Laptop Help!

CCFC

i think my max budget is around £450 now and seeing as the inspiron 1300 is aroudn that price i think its the best but i am still confused about the pentium or celeron issue!

wiraone

CCFC wrote:

looks good but i think i will get the cheaper 1300, but what is better pentium or celeron?!

Check this link:

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2004/03/09/does_everything_have_to_be_a_centrino/index.html

The Mobile Celeron is the well-known, tried-and-proven processor in low-priced notebooks, but the newcomer Celeron M has about as much in common with it as a Mobile Pentium 4 M CPU has in common with the Pentium M: absolutely nothing. While the Pentium 4 M and its "cheaper" brother the Mobile Celeron are both based on the Northwood core, and consequently on a desktop CPU design, the Celeron M (Banias core) is a processor spin-off that was specifically developed for notebooks. The most important differences between the Pentium M and the Celeron M - besides the price of course - are the L2 cache, which at 512 kB is only half the size, and the lack of "Enhanced Speedstep" energy saving technology.

The conclusion:

Conclusion
As the comparison tests of the Dell Latitude D505 based on the Celeron M, or alternatively the Pentium M have shown, a notebook with a Pentium M CPU is only advantageous with regard to the battery life. Regarding performance, the difference for day-to-day use of CPU models with a similar core clock speed is only marginal.

Price-wise, it can be argued that one hour more battery life for a cost of $100 isn't much to pay. However, if a long battery life is really the premise, then in the case of the D505, we would rather invest $130 in a spare battery for the Celeron M. That way you can easily achieve an additional two hours of battery time. And, it only costs $30 more than a Pentium M system with comparable performance. If on the other hand, the premise is to have long battery life including the lowest possible weight, or in other words, the greatest mobility, then there is almost no way of getting around the Pentium M. But also in this case, it still doesn't have to be a Centrino notebook. After all, other suppliers also provide competitive WLAN modules.

CCFC

ah, from reading that i think i would prefer the pentium

wiraone

CCFC wrote:

ah, from reading that i think i would prefer the pentium

As per the article, the only thing that you'll loose out when choosing Celeron-M compared to Pentium-M (aka Centrino) is the battery life... I'll argue why you need to spend the extra £100 just for the extra battery life when most of the time you'll have your notebook connected to the main.

Timmy

It's worth remembering when you configure your order with Dell that the longer life battery is only an additional £12 or something like that. Having said that I'm having problems with mine so you might want to keep an eye on the thread I started about it to see if it's something to worry about.