256 MB Ram 20 gb HD is it obsolete?

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brianj

New Member
I am looking to buy a refurbished laptop and I am considering laptops that are a little under $300.00 I mainly need the computer for writing Word documents and doing some research on the internet and sending emails. I have gotten different thoughts from a few people I know about the 256MB RAM and I would really appreciate some thoughts on whether the laptops I describe below will become obsolete fairly soon and I won’t be able to access all the internet sites, use updated anti-virus software, or use the latest version of abode reader etc.



IBM Think Pad X20:

Pentium 3 600 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive, 56K modem



IBM Think Pad T22:

Pentium 900 MHz, 256 MB RAM, 20 GB hard drive



If they might be useful for my purposes for perhaps 4 years or more than I might purchase on of them. I don’t require a real fast computer. I would really appreciate some thoughts on the issue.
 
Seriously, bump your budget up a bit and get a new laptop. If you look around hard enough, sometimes you can find brand new laptops for $400-$500.

As for using those laptops, they'd do alright in most cases. I know dad still runs his PIII 850MHz with 256MB RAM and windows 98. Load 2000 or XP on there and it'd be fine as long as you don't try to do much with Flash or Java.
 
try look around ebay whith 300 dollars you can get at least a celeron M at 1.5ghz and more ram.
 
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If you installed a linux distro on the laptop and got rid of windows, those specs would be perfectly fine. Using Windows would be pushing the envelope and you would probably want to go with something newer if you plan on running it.
 
I'm not sure that this is really obsolete, but I don't think you are going to be able to do a lot with it. With only 256 MB of RAM, most things probably aren't going to run very fast, depending on what you are going to be using it for, and second, a 20GB hard drive is hardly anything now, with most movies or games are now about 1-3GB each. I would say see if you can get an old laptop or desktop off ebay or another site such as that, and then spend a bit more money to upgrade the RAM to at least 512 and get a 40 or 60 GB HD.
 
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