Rate This Laptop 2+2

[GoldenIP]

I have just played around with customising a laptop on DELL. These are the main components:

<font color="red"> Intel Core™ Dual Core Processor T2080 (1.73 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache, 533 MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium - English
Collect &amp; Return, 1 Year Service only
15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800) Display
1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM (2x512)
80GB (7200rpm) SATA Hard Drive
Intel® Media Accelerator 950 Graphics Up to 256MB shared graphics memory
Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software
9 cell Lithium-Ion Battery (85 Whr) </font>

It came to ~£525 (~$1,000)

All I'm going to be using it for is the following:
Microsoft Office
Multi-tabling (4-6 tables)
PT &amp; PAHUD (obviously running in conjunction with poker tables
MSN Messenger
Web Browsing (Firefox)

Basically, nothing out of the ordinary or anything such as hardware draining games like Oblivion and FEAR.

Is this laptop suffice?

Do you recommend any worthwhile upgrades i.e. CPU power, graphics cards etc? Basically, if I upgrade, I want it to be money well spent.

Thanks!

[kazana]

It looks alright to me. Just keep in mind that you won't be able to play any 3D games on it. The integrated graphics card is comletely weak sauce.

[GoldenIP]

Yeah, the two upgrades I was going to make were the graphics card and the memory. However, the price they were charging to turn the 1Gb RAM into a 2Gb RAM is quite a lot.

[MrBlueNose]

Wouldnt it be worth upgrading the LCD Display(dependent on the laptop it should only be about $100 more) to get close to 1600x1200?

[MURK]

yeah, I think I'd want a bigger screen and higher resolution if it was my poker workhorse. Depends on what you're comfortable with I guess.

If you want/need extra RAM then Kingston should be a lot cheaper and I've had nothing but good experiences with them.

[phu_dawg]

I give it an F, as in fail. Any laptop without 1200 vertical pixels just won't work for a 2+2 member. Also, if you are going to play video games, you should upgrade from the IGP unit.

[Beavis68]

weak.

you should probably have 2GB RAM if you want to play all that many tables with Vista and Core2 Duo is much better than the Core Duo.

[GoldenIP]

Thanks for the advice guys. How does this one shape up?

Dell Inspiron 6400 - Components
<font color="red"> *Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5300 Processor (1.73GHz,533MHz,2MB L2 cache)
*Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium - English
*Collect &amp; Return, 1 Year Service only
*15.4" UltraSharp™ Wide Screen WXGA+ (1440x900) TFT Display with TrueLife™
*1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]
*120GB (5400rpm) SATA Hard Drive
*256MB NVIDIA® GeForce™ Go 7300 TurboCache™
*Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software
*6 cell Lithium-Ion Battery (53 Whr)</font>

This one is listed at £585.99 (~$,1,150)

Should I upgrade anything specifically the RAM or CPU? Should I really be going for 2Gb RAM min. these days? If so, I'm sure I can get a 2Gb upgrade kit through someone like Kingston much cheaper than the £130 upgrade on Dell...

For all this hardware, am I going to find a better deal on the internet outside of Dell?

[Josem]

[ QUOTE ]
I give it an F, as in fail. Any laptop without 1200 vertical pixels just won't work for a 2+2 member.

[/ QUOTE ]

this also applies to your revised version.


i haven't found anyone else who can sell a 1920x1200 laptop for anything close to dell's cost in australia (by like $AU3k vs $AU2k). i would not be surprised if this was similar world-wide, as it seems that non-dell providers who pre-design pcs and don't allow much customization only provide high-res screens with rediculously high-end specs.


corrected typo

[lockplayer13]

I would stay away from dell products, they load so much unnecessary stuff on it, it just clogs up your registry and works a lot slower than it should