I am thinking of buying a notebook...

Knight-Dragon

Knight-Dragon

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I'm thinking of getting the Dell Inspiron 6000. Value for money, 'Sonoma' ver of the Centrino platform, wide-screen 15.4" screen. Read reviews - seems a good fit for my requirements; mainly surfing, movie-watching, some gaming...

But weight is at 3 kg. 3.5 if including the AC adaptor. :undecide:

Any other recommendations/comments?

1) Also, if I get one, shld I do a reinstall and remove all the Dell 'bloatware'? Does it even come with a Win OS CD? (I have read that it doesn't...).

2) How big is a 15" WXGA screen anyways? :hmm:
 
About 2300 SGD for all the specs that I want, if I order online now. Last day today though... :ack:

This is a notebook; not parts. Even if I go to Sim Lim, it'd be roughly std pricing... :p
 
Dell no longer offers to deliver the OS on CD, not even against the around 50$ more they usually (ugh...) wanted for that purpose.

But you can still get it: Just call the support department and tell them you want the OS on CD, and you can get it. You can always force them a bit to do so if they should really not want to, as you can tell them, IBM offers this service, too. They want you to buy your notebooks, not so much the other way round. ;)

A friend of mine has a Dell Latitude series notebook, and he got the CD after request, they also included a driver disk for the Latitude series, but this might be delivered always.
 
Longasc said:
Dell no longer offers to deliver the OS on CD, not even against the around 50$ more they usually (ugh...) wanted for that purpose.
Click to expand...
What? They dont send in a system restore disk with the computer?!??!
 
A system restore disk - at least I think this is what you are refering to - is simply a tool to reinstall the system which is usually stored on a hidden partition. This is not a real WinXP CD.

There are ways to create a runnable WinXP CD from that, but these restore disks are not really useful for many people.

I personally like to have an original copy of WinXP on CD and then usually go on to reinstall the whole system myself.
 
actually the Inspiron 9300 I got recently didn't even come with a recovery-cd. it just had a recovery-partion. even the drivers weren't supplied on CD. After I reinstalled WinXP (I already got a XP-Pro license, so I deleted home and reinstalled it) I had to download all the drivers from the dell site.

If you really want to have a light notebook, Dell isn't really the way to go, but they do offer great performance at a good price. My Notebook, is super heavy, but the performance kicks butt. :D

edit: another thing: If I were you I'd reconsider wheter you really want just a WXGA-Display. Personally, I hate those low-resolutions-displays, but that's a matter of personal taste, I guess. I'd go with the WSXGA-Display.
 
A real beauty if you ask me, but don't espect to play any newest FPS games on a Laptop. :) (I'm a Laptop user myself)

dell-insp-6000-350x250.jpg
 
I am also looking at laptops. The cheapest ones £500 (about $900) do everything I need for work, but I also want to play Civ4 on it so will probably put off buying a new laptop until November. I will buy one with the best available 3D card.

P.S. Notebook is the IBM (I think) trademark name for generic laptop.
 
You are right, I am wrong.

I searched Google (suggested Notebook is a registered trademark of LabTec) and Wikipedia (just said, see laptop).
 
If you plan to play any newer games, I wouldn't recommend a laptop. I have a laptop I had built custom (2.5 ghz Intel Celeron & 512 MB RAM) and it's awful at running games. About the only thing I can play on it is the old Doom games.

Laptops are built more for media applications and word processing. Which is what I bought mine for anyways. (Afterall, I've got this 3.2 ghz, 1gig, 256 MB GeForce 5200 to play video games on.)
 
I think you should also realize that there are many notebooks out there that have Radeon 9700 / x700 and other modern graphics cards.

I would not discard them too easy, you cannot upgrade them, right - but my friend is playing Half-Life 2, Doom 3, Joint Operations, World of Warcraft and Grand Theft San Andreas on his Centrino 1,5 Ghz, Banias, Radeon 9700 - 512 MB RAM.


Gamers of course should not go for a notebook - but would they really even think of that at all? A student who likes to play some games cannot go wrong with a modern Centrino with a decent graphics card.

Forget about your old Celeron / P4 mobile notebooks with integrated graphics or stone-old graphics solutions - modern notebooks are more often limited by the tendency to widescreen TFTs with strange resolutions that really hamper the gaming experience.
 
Does anyone know any good laptop with 17" display?

I need new one as I probably give my monitor to my parents and get new computer. Would like to have bigger screen than 15"...

I'm ready to burn some cash that I have saved as I don't seem to find any better use for it anyway and buy basically laptop that replaces the desktop altogether.

I will probably just do the normal stuff: text editing, internet, some movie watching, mostly strategy gaming ala Civilization etc. Might play other games as well if they just run fine with new comp.
Don't need so much harddrive space but 1Gb of memory and fast processor would be nice along with some graphics card. Especially if I put money in enough.

Is example Acer Aspire 1804 any good?

Any advices?
Especially I would like to hear about the heating problems...

TIA
 
Strider said:
If you plan to play any newer games, I wouldn't recommend a laptop. I have a laptop I had built custom (2.5 ghz Intel Celeron & 512 MB RAM) and it's awful at running games. About the only thing I can play on it is the old Doom games.
Click to expand...

traditionally, laptops had crappy graphic chips but that has changed in the last few years, there are quite a few newer laptops around that got great gaming performance. e.g MINE ;) it's got a geforce go 6800, and it runs games like farcry very well :) there's an even more game-oriented laptop from dell the inspiron xps (but it's awfully expensive , and of course not that mobile anymore).

since i got my new laptop, I hardly use my computer anymore...
 
Longasc said:
modern notebooks are more often limited by the tendency to widescreen TFTs with strange resolutions that really hamper the gaming experience.
Click to expand...

you mean like 1920x1200 ? ;) I absolutely love it, it's absolutely awsome. and since my display apparently got very good interpolation, smaller resolutions look pretty good too.
 
If you like it. Even "very good interpolation" due to high resolution is still not the real thing. Your decision, of course.
 
I think you should also realize that there are many notebooks out there that have Radeon 9700 / x700 and other modern graphics cards.
Click to expand...

But those Laptop's are priced well over +1500 €. ;)

Still yes on modern laptop's one can play even the newer games, you just have to pay a lot for it. :)
 
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