Dell Inspiron 6400 URGENT

cosher10

Hi,

im looking for some advice i need a laptop for ebay work thats about it. something cheap but powerful enough to be able to run on.

would a Dell Inspiron 6400 with windows vista be ok and what would a fair price be.

BostonB

Quite old that laptop and I wouldn't get anything with Vista on it.

Whats the budget?

Alanstrainor

Good laptops in their day. Too old now though.

unkel

That's harsh, BB!

I have a 6400 in daily use and it's fine for light use. Vista fully patched with SP2 works fine too. Im running W8 Pro on mine though

unkel

cosher10 wrote: »

what would a fair price be.

Sorry, missed that bit. About €100 but don't expect the battery to hold a charge for that kinda money

unkel

You could get 3GB of RAM in a 6400. Although you can put in 4GB, it'll only see a little over 3GB, even with 64-bit.

However, I still can't get it out of my head that Vista was a bloated mess. :pac:

unkel wrote: »

Sorry, missed that bit. About €100 but don't expect the battery to hold a charge for that kinda money

Also, Dell aren't making new batteries for the 6000 or 6400 anymore so any replacements would have to be third party ones.

BostonB

We have a few laptops of that era. They are the minimum I'd find usable on the web these days. But I wouldn't use Vista on it. XP or W7/8 but not Vista. Windows 8 works well, even with 2GB of RAM. I sold on recently for about 80.

rebeve

BostonB wrote: »

We have a few laptops of that era. They are the minimum I'd find usable on the web these days. But I wouldn't use Vista on it. XP or W7/8 but not Vista. Windows 8 works well, even with 2GB of RAM. I sold on recently for about 80.

I have a 6400 with opensuse 12.3 ,flying it is.

unkel

Karsini wrote: »

Also, Dell aren't making new batteries for the 6000 or 6400 anymore so any replacements would have to be third party ones.

No one in their right mind would buy a €140 battery from Dell for their €100 laptop

unkel

BostonB wrote: »

Windows 8 works well, even with 2GB of RAM

Mine has just 1.5GB of RAM in it at the moment. And I'm using some of that for a RAM disk

Working very well for surfing, even with the likes of 15-20 tabs open in Opera

Performance was brutal with lots of tabs open without the RAM disk (Opera's cache goes there now) and before I disabled prefetch / superfetch...

TerrorFirmer

Isn't the 6400 a dual core Core Duo? Honestly can't see any reason why it wouldn't be perfectly fine for general use with Win7 or Win8.

unkel

Yep core 2 duo T2400 (1.83GHz). It is perfectly fine for light use! Don't listen to the naysayers :pac:

I've had Vista on it, Windows 7 and Windows 8 and it is by far the quickest with Windows 8...

TerrorFirmer

I have Win7 on a S478 Pentium 4 and it's perfectly fine for general use, and a Core Duo is much faster.

BostonB

For ebay use a 6400 would be ok.

But for anything else it kinda all depends what your idea of "normal, General, Light, Surfing" use is. Doesn't it.

I have to use a P4 2.8 and a Dual Xeon 2.4~3.2 (P4 based) occasionally and personally I find them quite slow. I couldn't live with them for regular use. Modern websites with video and CSS can be quite demanding. I found a noticeable difference between a 6400 with a dual core and the intel gfx and a 9400 with a core2duo and a 7900GS. Especially with Windows 8, I think its because the OS and newer Web browsers can use the gfx a bit and windows 8 has a bit more multi threading in the OS, making better use of the newer CPU. I wonder if the P4's you find ok have a decent old graphics card in them?

Like others have said. I found Windows 8 a bit snappier than Windows 7 on these older machines.

cosher10

thanks for the replies. im going to give it a miss. hold out for something better and newer. thanks