inexpensive pc laptop

[Evoir]

A friend is wanting to purchase a new laptop, and coming to em for advise. I don't know PC's... so I'm asking you folks what she should look at.

Price range: $700 tops (with ram upgrades etc)

She found the Dell 600M (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/entnb_600m?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs) with 256 ram (she can add ram) which is being discontinued, but to me, looks like it would suit her just fine. Is there a big difference between between the Celeron and the Intel Pentium?

She is going to use this for:
Web surfing
Email
Writing
Maybe some MP3 playing/download
DVD watching

I consider all of this kind of light use.

The sales guy at Dell was trying to get her to get the XPS M140 wich has an intel M 740 (1.73 GHZ) chip plus 512 ram.

The 600M is selling for $499 online right now. Will she be making a bad decision getting a Celeron chip? The sales guy was telling her that she won't be able to run certain programs on the celeron, but I imagine that won't be a problem for her, based on her usage... but I really don't know.

She really has no idea what she even has now for a computer... what speed it is, etc (but it is a couple of years old).

Any advise?

p.s. she want a 14 inch, kinda slick looking one like to

[Evoir]

Oh, and I saw this other thread, but it didn't answer my questions...

http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20975

[Evoir]

Ha ha, now I am talking her into getting a 14" ibook. :)

She'd have to spend a bit more (but I'm seeing 14" ibooks for $899) which I know I can help her figure out how to use. And she is such a non-power user, it will be great for her.

I'll keep you posted.

[In the meantime, if you have any ideas on the Dell, I'd still love to hear it.]

[Randall]

I started writing this pre-iBook, :wink: but if she decides to stay in the Windows world, this may be of some help.

My Dell started out as a 600MHz Pentium III. Now it's a 1.4GHz Celeron, and I haven't had any complaints.

I run Photoshop on this machine, which doesn't fall into the light duty category. And 99% of the time I'm not even getting the full speed of the processor, because it's still a machine designed around a 600MHz CPU. (I did the upgrade just to get faster MP3 encoding, which does use the full 1.4GHz.)

The Celeron is basically a Pentium with some sacrifices made for economy. Historically some Celerons have been better than others, but software compatibility has never been an issue AFAIK. The Celeron M has less cache memory than the Pentium M (which makes it somewhat slower) and doesn't have Intel's SpeedStep technology (which means it'll run down the battery faster). That's about it.

And in case you're wondering why the Celeron M 360 runs at the same 1.4GHz clock speed as my 4-year-old Celeron, the M-series chips are faster than their clock speeds would suggest.

All in all, it looks like a very nice system after you upgrade the RAM to 512MB. But whatever she buys, make sure she chooses the Windows XP Backup CD option on the second page. By default you get a computer without a Windows CD -- just a recovery partition, which is of no help if the hard drive dies on you.

Randall