Laptop advice

cooks

i was thinking of getting a laptop. the main uses of the laptop would be watching dvds, word, excel, net, not much of a gamer. i was looking at the acer travelmate 380. just have a few question do dvds look ok on such a small screen,what does dvd-dual mean and i presume that the dvd drive is powered off the laptop?

thanks in advance

Stugots

It sounds like any laptop with a DVD drive will meet your needs.

To answer your questions:

Do DVDs look OK on such a small screen?
For regular screen format DVDs, yes (at least in my opinion), but widescreen DVDs have to be compressed too much to fit on a laptop screen. You end up with a letterbox look on a screen that is already small. More than likely, any laptop you buy will provide a video out port and cable to allow you to feed the video to a TV screen if you prefer.

What does dual-DVD mean?
Dual layer DVDs contain double the amount of information and so can have longer movies recorded on them.

Is the DVD drive powered off the laptop?
Yes - and it can run down the battery pretty quickly. In my experience, a brand new battery won't last much longer than the duration of a single movie. The battery performance degrades over time. After approx a year, my laptop battery (IBM) wouldn't last more than an hour with a DVD playing.

voxpop

if your going to be watching alot of dvds on the laptop itself - i would shell out the extra cash and get one with a wide screen display. Personally it would wreck my head using a 12.1 screen, for anything never mind watching dvds.

Woden

dvd dual may also be reference to dual format such that it can write both the +R and -R formats. as well as dual layer mentioned by stugots above

Kevin_rc_ie

im thinking of getting a new laptop early next year.

looking for a centrino processor, 512 ram, maybe a intermediate graphics card, small screen,light weight,dvd cdrw combo drive, maybe 40 gb plus hard drive.

any one got any recommendations?

possible uses - just light internet and microsoft office stuff. wouldnt mind playing games but been told should stick to desktops for them.

oh yeah budget the cheaper the better, les than 1200.

Kevin_rc_ie

something like this

http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=ECE960021&productID=