Choosing a laptop: please help

Voyager2002

I am advising my son on his new laptop. He intends to use it for editing video clips (part of a media studies course) and is fond of games, some with demanding graphics. He has been given 350 pounds, which may or may not be an adequate budget.

He likes the Dell Inspiron 6400, and has checked that its specifications meet the minimum standards required to run the video editing program that he will be using. (In his preferred configuration it is within his budget, at 336 pounds.) Is this likely to be a good choice?

Oh: I am advising him to get it with XP rather than Vista, to vaoid over-loading its limited memory and processing power: is this a wise strategy?

Any opinions, please.

epz_2

yes vista is the biggest dog i have seen, half the apps and drivers i needed were missing and it is SLOOooow at almost everything.

video editing will be tough on a £350 laptop but i would sudgest he checks out something like a vostro 1700, the ability to add a second hard disk will be very welcome.

i would also wait till after jan the 7th , thats when the 45nm chips hit the market and everything lower down gets bumped up a perfomance grade.

Blacksheep1979

If you need to edit video and play games then you're going to have to add about £1k to your budget if you want a laptop on the other hand you'll get alot more bang for your buck with a desktop.

BigBouncyBall

editing video on a laptop is ok - not much fun though. If you are going for it, get as much RAM as you can. Media studies course? Will he need to be running any other applications during it such as photoshop or animation? If so you might like to rethink a bit. If you don't mind me asking, what is his budget?

epz_2

forgot to add i can transcode video slightly faster than realtime on a 3700+ amd64 with very low latency ram, a wd raptor and storage drive so yeah a quad desktop would give a LOT more time efficent.

Voyager2002

BigBouncyBall wrote: »

editing video on a laptop is ok - not much fun though. If you are going for it, get as much RAM as you can. Media studies course? Will he need to be running any other applications during it such as photoshop or animation? If so you might like to rethink a bit. If you don't mind me asking, what is his budget?

Thanks for this: I have suffered in the past from lack of RAM so I appreciate the comment. And yes, he will need to edit photographs so photoshop or something similar is likely to be needed. We don't yet know about animation. Anyway, what kind of rethink did you have in mind? An Apple Mac? (The problem with that is that the other machines in the house run on Windows, and none of us are familiar with the Mac operating system. Not to mention cost issues.)

Budget? He has been given 350 pounds to spend on his computer (fifteenth birthday present). I hope I won't have to add too much more to this.

BigBouncyBall

with £350 you could be looking at a second hand mac from eBay that might fit the bill. But then its always down to chance on whether you get a good system or not.

what about something like this:

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/default.aspx?s=dfo&l=en&c=uk

it's the dell outlet shop that sells refurbs at really good prices. Apple have one too.

Without being patronising, how advanced is the editing a 16 year old is expected to do? If it is movie maker stuff then £350 will be enough to get a spec that can manage and also edit photos on the GIMP software (or PS elements, say)

this:?

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/132670