Dual Core Atom laptops

martinbsp

Hello,

can anyone tell me whether a dual core atom laptop would be sufficient to run:

- AV software
- Firewall
- video (something like BBC iPlayer)
- Word etc

(video + Word obviously not at the same time!)

Thanks

P.S. Not sure if laptops can have Atom processors, are these just for notebooks?

greektony

yes to all the above, and generally they would be found in netbooks

esuhl

I have a single-core netbook with an Atom CPU. I found that Windows XP ran fine on it... but checking for and installing updates for half-a-dozen anti-malware/security applications was painfully slow - far too slow to tolerate! Having said that, the netbook performed reasonably well running Word, watching iPlayer, etc.

I moved to Arch Linux, so don't require any anti-malware applications, and the netbook performs much faster. It takes a brief moment for a large application (such as Word or Firefox) to open, and large video files embedded within web pages sometimes stutter (although they play fine if you view them full-screen or download them using VideoDownloadHelper and watch them in VLC). But otherwise the performance is great.

I'm sure a dual-core Atom processor would cope with a Windows OS reasonably well (so long as you're not expecting the same performance you'd get on an expensive desktop PC). But I'd definitely recommend trying Arch - it performs much better than Windows on such lightweight devices.

Yolina

I've got a dual-core netbook, upgraded the RAM to 2GB and it's running Win 7 Home premium (rather than Starter) absolutely fine, av & firewall (Kaspersky), Word (though obviously I wouldn't try something like CS5 on it but my netbook isn't for work stuff...), videos etc. You might want to have a fiddle with the power settings and set up a custom plan as the way it's set up by default to make the battery really last means that that the CPU is throttled etc. Even with power settings arranged to suit me, I get a good 7 to 8 hours out of the battery and that's with wi-fi on too

free4440273

martinbsp wrote: »

Hello,

can anyone tell me whether a dual core atom laptop would be sufficient to run:

- AV software
- Firewall
- video (something like BBC iPlayer)
- Word etc

(video + Word obviously not at the same time!)

Thanks

P.S. Not sure if laptops can have Atom processors, are these just for notebooks?

yes to all above ! and many of the new Atoms are found in low-power laptops/ desktops too /

martinbsp

That's great, thanks to all. I've somehow been fixated on needing an i5 (salesmen eh?!), but I guess an Dual Core Atom would suit my needs just fine.