PC World Laptop, £199!

Zagu

biglugs wrote:

Selling the XP disc on ebay should be of absolutely NO benefit - without the serial number on the COA this disk is worth about £2. If you sell it with your COA then anyone else can take over your licence and you will have problems upgrading/reinstalling in future.
If you tell the buyer this is a genuine sealed copy of XP then you are lying - taking advantage of other people's naivety, which is just downright bad form.

I think kwft is aware of that. He said:

"XP Home was junked/resold. Installed XP Pro, no memory upgrades."

kwft

biglugs wrote:

Selling the XP disc on ebay should be of absolutely NO benefit - without the serial number on the COA this disk is worth about £2. If you sell it with your COA then anyone else can take over your licence and you will have problems upgrading/reinstalling in future.
If you tell the buyer this is a genuine sealed copy of XP then you are lying - taking advantage of other people's naivety, which is just downright bad form.

*sigh* I have volume XP pro licences, the bottom of my laptop is sans product key; a razorblade, hair dryer & sellotape make it easily removable to people that know what they are doing & attached to the copy of XP being sold thanks very much, but cheers for giving me the benefit of the doubt eh!

Cheers @ Zagu

@Kilty you missed the "I'm gonna multiboot it with SBS 03, Linux & XP pro." bit from the quote, kinda puts it in context really.

With a 20Gb drive of course I'm not gonna multiboot, but then if I didn't I'd be happy with the 15-16Gb of space I have. Besides, the sizes of drives I'm looking at wouldn't have been in the magic £100 bracket, I'd need >100GB <150Gb if I was to multiboot, so I'd be buying HDs anyway.

As for the memory exactly which office applications are these power hungry behemoths & I'll run em & let you know, but I do think it's down to the speed of not the size of the RAM, if it were photoshop would be having a fit trying to apply filters, but it certainly seems fast enough.

Given that both Azureus, & media center cache their data & therefore have to store it in RAM, while waiting for the HD to catch up I'd have thought that would be a sufficient test with the other software running...

Again though, multiboot forces the update, as SBS 03 wouldn't be too happy serving files with 256Mb, but I can wait for a good deal on ebay for RAM, this ain't a fileserver primarily.

Perhaps the C7 you were looking at was designed badly by the OEM assembler? Early model laptop, was it a 1.5 chip, did it have DDR I or II? Was it an ECS board or some other manu?

Who knows, my point is that stories were told that it would barely be able to run XPhome let alone other apps & I'm saying it's running varied multiple apps sessions fine & I've had no reason to consider a memory upgrade, had I not wanted to multiboot, thus running contrary to popular belief in the thread.

In fact so far the vast majority of the negative comments have been a myth, other than you will never be able to play games on it, which raised a smile.

Point is, it is worth £200? Certainly seems that way with a bit of tweaking, but I'll bung on dreamweaver & flash, see if I can slow it down a bit. Dinna get me wrong, I'm not a troll & I'm not pretending it's a high end laptop or that it betters Intel or AMD, I'm not stupid, but I would personally give it considerably more credit than it received, call me a sucker for the underdog eh!

LoneRifle

May be worth noting that the C7 processor was designed by VIA, specifically their subsidary, Centaur. It's neither an Intel or AMD chip. The processor was designed with power savings and cost of manufacturing in mind, so that justifies the price.

Using the processor clock frequency as an indicator of performance could be possibly misleading. For reference, the Intel Core 2 Processors that are used in most Intel Centrino Laptops have frequency ranges from 1.06Ghz to 2.93Ghz. Considering clock frequency alone would put the C7 somewhere in the mid-low entry of the market.

However, if you also consider the fact that the C7 processor is about 2 generations behind the Core 2 (it was actually developed around the time of the 1st generation of Centrino laptops, those that use Pentium-M), its performance becomes slightly clearer.

If the C7 processor translates to longer battery life for the laptop, I wouldn't mind getting one. If anything, it would give me bragging rights for a laptop which doesn't have an Intel or AMD chip. Yes, the fact that I actually read up about all this would mean that I don't trust EI System's support and would be happy enough to cough up a bit of money for extra RAM and fix it in myself.

newtothis32

Hi, just wandering if there's anybody out there who can advise me on any decent, cheap laptops available at the moment to buy?

I'm new to this site and there seems to be hundreds of posts regarding laptops but can't find any that match my request.

The laptop is for my teenage son, mainly used for school work, MSN and internet. He doesn't want it for playing games, so doesn't need great graphics.

I have heard that you can sometimes drop on good laptops for less than £250, is this true? And, if so where do you get them from? Also, what sort of memory, processor, etc does it need?

Hope someone can help, thank you