Buying a laptop :-(

Post by **Eraser** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 1:49 pm

Okay, I'm in the market for a cheap laptop that needs doing little more than writing a few documents in Word and doing a bit of webbrowsing. I'm really surprised at how little raw power you can buy in laptops for a reasonable amount of money.

Now I've found this offer for a €588 Toshiba laptop.

Specs:
Intel Celeron M430 (1.73GHz)
1GB RAM
120GB HDD
128Mb shared videocard (no mention of the type or anything, probably something onboard)
15.4" TFT screen
DVD/RW Burner
WiFi
Windows XP

How will this perform? As said before, it doesn't have to be a powerhouse, but if I can buy something twice as fast for €100 more then I'd be happy to do so.

Also, there's other notebooks in the same price catagory that have 64bit CPU's. The problem is that all of these come with 512Mb RAM and 128Mb shared video memory. That leaves 384Mb of free RAM. Windows alone takes up about that much RAM doesn't it? That would chug along like a snail wouldn't it? So should I go for the bigger RAM or the faster CPU?

Post by **Nightshade** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 1:53 pm

That 128Mb shared video isn't an actual card, it's shared memory allocated for video, IIRC.
If all you want to do is basic stuff, that sounds like plenty or power, if more than a bit overpriced.

Post by **menkent** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 1:55 pm

why do you need a dvd-rw in a word processor?

Post by **Eraser** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 2:06 pm

Nightshade wrote:That 128Mb shared video isn't an actual card, it's shared memory allocated for video, IIRC.
If all you want to do is basic stuff, that sounds like plenty or power, if more than a bit overpriced.

It's basically the cheapest laptop I've found. I can go slightly cheaper (around €500 I guess) but those are all with 512Mb of RAM but I simply refuse to believe that you can have a smoothly working system with that amount of RAM while running multiple applications (or a single large Word document).

Post by **Eraser** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 2:07 pm

menkent wrote:why do you need a dvd-rw in a word processor?

Uhr, I don't, but there's one in there. It's not like it's a custom system.
Besides, you'd need at least a CD-ROM drive anyway and a DVD-RW doesn't cost shit anyway these days so why not.

Post by **Nightshade** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 2:30 pm

I agree with the need for at least 1Gb of RAM, the whole thing just seems expensive. Is there some sort of clog tax on it or something?

Post by **dzjepp** » Fri Mar 16, 2007 5:48 pm

Shared ram should only kick in when you are actually doing 3d work. On the windows desktop it will take none or very little of the system ram.

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Sat Mar 17, 2007 11:11 pm

My boss's laptop screen looks like this.

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Sun Mar 18, 2007 10:11 pm

Well it seems to be the screen that's fucked.
I hooked up an external monitor and the screen on that was fine.

Post by **AmIdYfReAk** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:53 am

the only thing that you can really check to see if you can fix it is Take the laptop apart and track downt he CGA connection to the LCD and see if reseating it helps.

Post by **FragaGeddon** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:14 am

I've taken the whole laptop apart, even the display.

Post by **Eraser** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:55 am

Well I went ahead and bought the thing. It's more for my girlfriend to do homework and such than for myself really and so far it's working pretty much allright. So far it's the only computer system in my house to ever have featured only legal software, lol.