Thanks for the info.
BTW What's your opinion on refurbished laptops? Are they worth it?
There are some cracking deals available if I got one of them....
I've never bought a refurb myself, but I guess if the source is reputable
and the warranty sound then I don't see why not. e.g. I'd have no problem
buying from the Dell Outlet if I could find what I wanted. But every time
I've looked there I've found I could get just as good a deal from their
brand new section and be assured I was getting the latest refinements in
components and build quality.
As for your needs to just run lots of desktop apps, quickly, but not play
games or do graphics editing the thing to look for would be 512MB of RAM
rather than 256MB (do not get less than 256MB). I get by very well with a
Dell Inspiron 8000, which is 3 years old this May. Spec is....
Pentium III 900
512MB RAM
30GB 5,400 rpm disk
Nvidia Geforce2go 32MB video
15" 1600*1200 display (This is the most important thing for me. I would
never have a screen with fewer pixels than this!!!)
CD-RW
DVD-R (separate drive)
Windows XP Pro (it came with Win 98 and I've upgraded with no problems at
all)
MS Office 2003 Pro
The machine is perfectly up to the job of running multiple desktop apps at
once and it will cope with video and photo editing but it collapses under
the challenge of playing games. As standard I will typically have the
following running at once...
Digiguide TV Guide
Outlook 2003
Outlook Express
3* IE browser windows for trading stocks (intra-day graphs, real-time
prices, dealing screen)
That's my basic minimum. I can quite happily open another couple of
browsers, plus Word, plus Excel, plus Shareaza and my laptop keeps going
without blinking. Let's face it, you can only type input into one
application at a time, regardless of how many apps are open, and you can
only type so fast. So really processor speed is not much of an issue. More
memory will allow more apps to stay resident rather than being paged to the
pagefile so application switching will be a bit quicker. But again, my
laptop does all I need with a PIII 900! Many people winge about Celeron
processors but a friend's new Celeron 2.4GHz machine wipes the floor with
mine when opening apps - 0.5 seconds to start Word instead of 0.9 seconds.
Big deal - she can't type any quicker than me.
When you say you want a BIG screen do you mean in inches or pixels. For me,
inches are irrelevant. Pixels is what counts, as the more you have, the more
you can see on the screen. I simply couldn't fit my 3 stock trading screens
on a display with fewer than 1600*1200 pixels. On my display I can see them
all at once. For your £800 budget you will easily get a machine capable of
doing everything you need. The big differentiator will be the screen
size/quality/resolution you can get at that price. Dell seems to be the only
manufacturer that truly understands the value of pixels. The only machine I
can find on the market that would make me even consider upgrading would be a
Dell Inspiron 8600 with a 1920*1200 widescreen display - pure heaven
In your position I certainly wouldn't waste extra money to get a 15" display
over a 14" display if the resolution was still only 1024*768. All it will
mean is that the display will look a fraction more grainy as each pixel will
be bigger. My old Dell laptop, handed on to my girlfriend, has a 14"
1024*768 display and that display is just fine at 14". If you think 1024*768
will be enough then have a look at this Dell...
http://commerce.euro.dell.com/dellstore/default.asp?b=43298&s=uktra&sbc=ukdhsftdhpnotebook1&v=d
for £641 including VAT and delivery. And it comes with 512MB RAM and a CD-RW
as standard. You can customise the spec to suit your exact needs - a bigger
display, if you must, more disk space, a P4 instead of a Celeron and hit
your price point. But you won't get more than 1024*768 on this model. Just
watch for the default warranty of 3 years on site as this adds £199+VAT to
the price. If you can live with 1 year RTB then you will get the prices
above.
