laptop Questions

[mattaggie]

Trying to advice a friend on laptop purchase (different person than thread below). It will just be general use, internet, MS Office, no gaming or intense applications. she will be using it in classes where there are no outlets, so a decent battery life is needed. The catch is she doesnt want to spend more than $450. This will be her only computer, so needs to be full fledged laptop, not a netbook.


From watching the Boards I know that Asus and Lenovo seem to be the preferred brands. Any opinions on Acer? They seem to have alot of budget choices and have good reviews. We have a few Acers where I work and havnt had any problems. Any other budget brands recommended?

What is the difference in the current Pentiums and the i-series? I know the i-series is Intel's latest and greatest, but how do the Pentiums perform in comparison? Also, I notice some laptops have AMD cpu's with really low speeds, like the C-50 (1 GHz) or E-350 (1.6GHz), are those akin to the Intel Atoms?

Last question, I notice alot of the cheaper laptops only come with 2GB of Ram, is that a big deal running Windows 7? I know 4GB has become kinda the standard, and upgrading isnt hard, just wondering how 2GB will perform.

[glc]

Newegg.com - ASUS A53 Series A53E-XN1 Notebook Intel Pentium B940(2.00GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 1333 320GB HDD 5400rpm DVD Super Multi Intel HD Graphics

Now - if you want to look at refurbs, THIS one is an incredible machine for the price:

Newegg.com - Recertified: ASUS U52F-BBG6 Notebook Intel Core i3 380M(2.53GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory DDR3 640GB HDD DVD±R/RW

[XenaWP]

Don't know if the question is still open, but I thought others might refer to the thread.

I've had 3 E-350 based units to review lately. 2 of the 3 were real underperformers. I mean painfully slow. I would personally avoid them. I've also had 2 i3's and an i5 laptops recently that had good performance (the i3's were Samsung and the i5 was HP).

[mattaggie]

thanks for the responses. She ended up getting an Lenovo with an i3 processor when office depot had it on sale for $429 over Labor day. Heck of a deal.

Lenovo IdeaPad Z570 1024 3VU Laptop Computer With 156 LED Backlit Screen 2nd Gen Intel Core i3 2310M Processor With Turbo Boost 20 by Office Depot

[Masaki 7-11]

Personally not a fan of atom/zacate based net/notebooks, way too slow for most use, and in my opinion atoms are even worse since they can't really do squat for video (unless you find a nvidia ion board). There are some uses for atom/zacate net/notebooks, but it's for lightweight computing and you have to tweak your operating system and what applications you install to make it fast enough to use.

Looks like you got a nice deal on the laptop, good performance for the price.