My Ideal Laptop

Fabio

Really need some help with this one lads.

I currently have a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop, about two years old and it shows. Obvisoulsy it was bought as a budget laptop! It has an Intel Celeron 2.0ghz processor, 256mb RAM and a 30gb hard drive. It is showing its lowly spec and age now and I thought that maybe it is time to get a new one...

My ideal laptop would have to have the following specs or higher and be portabel enough to take to college everyday without being too big a hassle.

-Processor: Intel Core Duo M or equivalent type. Pentium M would be fine too. Not sure what clock speed I'd need as the biggest program I'd be runnning would be Microsoft Flight Simulator...

-RAM: 1gb or higher

-Hard Drive: 50gb or higher

-Graphics: Good enough to run my Flight Simulator and thats all. Perhaps a 128mb graphics card....I'm not sure....any suggesrtions?

-Screen size: 13 inch to 15 inch to save on battery and weight.

-Battery: Should last for about 3 hours using Word and Internet Explorer.

-A CD writer would be nice too and it must be wirelss enabled.

My budget????

---

under E850......

Can it be done?

godtabh

Fabio wrote:

Really need some help with this one lads.

I currently have a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop, about two years old and it shows. Obvisoulsy it was bought as a budget laptop! It has an Intel Celeron 2.0ghz processor, 256mb RAM and a 30gb hard drive. It is showing its lowly spec and age now and I thought that maybe it is time to get a new one...

My ideal laptop would have to have the following specs or higher and be portabel enough to take to college everyday without being too big a hassle.

-Processor: Intel Core Duo M or equivalent type. Pentium M would be fine too. Not sure what clock speed I'd need as the biggest program I'd be runnning would be Microsoft Flight Simulator...

-RAM: 1gb or higher

-Hard Drive: 50gb or higher

-Graphics: Good enough to run my Flight Simulator and thats all. Perhaps a 128mb graphics card....I'm not sure....any suggesrtions?

-Screen size: 13 inch to 15 inch to save on battery and weight.

-Battery: Should last for about 3 hours using Word and Internet Explorer.

-A CD writer would be nice too and it must be wirelss enabled.

My budget????

---

under E850......

Can it be done?

I just picked up the new Dell 1501 with AMD processor in it for €700 and I reckon that would do you no bother. It has a "decent" on board graphics card from what I've hard. Add some extra ram your self

Saruman

easy as that spec is quite low with the exception of the graphics. You could get a shared graphics of 128mb no problem with plenty of money left but not a dedicated geforce or something.

However for that money you could walk in to pc world even and get a decent laptop.

Was just about to post that 1501
Oh and on adding ram yourself, its very likely that there will be 2 slots for ram and both will have a 512mb chip in them so he would have to take them out and put in 2 1gb chips if he wanted more.

BostonB

Just my opinion, other people might disagree...

A Dual core will be better on battery life but more powerful than the AMD. Flight sim needs a good CPU. You need a good gfx card for flight sim and at least 1GB of ram. You'd need to be looking at a 7600go or better gfx card. Get at least a DVD/CDRW as some new games and applications come on a DVD and not a CD. A smaller screen and lower res with be faster than a larger screen and a high res.

Dell really only do low end gfx like the ATI 1300/1400 (no good for flight sim) or high end like the XPS laptops. You might find a better med range laptop in another brand.

Fabio

True about adding extra RAM there Saruman. That spec, though seems low for some of you lads, is quite high for what I would want it to do like. I mean, the most demanding "game" I play is Flight Sim 2004!!!

I would like to try out something other than Dell this time however as I don't particularly ike the look of the Dell 1501 though to be honest it's a fine laptop...

Fabio

BostonB wrote:

Just my opinion, other people might disagree...

A Dual core will be better on battery life but more powerful than the AMD. Flight sim needs a good CPU. You need a good gfx card for flight sim and at least 1GB of ram. You'd need to be looking at a 7600go or better gfx card. Get at least a DVD/CDRW as some new games and applications come on a DVD and not a CD. A smaller screen and lower res with be faster than a larger screen and a high res.

Dell really only do low end gfx like the ATI 1300/1400 (no good for flight sim) or high end like the XPS laptops. You might find a better med range laptop in another brand.

Can you explain to me a little further about screen resolution? I'm not quite sure what you mean and you seem to know what you are talking about to be honest. Do you mean, response time like on an LCD tv screen?

About the gfx card and that - I'm used to running Flight Sim on my old laptop (256mb, 2.0ghz Celeron processor and no real graphics card...just shared Intel integrated heap of junk) and any step up would be nice..!!!