Help with buying a laptop

prowla

asininity wrote: »

Acer Aspire Gemstone Blue range. From AcerDirect site.

I had to reinstall the OS on a friend's Acer, and it was nigh-on impossible.
I would never recommend buying one of their laptops.

Jakg

Marty_J wrote: »

But why bother if, at best, your OS is only going to see just over 3 GB of it?

If you had a 1 GB video card, it gets even worse, and you could only use just over 2 GB of it.

You will never get to use 4 GB of RAM on a 32 bit version of Windows.

It might make you feel better that it's there, but it's not going to do anything.

What are you on about?

A 32-bit OS will see 4GB minus the reserved memory space (which isn't actually the amount of vRAM but usually ever so slightly larger). Anyone with a 1GB GFX card should obviously be running x64 windows for the speed boost, but with a laptop your looking at maybe 128MB or even no dedicated memory at all, as the OP just doesn't need it. Then your looking at seeing around 3.5GB of the 4GB of RAM which is less than ideal - but better than 2GB. Plus Dell etc charge £30 to go from 3GB to 4GB, so you might as well go for the lowest amount and stick your own in.

FWIW almost all my PC's run x64 Windows - 7 RC on the Phenom PC, Vista Home Premium on the Xeon Quad, but then XP Home x86 on my laptop as it's an Atom which doesn't do x64 (and XP X64 sucks).

daviedee

HP 6735s Laptop AMD Turion X2 Dual Core RM-72 2.1Ghz, 4GB 800DDR2, 320GB 15.4" DVD RW LightScribe Writer, WLAN, 8 Cell Battery, Webcam, Bluetooth 2.0+, Onboard ATI Radeon HD3200 Windows Vista Home Premium only £409.99 from ebuyer

asininity

prowla wrote: »

I had to reinstall the OS on a friend's Acer, and it was nigh-on impossible.
I would never recommend buying one of their laptops.

Well I'm not sure its acers fault you can't install an OS.

Marty_J

Jakg wrote: »

What are you on about?

You know very well what I'm on about, as you've just explained it in your post.

I said there's not much point having 4 GB of RAM. You then disagreed, while going on to point out that there's not much point having 4 GB of RAM.

You might use 64 bit versions of Windows on some of your computers (which I assume all have 64-bit chipsets, in addition to 64-bit processors, and so can address more than 4 GB of RAM, otherwise it's pretty moot), but most people don't.

sweetstudent

Buy a MacBook, so much better, more expensive, but it will last longer, continue to use new operating systems for years to come and best of all it does not run windows!!!

plus as you seem to be using accounting software, macs don't depreciate as quickly as a

PC

/laptops do!!!!!

Marty_J

They've already bought a Packard Bell.

And they need a computer to run Windows software, so there's not much point getting a Mac really.

asininity

sweetstudent wrote: »

Buy a MacBook, so much better, more expensive, but it will last longer, continue to use new operating systems for years to come and best of all it does not run windows!!!

plus as you seem to be using accounting software, macs don't depreciate as quickly as a

PC

/laptops do!!!!!

Oh dear, never mind, silly silly girl.

Jakg

Marty_J wrote: »

You know very well what I'm on about, as you've just explained it in your post.

Marty_J wrote:

If you had a 1 GB video card, it gets even worse, and you could only use just over 2 GB of it.

That was what I was !!!!!!'ing at...

asininity

Sorry silly silly boy.