the spec is as follows:

AMD sempron 3500+

Windows XP home

14.1" WXGA LCD

512mb 533MHz DDR2 SDRAM

60GB Hard Drive

CD writer - DVD reader

ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 256MB HyperMemory

WiFi built in

That's basicaly what I see to be of importance in a computer, but it's a fair while since I've atcually bought one so I'm not current with where can offer the best value for money. Ideally I don't wish to spend anymore than £400. It will be used for Uni, Writing up report's etc, downloading music, internet, and a little bit of solidworks, I don't mind if it slows up a bit when rendering and generating models etc....

Can anyone offer any advice as to wether that's a fair price for the componentry, or perhaps offer alternatives? Remember the main thing's of importance for me are that it is small, 14" is about as big as I want to go in terms of screen size, it MUST have built in wireless, and be able to browse internet etc without taking forever.

If I have an intel celron 2.93Ghz processor, and 480MB Ram, with just on board graphics, how would the laptop compare with what im currently using?

I'd imagine the performance to be much the same?

Edited January 23, 2007 by jake1516

[Tomm]

If that's what you've got at the moment, it's not going to be a huge upgrade at all. If you're having trouble with your current laptop, I'd definitely start by formatting everything

[Token]

Think you could do better for the money

for 399 this will be quicker Acer Aspire

Wouldnt touch anything with less than 1gb of ram, so maybe try an aim for 64bit an 1gb or ram, vista will run smoother if you then decide to upgrade in the future.

Edit: Your Celeron will be much slower, having probably half the cache size and slower memory because of low fsb.

Edited January 23, 2007 by Scopse

[Walleee]

If that's what you've got at the moment, it's not going to be a huge upgrade at all. If you're having trouble with your current laptop, I'd definitely start by formatting everything

It's not ment to be an upgrade, I've just a desktop at home now and want something portable to take to uni with me. I don't have any problems on my current system that a restart every few day's can't fix.

Think you could do better for the money

for 399 this will be quicker Acer Aspire

Wouldnt touch anything with less than 1gb of ram, so maybe try an aim for 64bit an 1gb or ram, vista will run smoother if you then decide to upgrade in the future.

Edit: Your Celeron will be much slower, having probably half the cache size and slower memory because of low fsb.

If that's the case I might be happy enough, even after a few months using this PC im still happy with it as I havn't noticed any serious slow down or anything. The S-video out on the Acer is tempting, but with having half the graphics memory, it might struggle that bit more using 3d modelling programs?

[Token]

If that's the case I might be happy enough, even after a few months using this PC im still happy with it as I havn't noticed any serious slow down or anything. The S-video out on the Acer is tempting, but with having half the graphics memory, it might struggle that bit more using 3d modelling programs?

Yeh it might struggle that bit more in rendering but by having faster processor and more ram I think it'd more than make up for it. I dont think 3d modelling programs are 100% graphics orientated as the graphics card only has to render the image, isn't there some pretty heavy maths in which the cpu and ram will make a big difference?