Price question on lappy

ReRuss · Post by **ReRuss** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 1:49 am

is this decent for about $1,300?

Dell Inspiron E1705

Intel Core 2 Duo T5200 (1.60GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533 MHz FSB)

XP Media Center, CD and Ext USB TV Tuner, Remote

LCD PANEL 17 inch Wide Screen XGA+ Display

1GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz

80GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive

24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive

256MB ATI MOBILITY RADEON X1400 HyperMemory

Integrated Sound Blaster Audigy HD Software Edition

I don't need it too beefed up , but I know it'd run everything I actually would use... I may aim for the same specs but different brand , I heard eMachine does pretty good , but I won't get HP , and I heard Toshiba isnt too great

HDD isn't too important to me , I dont store much on mobile , so I'd probably wouldnt even need 80GB , I just prefer the 7200rpm over 5400rpm

AntoineWG · Post by **AntoineWG** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 9:18 am

I'm not a big fan of Dell, but that doesn't look too bad, even if it is a little pricey. The 2 brands I was actually going to recommend were HP and Toshiba. HP has some very good prices--my brother just bought a nice Core Solo notebook for $600--and Toshiba Satellite notebooks are fast and reliable, but a little pricey. I've never really had a problem with either brand, but I do get a lot of problems with Dell products. I wouldn't buy an eMachine. You get what you pay for.

Things to watch out for with that laptop, though. Shared video memory, which is pretty standard on laptops, means you only have 768 MB available to the OS and 256 is dedicated to the video card. The DVD drive reads DVD's but only burns CD's. I'm not sure what the "Software Edition" means on the soundcard, but it's probably going to heavily rely on the CPU, which will degrade performance.

Deathlike2 · Post by **Deathlike2** » Fri Dec 08, 2006 6:53 pm

AntoineWG wrote:I'm not a big fan of Dell, but that doesn't look too bad, even if it is a little pricey. The 2 brands I was actually going to recommend were HP and Toshiba. HP has some very good prices--my brother just bought a nice Core Solo notebook for $600--and Toshiba Satellite notebooks are fast and reliable, but a little pricey. I've never really had a problem with either brand, but I do get a lot of problems with Dell products. I wouldn't buy an eMachine. You get what you pay for.

Things to watch out for with that laptop, though. Shared video memory, which is pretty standard on laptops, means you only have 768 MB available to the OS and 256 is dedicated to the video card. The DVD drive reads DVD's but only burns CD's. I'm not sure what the "Software Edition" means on the soundcard, but it's probably going to heavily rely on the CPU, which will degrade performance.

Personally, I would up the video to simply not use onboard memory. Better performance in games (and ZSNES

) over integrated graphics.

On the other hand, if the laptop is ever going to use Linux... please use an NVidia card for your own sanity.

ReRuss · Post by **ReRuss** » Sat Dec 09, 2006 1:00 am

I actually found better for the price , at of all things at redneck-mart

$750 Acer (2 year warrenty)
AMD Turion 64 X2 (1.60GHz , 512KB L2 cache)
1GB DDR2
100GB HDD
15.4" WXGA Widescreen display
Dual Later DVD Burner
Ati Radeon Xpress 1100

EDIT - Known full specs now

I went ahead and bought it , will tweak it tomorrow probably , for now it's fine