More OTness - laptop CPU names

Anyone with too much knowledge of this guff care to tell me what's the current dogs danglies CPU for a cheap £400 - £500 laptop? I wish we still had a cheap CPU, a premium CPU and a speed rating instead of all these fecking brand names.

Reply to
Doki
Loading thread data ...

I think the Centrino CoreDuo (or something like that) is reputedly pretty good, and good on battery life too.

Reply to
AstraVanMan

Core 2 Duo :-) Probably not for £400 though.

Reply to
Iridium

Isn't the name slightly different for the Centrino family of laptop CPUs, or is just simply Centrino Core 2 Duo?

Aye, that's where I didn't quite get the question. "current dogs danglies CPU" and "cheap £400 - £500 laptop" don't neccessarily go hand in hand. Ergo "current dogs danglies CPU for a cheap £400 - £500 laptop" is probably equal to a "mediocre to reasonably ok" CPU in terms of regular PC laptops on the whole.

Reply to
AstraVanMan

I don't know, I suspect 10 seconds on the Dell website and all would become clear. Can you be arsed?

Yea, probably just looking at a standard Centrino M 1.8 or something for that. But they're perfectly respectable chips anyway.

Reply to
Iridium

What I'm saying is, "What's the best laptop CPU that I'm likely to get in a

4-500 quid laptop?".
Reply to
Doki

Best bet is usually to see what Dell will give you for £500 and use it as your benchmark for other things. Then probably end up buying the Dell anyway heh. FWIW all the Dell's i've ever used or owned (granted, that's one) have been very reliable. Quite a lot of preinstalled crap, but that's no hassle to remove. And you can add a media disk for £6 heh.

Reply to
Iridium

It looks like a 1.6GHz Core Duo is about what you can expect to get, not a Core 2 Duo. You might just see that pushed up to a 1.83GHz Core Duo.

A quick scan through Kelkoo shows that in that price range there are also Turion 2GHz, and some remaining Celeron M processors available at around that price.

I'd say that what you can expect to get (1Gb RAM, 100Gb HDD, 1.6GHz Core Duo) is roughly what you could have had at the beginning of the year for

2-3x the price.
Reply to
Steve Firth

Pentium M, AMD Turion, Intel Centrino Duo, and low spec versions at that.

1.75GHz at best. You're very unlikely to get anything much better in that price range, and I doubt there's little practical difference between the performance of any of them, bearing in mind the h/ware, memory, h/drive size, peripherals etc, that'll go with them. If you can stretch to £600, the HI GRADE Notino C7000L-1700 looks to offer good value at around £580. Maybe less if you search the internet. 1.75GHz Pentium M, with 1GB of DDR2 memory, and 80GB h/drive. It really depends on what you want to use the notepad for. Even a sub £400 one would do emails, and basic office tasks etc, but forget games or anything that needed fast graphics or computing power. Mike.
Reply to
Mike G

Same here. However, I've heard that a) Dell laptops are crap, from Tim, and b) I know people who've recently bought Dells and had to put up with paying £1.50 a minute to speak to a call centre in India who have no clue what the problem with the computer is.

Reply to
Doki

What's the difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Core Duo, or have you just missed a two out? Does one of them actually do the strange dual CPU type stuff and the other not?

Reply to
Doki

Is that in order of goodness?

I really doubt it's going to be much above £400 as it's for my sister who rarely spends more than the bare minimum on anything. I just want to make sure that there are no massive gotchas hanging about (ie, old tech that's a bit cheaper but a lot slower than the new stuff) and no massive bargains that I'm missing. Probably going to look for something with a gig of RAM as that seems to have the most influence on running speed of most laptops, whereas the hard drive is unlikely to get filled and there isn't going to be any CPU intensive stuff, just a bit of MS Office.

Reply to
Doki

Mine works fine, as do the 3 I helped people buy at uni heh. Also, I have a mate who works IT support at a local big printing firm, and they use Dell stuff, and have some 200 of them , he seems to like them (i.e. - they don't break so he doesn't have to fix them).

Reply to
Iridium

No, the Core Duo is the predecessor of the Core 2 Duo.

formatting link
Gives a good summary of the two chips, better than I could do.

Reply to
Steve Firth

Yes. But Tim S Kemp is an unashamed raving Toshibophile. I think he has a Toshiba kettle/toaster set, Toshiba crockery and little Toshiba slippers. (c:

Dell's business practices remind me a bit of Ryanair somehow. Perhaps it's just the Irish connection.

I was in the market for a £500 laptop about a year ago. In the end I bought the cheapest Thinkpad with a non-Celeron processor I could get and stuck a gig of RAM in it. The Graphics are a bit shit, it's not much to look at and it's only got a 40gig HDD but it's fine for what I need. I'm using it right now. Hurrah.

FWIW my choice was between the Lenovo/IBM and a Toshiba of a similar spec.

Reply to
Douglas Payne

IBM make the best ones - this is quite commonly acknowledge I beleive. It's just a shame they're so expensive and so god damn ugly.

Reply to
Iridium

There is that, but he didn't abuse every other laptop maker either. I'm sure he'll turn up in a bit.

Are they still up to the same standards though? I was under the impression than Lenovo was completely different to IBM. We've just got rid of a Thinkpad that must be getting on for 10 years old, and you would have no idea from looking at it. Very well built it was.

Reply to
Doki

Aye. I've had a bit of experience with Dell's desktops, and they seem rock solid. Just not sure about their laptops and support (though obviously you tend to get what you pay for in terms of support).

Reply to
Doki

Yea true. Mine was a cancelled business order from the Outlet, came with 3 years onsite heh.

Reply to
Iridium

I don't have any recent pre-Lenovo Thinkpad experience My mother had a DX2/50 with 12megs of RAM when that was quite good. It was a nice machine. The DX4/75 Toshiba which succeeded it was very good too, and is still around.

My Thinkpad seems OK so far. I'm not particularly hard on computers but the "any colour you like as long as it's black" case will never have the shitty silver paint scrape off, the screen's on metal hinges and it's really quite rigid when it's closed.

It has an unfussy port layout (although the USB ports are on the wrong side if you're a right handed external mouse user - doesn't bother me I have passed my 'nipple proficiency test').

It has reasonable performance as far as £500 laptops go.

There are no stupid blue LEDs or media control buttons. The battery (still, after a year) happily lasts the length of a DVD or longer if you're just surfing/officing.

Bad thing about buying one I found is that very few places keep them in stock to allow you can go and have a feel.

I don't like bells and whistles. Thinkpad suits me. YMMV.

Reply to
Douglas Payne

MotorsForum website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.