My girlfriend is buying a laptop, and I?m helping her chosing it. As she is on a tight budget, I have looked around for great offers, and I have found one. It?s a new ?old? IBM R50 centrino machine with a Banias (hence the term old) Pentium M, 256 MB RAM and 30 GB 4200 RPM HDD.
I am aware that I can find cheaper solutions based Celeron-Ms, but because of her likely usage pattern, I have opted for a Pentium M. She will mostly be doing lab observations (sometimes away from a power plug for extended periods of time), and thus she will be using the computer with many interruptions without turning it off.
Because of the usage pattern I have opted for a Pentium M (even though a Dothan Celeron-M would provide the same amount of L2 cache as the Banias Pentium M) because the crippled Speedstep unit on a Celeron-M will take its toll on battery life. She will be running WinXP (included in the price) on the machine, and she will only be use it for web surfing, email and MS Office.
I realize that both the HDD (low RPM) and the amount of RAM could use improvement. As I don?t want to void the warranty I would like to get the store to supply it with a 5400 RPM HDD instead and then upgrade the RAM later (remember, tight budget), BUT??
Will the low amount of RAM cause so much swapping to the HDD that the power savings made possible by the functional speedstep unit of the Pentium M will be lost to power the HDD (correct me if I?m wrong, but I imagine that the HDD will consume much more power when busy than when idling)?
Considering how the laptop is going to be used, is she then better of with 512 MB RAM from the start (to avoid swapping) and a slower HDD (will it even make a difference with the type of programs used)?
Please post informative answers, and please don?t state that ?this and that brand will be cheaper?. The laptop I have found is way cheaper than a Dell or Acer.
Thanks in advance
Andreas
I am aware that I can find cheaper solutions based Celeron-Ms, but because of her likely usage pattern, I have opted for a Pentium M. She will mostly be doing lab observations (sometimes away from a power plug for extended periods of time), and thus she will be using the computer with many interruptions without turning it off.
Because of the usage pattern I have opted for a Pentium M (even though a Dothan Celeron-M would provide the same amount of L2 cache as the Banias Pentium M) because the crippled Speedstep unit on a Celeron-M will take its toll on battery life. She will be running WinXP (included in the price) on the machine, and she will only be use it for web surfing, email and MS Office.
I realize that both the HDD (low RPM) and the amount of RAM could use improvement. As I don?t want to void the warranty I would like to get the store to supply it with a 5400 RPM HDD instead and then upgrade the RAM later (remember, tight budget), BUT??
Will the low amount of RAM cause so much swapping to the HDD that the power savings made possible by the functional speedstep unit of the Pentium M will be lost to power the HDD (correct me if I?m wrong, but I imagine that the HDD will consume much more power when busy than when idling)?
Considering how the laptop is going to be used, is she then better of with 512 MB RAM from the start (to avoid swapping) and a slower HDD (will it even make a difference with the type of programs used)?
Please post informative answers, and please don?t state that ?this and that brand will be cheaper?. The laptop I have found is way cheaper than a Dell or Acer.
Thanks in advance
Andreas
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