No. IMO as far as budget CPU's go, there appears to be little to choose between any of them, but even a low spec CPU can perform quite well if the h/ware is carefully chosen to make full use of it. Within the price range you're looking at, I'd be inclined to put less emphasis on the CPU, and more on the rest of the package spec, as that is more likely where you'll find corners have been cut to keep the price down. Things like only 512MB of slow shared memory, small h/drive, low res screen, s/ware supplied, and poor warranty, are all areas where savings can be made. A better CPU gives no benefit if it hasn't the m/board, memory, and graphics etc that can use it, as unlike a PC, apart from adding memory and a bigger h/drive, there is little one can do to upgrade it. To base your purchase on the CPU in a notepad is not really a good idea IMO. Mike.
Hmm. Mine is okay. Actually it's greatest strength is that it just... does what I need it to do. No worries. It's not the fastest thing, but, I don't need it. It has never rebooted itself, not that I'd expect it to. It just works.
I've not yet had to use customer support, many large companies offer an offshore tech support, though.
As others have said it's considered to be the Intel Core 2 Duo, but, really... it's academic at this end of the market... in my opinion.
But you're buying at the top end of the budget notebook scale. I can't imagine you wanting to do heavy duty stuff on it, so, one processor will be the same as the next in the majority of cases, surely?
It may be better putting it towards superior video abilities and memory?
Aye. I understand that lots of RAM is preferably to a fast CPU and a massive pagefile. Just my thinking was that you don't really want to f*ck about upgrading laptop CPUs, whereas adding ram is easy and always gets cheaper, but TBH I can't remember the last time I ever really upgraded a machine - they basically get to the point where you're ready for a new everything, and perhaps the case, CDRW and a hard drive get kept.
My old celeron 466 Vaio was cool. Much sturdier than the Advent I have now. Bought that 5 years ago.
Shame it could only take a crap ammount of Ram (less than 200meg) so that even linux runs slow on it, and doesn't leave much space on the
4gig HDD. Bloody good lappy though. Too slow, but still useable.
If can find a decent full sized laptop Vaio instead of the sub mini ones, that would do the job used. Remember, Sony always are one step in front, so what they had last year the cheap end has now. And vaio owners are the Macheads of the PC world. they must have the coolest looking latest model, so last years goes cheap.
Aye, though I'm of the school of thought that if I'm splashing out on something new, I'd rather get something with a good enough spec to start with that I'll not want to touch it for a good 3 or 4 years, even including simple things like RAM upgrades. If you can get a good enough deal to start with, why piss about upgrading it in a year or so when you could have avoided it?
I'd rather get something with a seriously good CPU vs a "reasonably respectable" one, a lot of RAM (i.e. 2GB) vs a bit (like 512MB like they ship with a lot of cheaper priced systems), a decent graphics card vs cheap integrated one, etc etc. All these will mean that the various bits of the PC have far less trouble keeping up with each other, and that it'll probably last an easy 4 years, maybe 5, before I'm wanting something newer, at which point things will have moved on so much that the latest CPUs almost certainly won't fit in the socket on that motherboard, the amount of RAM you'd then want would far exceed the max allowed on the mobo, etc etc, so it's time to either stick with something that still does the same job you bought it for just as well, or buy something properly up to date.
IOW I'd rather pay £800 for a Core2Duo 2.13GHz (1066MHz FSB, 2MB cache) with
2GB DDR2 RAM, 320GB SATA HDD, 19 Digital Flat Panel, 256MB Radeon X1300 graphics, 16x DVD +/- RW machine and not touch it for 4-5 years, than pay £300 for a P4/2.8GHz with 512MB RAM, 80GB HDD, shitty on-board graphics, regular CD-ROM drive, and then end up wanting to upgrade the RAM to 2GB a year or so later, plonk a decent gfx card in around the same time 'cos that's slowing things down, run out of hard disk space a lot sooner than in the other one, meaning buying a bigger drive, etc etc etc, and still be left with an inferior system to the other one, when I could have just bought a decent one to start with.
But then that's against the ethos of "modifying", innit? :-)
Because for the most part, if you want the latest specification you have a heavy duty application in mind. Then when the next version comes out of whatever application you use, you find that your system is compromised.
Only if you're patient. Not from the perspective that it'll decelerate, more that, you'll want something better.
What do you have in mind, because for the most part, even the cheapest machines will manage every ordinary computing task without batting an eyelid.
There's a compromise between the two, though. You can never have enough hard drive space no matter the size of the drive, so that's a bit of an irrelevance. Memory, the same. Video cards change more often than I change my socks.
Yes. So I bought a notebook, the only think I'll probably do to is is add the Dell Bluetooth card.
Adding ram is easy, but not all ram is the same. Some are faster than others A laptop m/board that will accept DDR2 ram would be better than one configured for DDR, which is what I meant when I referred to slow memory. .
I build my own PC's anyway, and try to choose a m/board that will accept the latest processors, and memory, even if at the time I can only afford the cheapest versions of each. Leaves room for u/grading when prices drop as they inevitably do. Mike.
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.