Sunday, May 11, 2008

Happy Mother's Day

Mah mamma came down from Denver today and we talked a LOT about computers and how she DESPERATELY needs one.



We went to Dell.com and found a pretty good laptop that JUUUUST might be in her price range.

We are now going to go to Famous Daves for lunch. I really hope my poor tummy does well. Ant-acids anyone?

3 comments:

garion333 said...

Okay, so do me a couple of favors here. 1) Do not get the base model. 2) Do not get the base model. 3) Everything comes with Vista, and you MUST have 2gbs of ram to run it properly. The laptops with 1gb will run like crap. 4) The base model has a Celeron, and one should definitely not have a Celeron processor even if the listed processor speed is faster. It's not. 5) Do not get the base model. 6) The $700 one is the best deal on that page.

garion333 said...

Okay, so here's my recommendation. Wait. For a sale.

More importantly, since you are able to build your own with Dell, I highly recommend getting an extra gig of ram. Vista is a ram hog (for a good reason, which I'm not going into) and the video "card" is actually an integrated video chip that uses the ram to power itself. One gig of ram spread out between the video "card" and Vista will result in performance decrease. How much? Hell if I know, I have 4 gigs in my Vista machine. I have one gig in my laptop (that tuns XP) and I wished I had two. Too many things at once and it bogs down. Severely. And I have an actual video card, not a integrated chip.

To go back to my first point, if price is important and graphic design, video editing or gaming isn't an issue, you may be better off waiting until somewhere like Best Buy has a sale on their laptops (which tend to by made by Compaq, something I normally don't recommend) because you can get them for a lot less. Say, $300 for the tier 2 Dell laptop.

Just a thought.

Oh, and don't buy an extended warranty. Waste of money if you are only spending $500. On $1000+, that's a different story, but even then . . .

garion333 said...

And you still have to buy Office. That alone costs over $100. Check out OpenOffice.org. It's free and is basically a complete ripoff of Office. That's what I use for Word and Excel.

I'll stop spamming your comments now.