I’m sort of hunting for a new laptop at the moment. I’ve narrowed my choice down to a Dell Inspiron 6400 with an Intel 2.0ghz core duo CPU – T2700 and an X1400 Ati graphics card, 15.4″ screen and 1 gig of ram.
The CPU is just about top of the line, whereas the graphics system is not, but then I’m not a hard core gamer so I’m not in the market for a serious gaming laptop even though I had looked at the Dell 9400 which can come with a really hot graphics card in the form of the GeForce Go 7800. The 9400 also comes with a 17″ screen which is nice, but makes the whole PC huge and heavy, not that I move my PC around a lot, especially since I got my Dell X30 pocket PC (great piece of kit and the quality is very good too – I still have not seen anything quite as good (624Mhz cpu) for around the price I paid). At times I do like to take my PC with me and so I do not want anything that weighs much more than 3kgs. Another trip to Rome is in the offing so this will be an occasion when a laptop comes into its own.
Stop reading, start speaking
Stop translating in your head and start speaking Italian for real with the only audio course that prompt you to speak.
I’m sticking with Windows XP home as the operating system because I don’t think I really need XP Pro whereas good multimedia capabilities are useful for me.
People do seem to slag Dell off from time to time, but I’ve not had a bad experience at all, in fact I was very impressed with the salesman who I spoke to and I shall try to contact him again because I’d like to know if I can upgrade to a faster 7200 rpm hard disk. Actually speaking to a sales person before paying is a good idea with Dell as you can often get a little more than you wanted at roughly the same price. I guess that Dell salespeople work much like any other salesperson and so any sale is better than no sale at all and they may get commission too which makes sales people more eager to close a sale. You need to be a little careful because sales people will also try to get you to upgrade to something which you had not considered but will invariably cost more – but then I might be convinced if I only end up shelling out another 100 Euros or so. We’ll see.
If I do end up with a new laptop, I shall post a short review here.
