Buying new laptop - Suggestions (non-gamer)

[billsbury]

I know someone that wants a new laptop. He's a lawyer so he's not a gamer, but he does do PowerPoint a lot and uses a lot of video in his presentations. He also will need some decent battery power. He's right now using a 700 Mhz piece of crap laptop.

He hooks his current laptop up to projectors, but its video controller can't handle feeding video to its LCD and the projecter at the same time, so he always disables his LCD while giving presentations.

He is tired of his computer lagging, especially during his presentations. I told him I would find him a new laptop at a good price that should solve his problem.

And what's up with all these processors that are less than 2 Ghz?? For example, this Dell Inspiron E1505 has a 1.66 Ghz Core Duo T2300.
I just built myself an AMD 64 X2 3800+ that supposedly performs at 3.8 Ghz with its larger cache, with actual clocking at 2 Ghz. So why are these laptops at like 1.6 instead of like upper 3s??

And it has to run Windows.

Have any suggestions? I was contemplating Dell, HP, or Toshiba.
Thanks guys and gals!
-Bill

 

[EagleEye]

The core duo performs better than an AMD 64 x2 operating at the same clock speed.

 

[billsbury]

Ahhh ok, good to know. Thanks buddy.

 

[dexvx]

You should ask what size he wants first. Thats the most important thing for a laptop.

I would recommend a Thinkpad or Dell Latitude Line (higher quality base components and better support, as its targetted toward business users).

Core Duo @ 1.66 = X2 @ 1.66, or about a X2-3500+

 

[spike spiegal]

The core duo performs better than an AMD 64 x2 operating at the same clock speed.

So What?

 

[yosuke188]

There's some killer deals going with the Dell laptops if you can find a 35% off $999 (you can buy one off eBay). Combine it with the 5% off coupon and you got yourself a nice laptop.

 

[billsbury]

So do you think Dell and IBM make the best laptops?

 

[1N0V471V]

Yep. I'd get him a Core Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM, etc.