Bought new Laptop for my girlfriend (HELP!)

[MacB]

Toshiba Satellite M60

Intel® Pentium® M Processor 740 (1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB, L1 Cache 32KB/32KB, L2 Cache 2MB)
80g hardrive
512 ram

My girlfriend is doing her PhD in economics and needs this laptop for alot of data processing and running simulations.

Will this processor be powerful enough??? If not I may have to return it.

Thanks alot.

 

[Haymez]

she must be a pretty sweet girlfriend

 

[Geoff]

she must be a pretty sweet girlfriend

And what does that have to do with anything?

What kind of simulations will she be doing?

 

[MacB]

What kind of simulations will she be doing?

I dont know, she'll be running statistical software using rather large datasets.

 

[Geoff]

It will probably work fine, im not sure if a P4 3Ghz+ would be better or not though. but dont hold me to that

 

[MacB]

Anybody else have any opinions on whether the Pentium M 1.73 Ghz will be fast enough to run large data simulation type school stuff???

Thanks

 

[Hairy_Lee]

she should be able to run statistical work fine on it. the pentium m has a much shorter pipeline than the pentium 4 so the lower clockspeed is almost cancelled out.
i think memory will be her major concern if there is vast amounts of data.

It will probably work fine, im not sure if a P4 3Ghz+ would be better or not though. but dont hold me to that

all bases covered there then

 

[alanuofm]

i simulated ten million rounds of monopoly with four players on a pentium 1.6ghz processor in less than 3 seconds

 

[The_Other_One]

Come on people, give some current processors SOME credit! Hell I'm running my Sempron at 800MHz and I bet noone would know if they started using this machine...

 

[MacB]

i simulated ten million rounds of monopoly with four players on a pentium 1.6ghz processor in less than 3 seconds

Thanks, but I have to ask; why did you do that?

 

[suprasteve]

ok PM's work great and P4's overheat and fry laptops, so even if the P4 was faster, it still wouldn't be a very good idea. Just drawing off personal experience of about a half dozen of my friends' broken laptops all running 3ghz+ P4's

 

[LaptopExtreme]

Toshiba Satellite M60...
Will this processor be powerful enough??? If not I may have to return it.
Thanks alot.

It's more than enough power for that. It's a big unit though- hope she's not planning on carrying it around campus or anything...