PROCESSOR: AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL-60 (2.0GHz/1MB) OPERATING SYSTEM: Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium LCD DISPLAY: 15.4 inch Wide Screen XGA Display with TrueLife™ MEMORY: 2GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHZ, 2 DIMM HARD DRIVE: 120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive OPTICAL DRIVE: 8X CD/DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) with double-layer DVD+R write capability GRAPHICS CARD: ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 256MB HyperMemory™ (Integrated) BATTERY OPTIONS: 85 WHr 9-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery I'm planning on getting a new laptop for school and travel, etc. Its gonna replace my desktop pc so I need something decent that can handle most applications. I won't be gaming on it, but I'll watch some movies, listen to music and use some presentation software. I just wanted to know if these technical specs are acceptable for a laptop that I'll be stuck with for 4 years. I have a budget (maybe $1500 since I'm buying it myself) so I'm not looking for anything major. This one is a Dell and I plan to switch it to Windows XP before I buy it because someone told me that Vista is no good. Anyways, any advice is appreciates... thanks guys. If anything stands out and is really bad, please let me know. Or likewise, if anything is good about it and you think I should buy it, let me know about that as well.
I ain't no pro or nothin, but i think you should get a better hard drive, whats the purpose of having an SATA if you only gonna get one that spins at 5400 RPM, try to get a faster one, gonna cost a little more but its gonna give better performance.
Whats the benefit of getting a hard drive with a higher RPM? Would the difference in performance even be noticeable when running basic applications?
Well if your only running one program, I don't think it would show. But if you are surfing the web, typing a paper, and listening to music I wouldn't doubt it if you started to see things lagging. But as far as laptop specs go that is a decent configuration, the only things I would like into changing would be get a model with a bigger screen and a faster hd 7,200 rpm.
Faster rotation speed will allow you to to do just about everything faster you will be able to search for files faster, files will be saved and opened faster, less wait time when openeing many files, you will be able to copy faster its all about speed, IDE hard drives come with faster spindle speeds, SATA allows for faster access times so i believe that if you have the advantage of SATA, then at least get one with a faster speed and take advantage of the available benefits. Like you said, you will have this computer for four years, and after you start packing that thing up with files, it will start to slow down. Hey, its your choice, you asked for suggestions
Ok, I think I get this hard drive stuff now. So right off the bat the laptop won't slow down on me but down the road it will unless I get a drive with a higher RPM? I have a problem now... this particular model does not come with the option to upgrade to 7200RPM. I was planning on just buying an external drive as the "base" for my laptop and just using the laptop's actual hard drive for stuff that I need when I'm on the move. From what I understand though, this problem won't arise for a year or two (maybe longer because I don't store large files)? And I don't think I should get a 17" monitor because I'll be on the move a lot. Those things are too big to carry around... I was even considering a 14.1" but then I decided to go with something in the middle. And will the quality of the graphics card (or lack thereof) affect anything? I don't do gaming but will it noticeably affect the quality of my presentations and/or display quality? I'll take the hard drive thing into consideration though. If I have no feasible alternatives, then I guess I'll just get this laptop and pick up a 250GB 7200RPM external drive or something. Those things are cheap now-a-days . Oo, and is 1MB of cache really bad? I don't even know what its for but this guy told me that he had 4MB
. Well in that case you may be fine with the slower hard-drive speed, but make sure your external harddrive has a faster rpm. And its not really a problem with storing big files that causes it too slow down, the problem is it spins slow thus it retrieves data slower. The quality/lack of a graphics card will not affect the quality of anything your doing, and since you don't have a videocard your battery life will be longer. Well basically in terms of CPU more cache is better but you are dealing with a laptop cpu so I wouldn't sweat it. Basically the CPU will be overloaded with work sooner than if you had a larger amount of cache.
Ok, thanks guys. I checked out all other alternatives and this still seems like the best choice. I'm gonna order it tonight and probably pick up an external hard drive at the store. One last question. Is there anyway to have Vista loaded on one drive and XP on the other? People are telling me to get XP but I don't want to have to get rid of Vista... I would just move the OS to the external HDD (if possible) and load XP onto the laptop. Someone told me that they both can't be on the same drive because files get overlapped/ corrupted or something. Any suggestions... and will my idea even work?
You could do a dual boot setup, on the laptops harddrive with Vista and XP. People have done it and it works. Now if you install say XP on the external drive be aware that that will only work with your model of laptop, you won't be able to plug it in and have it magically work with any PC. Also in regards to the external harddrive, you can build one yourself cheaper than most stores sell them. All it is is a external harddrive case and a harddrive. I will be using this external hard-drive enclosure for all my examples. It is a Thermaltake unit that sports USB 2.0 (480 Mbps transfer rate) and SATA 2 (3 Gbps transfer rate). The unit itself has a non-sale price of $43.99. Listed below are five hard-drives ranging from 320-500 GB and all under US $100... SeaGate 400GB 7200 RPM=$99 SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series 400GB 7200 RPM=$89.99 Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM=$99.99 HITACHI Deskstar 320GB 7200 RPM=$74.99 Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200 RPM=$79.99 Now I know your hard-drive is only 120Gb but I just posted these huge drives so you could see that a huge external harddrive is a affordable option. You could have a 500Gb external harddrive for as little as $143.99. And for comparison you can get a 200 Gb Western Digital hard-drive for $55, so with a case and that hard-drive your final cost would be $98.99.
I'll check out this OS and hard drive stuff you guys are telling me about when I get everything up and running. Thats not really a priority at the moment. Anyways, thanks for all the help guys, there aren't enough helpful people in the world today. People at Best Buy are getting paid for this stuff and they probably wouldn't have been able to help me as much if at all. Take it ez
