Advice On New Laptop!

shane8961

I'm looking at buying a new laptop, got about £350 to spend. I have one of the new Dell Vostro's on order but it might not be here before I emmigrate (2nd week in august). I've found 3 laptops, all similar price and similar spec except the processors. Im not sure what laptop is the best? Its mainly for using photoshop, dreamweaver and converting divx to dvd.

Any recommendations between the 3 below or perhaps a better laptop I havent found. No matter which one I get I will be upgrading the Ram to 2 x 1gb rather than the 2 x 512mb.

Compaq Laptop

• AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual Core TL-50
• 1600MHz HyperTransport
• 512KB Cache
• 1GB RAM
• 120 GB Hard Drive
• DVD ReWriter MultiDrive
• 15.4" Widescreen Display
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
• 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6150 Graphics
• 1 year warranty

Advent Laptop

• Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 Processor 1.66GHz
• 667MHz FSB
• 2MB Cache
• 1024MB RAM
• 80GB Hard Drive
• DVD ReWriter Drive
• 15.4" Widescreen Display
• Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
• 128MB Intel UMA 950 Shared Graphics
• 1 Year Warranty

Dell Laptop

• Upgrade AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TK53
• Genuine Windows Vista Home Basic
• Base Warranty - 1 Year Business Hardware Support
• 15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800) Display
• 1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]
• 120GB (5400rpm) SATA Hard Drive
• ATI Radeon® Xpress 1150 HyperMemory (integrated)
• Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including Software
• 9 cell Lithium-Ion Battery
• Dell Wireless 1390 802.11b/g Mini-Card - Europe
• Dell v92 Data/Fax Modem

Would be grateful to hear peoples thoughts on each machine.

Thanks, Shane

student100

Personally would go for the Dell. The Advent has a better processor than the Compaq, but worse graphics and a smaller hard disk; I'd probably go for the Compaq second though.

You'd probably not notice that much difference in performance between any of them though, so I'd also take factors like weight, size, build quality, noise levels, quality of the keyboard, quality of the screen, number of USB ports and finally what it looks like into account.

donny-gal

I agree, and with the many thousands sold, you do not get them many complaints about Dell. Myself I have had a Dell Laptop for +5 years in a day to day work environment with one small hic-up and that was the catch to keep the battery in. Take my word on it it was used all day to its full ability, via a docking station much of the time, but with a very heavy workload.

DG

shane8961

Thanks guys. I was torn between the compaq (T5500) or the dell, just I read somewhere that the T5500 processor is LOTS better than the athlon in the dell?

eddmac2

What advice does anyone have on the windows vista?
A post on another thread, the author is concerned that he should really try and get windows XP loaded rather than vista basic.

sav2001

shane8961 wrote: »

I have one of the new Dell Vostro's on order but it might not be here before I emmigrate (2nd week in august).

Dell are currently delivering in about 2 weeks, so if you have it on order already it should turn up on time... The delivery date is available by checking on the Dell site (mine is still being built, due end July).