Randmness

This morning I got an email from my aunt asking for help on picking out a laptop. She has a Mac right now and I guess it’s on it’s last legs now and she’s ready for something new. She needs something that she can work on Office with, along with answering emails and light internet usage.

After doing some poking around at various sites I noticed that Windows Vista is the norm for just about every laptop out there. Right now Vista is finicky. It requires a lot of RAM (512MB is the minimum requirement but you’ll want around 2GB so the thing actually works) and a lot of hard drive space (around 15GB). There are some devices like printers and cameras that still don’t have drivers available for Vista yet and that scares me because my aunt has a printer/scanner combo and I don’t know if it’s compatible. Vista can only get better at this point but I think that it’s going to be a while before it actually works like XP does. Plus if you’re buying a budget laptop you’re going to end up spending some extra cash on RAM to try and get the thing up to Vista standard and that’s something I really didn’t want to deal with.

Luckily, after some poking around, I found some laptops that are pretty decent and run XP. My theory is that by the time XP is no longer supported and my aunt is forced to upgrade to Vista she’ll be ready for another laptop and I can start the search again.

Below is a list of laptops that I found by looking around on the internet. Every laptop that I found has at least an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, built in wireless card, and runs on Windows XP. Lastly, should she need to upgrade to Vista all of these systems will support it - and run fine.

1. Dell Inspiron 1520 -$881. This price includes 3 years of In-Home service and 24×7 phone support. It has an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, a 15.4″ screen, a 2.5 hour battery life and Windows XP installed. It can be found on the Dell website here:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/services/inspnnb/1520_DNCWKB1?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

2. Fujitsu LifeBook V1010 - $799. This price includes 1 year of service and support. It has a 120Gb hard drive, 1GB of RAM, a 15.4″ screen, a 2.25 hour battery life and Windows XP installed. It can be found on the Fujitsu website here:

http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildseriesbean.do?series=V1010

3. Toshiba Satellite Pro A210 - $899. This price includes 1 year of service and support. It has a 120Gb hard drive, 2GB of RAM, a 15.4″ screen, a 2.26 hour battery life and Windows XP installed. It can be found on the Toshiba website here:

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/pdet.to?seg=HHO&poid=397712

I think that at this point it’s going to be a toss up between the Dell and the Toshiba. The Dell has less RAM and a smaller hard drive but it comes with the 3 year In-Home warranty. To get the 3 year comparable warranty from Toshiba it would be $359 extra. To upgrade the Dell with another Gig of RAM it would be $121 and to bump the drive up to a 120Gb drive it would be $24; putting the Dell at a cost of $1026 for the upgrades compared to $1258 to upgrade the warranty on the Toshiba.

As soon as she’s made her decision and bought it I’ll post a review on how it is.

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