Please recommend a good laptop

[Sheila]

Originally Posted by BarTopDancer

Shelia, MM likes this one as well does another techie friend of mine. Let me know what your techie guy says. I think the special ends today, though they have *Deals of the Week* every week...

Okay, just finished talking with Mr. Guru. Basically, his take is that it is an okay model, but he has several reservations about it:

1. There are only two memory slots and they're already filled by the two 256 chips. If you wanted to upgrade your memory, you'd have to buy two new chips. He noted that there's an option to buy one 512 chip, leaving one slot open.

2. The system uses WinXP Home Edition. His recommendation would be to upgrade to WinXP Pro instead.

3. The video chipset as-is he believes would be okay for games like the Sims or RCT. However, if you ever want to play a more feature-rich game (like let's say Doom 2, etc.), he's not sure at all that the video would be able to handle it. There was no option at all to upgrade the video component in the Inspiron so to upgrade would mean changing to a different model line.

So, he went through the build-a-laptop wizard, swapping out for the 512 chip, converting to WinXP Pro and adding the components necessary for WiFi. The total came to $1,150. He did not add any extra warranty services. Personally, I would not as I'm not averse to fixing stuff on my own, and any catastrophic failures usually happen in the first few days (or in the case of a hard drive, within a year).

He basically felt that since I like to play games like Doom 2 or Hexen, etc., this would not be the laptop for me, mainly because there was not enough information given about the video chipset supplied with the model we were looking at.

Not sure if this information helps you or not. I thought the 512 memory chip was worth checking into, though.