laptop for school

T

towly

New Member
Im trying to get a laptop for school, since Ill be spending much more time there for classes and volunteering in an organic chemistry lab, so I need something thats good for web surfing, word processing , and possibly doing some work for the lab.

I was thinking of getting a dell inspiron 1501, something similar to this build I put together:

PROCESSOR AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TK-53 OPERATING SYSTEM Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Basic
LCD PANEL 14.1 inch Wide Screen XGA Display
MEMORY 1GB DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz, 2 Dimm
HARD DRIVE Size: 60GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
OPTICAL DRIVE 24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
VIDEO CARD ATI RADEON® Xpress1150 256MB HyperMemory™ (Integrated)
SOUND OPTIONS Integrated Audio
BATTERY OPTIONS 29 WHr 4-cell Lithium Ion Primary Battery
WIRELESS CARDS Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini Card (54Mbps)

I was talking to a friend who has a similar laptop and he recommended that since I wasnt going to be using it for very intensive work that I should keep the sempron 3500 processor and instead invest in getting a better battery. Should I do this, or should I keep the processor I have atm.

Thanks
 
i would stick with the crappy sempron. save your money. unless your going to run vista on it. then its another story.
 
ill probably reformat and stick XP on there, unless vista basic home is not that much of a resource hog.

Though Id rather swap out spending 50 dollars on the processor for a 9 cell battery, to avoid having to carry the charger with me everytime I go to school.
 
haha this may be irrelevant, but if it's for school, may I recommend getting a macbook. there are virtually no distractions because games don't run on it.
 
bumblebee_tuna said:
QFT.......

Although you could always Bootcamp.......
Click to expand...



dont you just hate cusomizing a dell laptop? takes ages to ship :) mines supposed to ship on the 6th of august :(




you can always bootcamp or parallels. though i wouldn't game in college because it MAY affect your grades.
 
I've already been in college for two years and I've been doing fine so I have no worries about my grades. The thing though is, for the lab Im going to be working in we do allot of C-NMR and H-NMR spectrophotometry so Ill need something thats some what decent so that I dont have to wait for hours for the computer to analyze the data. Im thinking of getting the tk-53 and Ill hold off on the ram for a bit, I saw on newegg for ~ 45$ you can get 2 x 512mb sticks so Ill probably go with that once I know if Ill need the ram or not.

But for more or less basic things will this computer suffice, I really dont feel like spending more for something thats meant to just handle a few things that I need.
 
After doing some searching on craigslist I think I found a better deal.

Its a e1505, comes with 2 gbs of ram, core solo 1.66, 80 gb hdd. Price is 500, seems reasonable considering that with all said and done if I were to go through dell to get the 1501 Id be spending about 650-700 anyways.
 
towly said:
After doing some searching on craigslist I think I found a better deal.

Its a e1505, comes with 2 gbs of ram, core solo 1.66, 80 gb hdd. Price is 500, seems reasonable considering that with all said and done if I were to go through dell to get the 1501 Id be spending about 650-700 anyways.
Click to expand...

make sure to check it out first and look for scratches or whatever to get it to lower the price more.
 
kof2000 said:
make sure to check it out first and look for scratches or whatever to get it to lower the price more.
Click to expand...

Ill definitely give it a look over to make sure it is in good shape.

My only question now is how does the core solo compare to the turion x2, obviously the core solo is only a single core while the other is dual core. I saw on intels website that the particular model proc has a 2mb cache, while the turion I would get would only have 512kb of cache. So in terms of everyday applications will I notice any real differences or will it not make much of a difference?
 
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