…and ordered a new laptop for a xmas present for myself, and would like imput from you on what I hath wrought. Here goes:
Dell Inspiron 1501
AMD Mobile semprom 3600+(2.0GHz/512/KB Processor
15.4 inch Wide-screen WXGA Display
2 GB, DDR2, 533 MHz 2dimm SRAM
3 in 1 memory card reader
ATI Radeon Xpress 1150 Video with 256MB HyperMemory 15.4"
Most of my doings with a computer are on the Web, so I don’t have much graphic or game stuff going on. Maybe an occasional letter, couple of spreadsheets, email, that sort of stuff.
I’ve got a 30 day to return, but what say GIN? (Geeks, Intellingensa, and Nerds)
I’m just upgrading my 4 computers to 19" screens, so I can’t really compare. 
You don’t say what you have now*. I bought laptop a couple years ago, but just recently got DSL, and got it set up wirelessly to be able to surf the web from my family room while watching TV, and that’s really nice. Can’t do that with a desktop.
- Or how much you paid. $100? great deal! $2000? Not so much.
I bought twenty or so of those for work. Not crazy about the iPod-esque white plastic, which seems to clash with the fake aluminium-look silver paint… but hey, it’s Dell, you don’t look to them for fashion tips. But the Powers That Be took a dislike to the White-on-Silver thing, not professional-looking enough apparently, and went for Acer laptops instead. Biiiig mistake. Budget Acers are crap, let me tell you.
Anyhoo, apart from the questionable colour scheme, they seem like very good laptops for the money. Good build quality, and Dells are, in our experience, more reliable than other brands at the budget level. Such as, oh, Acer for example.
Bought it on Dell credit, total $850.00 (26.00 per month interest at 29.a bunch) for computer, All-in-one 926 printer with USB cable, 2 Gig ram, Kensington Notebook Docking Station, SD100, 2GB Jumpdrive FireFly USB Flash Drive. I’m worried about the processor not being oomphy enough. Shoud I upgrade to a dual-core processor before it goes into production?
Your processor is pretty weak. You will probably want to upgrade to the dual core.
If the OS is XP then the processor has the Oomph.
If the OS is Vista then you can support the O/S but not much else, my Vista Advisor suggested my AMD 4000 San Diego was quick but ideally a dual core would be preferred.
That’s when I rolled my eyes at using Vista.
For web browsing, a couple of spreadsheets? Any processor manufactured within the last five years at least can cope with that.
Bombed = drunk? Because I hate, hate, hate getting online when I’m drunk to cruise overstock.com, amazon.com, and ebay.com.
You are correct. I’ve got a 1.4 centrino doing those same things. As somewhat of a dork, I’m always trying to look ahead a bit. Besides, M$ might “require” you to download the latest version of something that requires more processing power.
The OP is really looking for opinions, so let’s move to IMHO.
samclem GQ moderator
“imput”.
Grrr.
with 2 Gig of RAM, it should run Vista fine (you didn’t mention OS), it will, however, run XP or Ubuntu GREAT.
I just bought a Core 2 Duo HP Pavilion, 1 Gb ram, came with Vista Home Weenie edition. It sucked hairy donkey appendages.
Put Linux on it and it screams.
I just received some laptops with Vista Home Basic, or whatever it is called, on them, and they did seem to run slowly. Strange, I thought, because we had specified 2GB RAM. Turns out that loads of stuff was configured by the manufacturer (a certain Taiwanese brand who I have already slagged off today, so I will only say that the name begins with A and rhymes with “pacer”) to run a load of absolute crap at startup. And there were some entirely unnecessary tasks in the Windows Scheduler, which used about 20% of CPU for 30 minutes after booting.
I got rid of all that crap and Vista Charmingly Rustic actually ran very well. So the moral is, don’t necessarily blame Vista, blame the default settings.
I run MSCONFIG and there’s all kinds of stuff in the Services and Startup tabs (on XP on the computer I’m typing on, but I’m sure there’s lots of junk on my Vista Desktop too). But how do I tell what’s the crap? Some of it’s obvious, and I turned that off, but I’m sure I haven’t go it all.
Yeah, but isn’t the point of default settings to ‘first do no harm’? And why would an average person have to muck about with those settings?
The default settings designed into your fuel injected vehicle–perfect for average people. The default settings that come with new computers are full of bloatware, and a whole host of crap that slows down your machine. A lot of this is stuff is unnecessary.
I think they were the manufacturer’s defaults rather than Microsoft’s. Can’t be absolutely sure, because it’s not entirely clear to me what the purpose of the scheduled tasks was. I have never see a Windows PC that must have stuff in the task scheduler, though, so I felt safe in disabling them. These are our only Vista PCs so far though - other Vista users, do you have mysterious stuff in your Task Scheduler too?