Being a student I have had to save up for awhile to afford one. Now the time has come. Hurray! Now, you can help me figure out what I need to spend the extra money on.
Screen: whats the difference between WXGA, WSXGA+, WUXGA? is it worth the extra $100 or $200 for the later two?
Memory: I’m getting 512. Is it worth $100 more to get 1 dimm? will this make any future upgrade cheaper?
Wireless Card: Dell vs Intel cards? which one should I going with here? reliability?
Router: Ok, I have no experience with wireless. What should I be going with here? Should I buy one from Dell, will it save me money, or is the local computer store a better bet?
If anyone is curious I am buying an Inspiron 6000d. Any other suggestions might be appreciated. (As well, I intend on running Linux, which I also have no experience with; so some guidance in that regard would be greatly appreciated.)
Hey, first of all, you might want to take a look at this thread if you haven’t seen it already. It might help you save a few bucks.
Screen: Those are just screen resolutions. More information here. Anything XGA or above (1024 * 768 or higher) would be fine for day-to-day college tasks. The W-whatever resolutions indicate widescreen monitors that don’t use the standard 4:3 aspect ratio. This is great for most Windows applications (gives you more screen space) and watching DVDs (widescreen movies fill up more of your screen).
The only major downside I can think of is that it sucks for playing widescreen 3D games – you either have to find a game that supports widescreen resolutions (rare) or you have to either stretch out your display to an abnormal ratio or shrink it down to the game’s resolution. But if you don’t plan on doing that, it shouldn’t matter.
Memory: Depends. How many slots are you using, and how many do you have total? If you have 3 slots and you’re only using 2, I wouldn’t spend the extra $100 to make it one DIMM; I’d just buy another RAM module and stick it in the extra slot.
And what do you usually do with your computer? If you don’t use it for more than office tasks, 512 should be enough.
Wireless card: They should be pretty much the same (wireless is just a commodity thing and anybody should be able to make one). Just make sure you get a 802.11g card and not a 802.11b one for the speed differences.
Router: I’m not too sure about the specifics, but you should take the time to read through some wireless configuration guides to properly set up and secure your wireless connection before you start using it. If not, you leave your network wide open and people can both see the data you’re sending and can leech off your Internet connection.
Linux: You might want to Google for “Linux Live CDs”. These are CD images that you can download and burn to a CD. You can then boot directly from that CD and experiment with Linux without making any changes to your current Windows setup.
Typo: I didn’t mean to say “it sucks for playing widescreen 3D games”, I meant that it sucks for playing 3D games in general UNLESS the game was specifically written to take advantage of widescreen monitors.
And also… hmm, actually, don’t listen to what I said about the wireless card. There may actually be some out there that are better at getting a good signal, etc. and I don’t know enough to comment.