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Laptop to watch Hulu

I

igloo15

Senior member
Thinking about getting my mother a laptop for her birthday. She watches hulu and likes to play flash games, Farmville, bejeweled etc. Her current laptop(2 years old) lags horribly while doing flash things so I want to make sure the cpu I get on this laptop is up to the challenge.

I recently saw a laptop at best buy:
Toshiba L455-S5009

Don't know much about mobile cpus so I don't know if that would be enough. My budget is about 400 dollars so this would be a perfect buy.
 
igloo15 said:
Going off memory but I think its a ASUS ASPIRE 5520-5334
Click to expand...

The reason he asks is because gpu accelerated flash is just around the corner and once that hits, your system may actually run those flash games quite well. If it's an Acer Aspire and those numbers are right, you've got an nVidia 7000m/nForce 610. Can someone who knows evaluate this?
 
best thing you can do is look up which onboard video will be supported by flash with gpu acceleration and look for a laptop that is supported.
 
fbrdphreak said:
That processor should do fine. Avoid the Atom and any of the SU series chips from Intel. They won't handle Hulu, and barely YouTube (no HD for sure).

For the money, I would pick up a refurb Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 or Y450. Most of the refurb boxes are under $500 with a full Core 2 Duo chip. I like the chassis a lot, they're good systems.

http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops.html?cat=8&series=96&screen_size=127
Click to expand...

My laptop with a SU7300 handles Hulu @ 480p just fine. Provided that's not HD, but most of the movies I've seen on Hulu aren't. If you can send me a link to one running at 720 or 1080p, I'll test it and post the results.
 
Do you watch Hulu at full screen? It might have been some of the older CULV chips I was seeing that problem with; I hadn't tested it on the newest Core 2 SU's
 
igloo15 said:
Thinking about getting my mother a laptop for her birthday. She watches hulu and likes to play flash games, Farmville, bejeweled etc. Her current laptop(2 years old) lags horribly while doing flash things so I want to make sure the cpu I get on this laptop is up to the challenge.

I recently saw a laptop at best buy:
Toshiba L455-S5009

Don't know much about mobile cpus so I don't know if that would be enough. My budget is about 400 dollars so this would be a perfect buy.
Click to expand...
That Toshiba is amazing for the money. Looks like it has a "glare type" screen so hopefully she likes this type of screen?


Silly question...

Are you sure it is the laptop and not the internet connection?
 
fbrdphreak said:
Do you watch Hulu at full screen? It might have been some of the older CULV chips I was seeing that problem with; I hadn't tested it on the newest Core 2 SU's
Click to expand...

I think the single core SUs may struggle, but the dual-core SUs should be fine. My SU7300 handles HD youtube just fine.
 
fbrdphreak said:
Do you watch Hulu at full screen? It might have been some of the older CULV chips I was seeing that problem with; I hadn't tested it on the newest Core 2 SU's
Click to expand...

Yep. Some of the single core CULV's might have problems with it, but my dual core, Core 2-based CULV runs perfectly fine.

In fact, I don't run any games or really intensive applications on the computer, but for general tasks (Internet, word processing, programming, mulit-tasking, DVDs, etc.) I can't tell any difference between it and my previous laptop with a P8400.
 
Hulu (SD) is choppy at 1366x768 full-screen on a Core Solo at 1.6GHz (19-21FPS) but is perfect with a Core Duo at 1.6GHz (34-40FPS). These are the older-generation Core series, but I believe they are, clock-for-clock, no more than 5-10% slower on most processes versus the Core 2s.

I would think that even with a Core Solo, the beta Flash releases that support certain GPUs (including integrated ones) should make this a non-issue. Thus, a single-core CULV with a GPU that supports GPU-accelerated Flash could work.
 
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