in badly need of a decent and cheap laptop

B

baniceday

Banned
i am a student, just wanna to buy a new laptop for my college life. i will not use it gaming a lot. just for school work. but my budget is very tight (less than 500bucks). since the money is a big issue, i'd go with a good deal. i've found one --Toshiba Satellite L515-S4010 15.6" Notebook for 430 bucks at Office Depot.
i wanna know if it is really worth every penny. cons or pros? or some other good suggestions?
thanks to help a noob out. any help would be appreciated.
 
a battery life on the short side (2.33 hours from the toshiba site), high non-gaming performance (still very good at running warcraft III and the like), good storage.

I say good deal, I would have advised a Toshiba or a Dell or similar anyway, they make a good keyboard and good general build. (maybe some Asus but I think you have to be careful)

I say decent, but be aware it's a 14" with weak battery life (you'd probably better like a 15.6" with same battery life or a 14" with longer, bigger battery)
I wonder where's the option to refuse windows, such modern laptops are ultra-fast and powerful machines when it comes to running ubuntu or similar.
 
i have a hp dm3z its really thing and very light. It has a neo x2 1.6ghz and a 3200hd and i added the hd 4330 to it. Battery life wit the ssd is around 3-4 hours depending on what i'm doing , flash videos can knock me down to 1h 20 mins.

You can get the base dm3z for $400ish

YOu should really look into the asus ul80vt. My buddy has it , gets about 10 hours with it. He has the celeron 1.2ghz version .

Its pricy tho at $700ish . But as a student your able to easly bring it to class and almost anywhere and it should be pretty decent with games. I would have bought it , but it came out a few months after what i bought.
 
still, now that time has been wasted, I wonder if someone ever had the idea of regular size laptops with Atom processors.

Atom 510, 2GB ram, hdd, big battery, high quality keyboard with no keypad, and half-half-decent sound would feel about right for me.
(bonus points for legacy com port as I would love to connect into switches and 486s and stuff)
 
Blaz, why would you ever want that when an i3 530 idle's within 5 Watts of an ATOM Platform? Soon enough Intel will be releasing ULV versions of the i3/i5 platform which will fit perfectly there and offer even better power/efficiency scaling.
 
BRiT said:
Blaz, why would you ever want that when an i3 530 idle's within 5 Watts of an ATOM Platform? Soon enough Intel will be releasing ULV versions of the i3/i5 platform which will fit perfectly there and offer even better power/efficiency scaling.
Click to expand...

gosh, why does Intel is so confusing and always make processors more efficient than Atoms? :) (even the celeron-M that was on the first Asus netbook)

well even 5 watts are significant, I'd like pushing the idea to the extreme to get something cheap (a high end ULV isn't cheap), cool running, long-running and fast enough to deal with text and video playback on a gnu/linux distro. with a half terabyte storage and gigabit networking.
 
Blazkowicz said:
gosh, why does Intel is so confusing and always make processors more efficient than Atoms? :) (even the celeron-M that was on the first Asus netbook)

well even 5 watts are significant, I'd like pushing the idea to the extreme to get something cheap (a high end ULV isn't cheap), cool running, long-running and fast enough to deal with text and video playback on a gnu/linux distro. with a half terabyte storage and gigabit networking.
Click to expand...

i had a hp mini 311 , 1.6ghz atom with 3 gigs of ram and an ion chipset . It sucked at everything. I returned it and my 1.6ghz neo x2 is at least 3 times faster than it.

The atom is good for energy savings , its performance is very poor. I really wish my neo got better battery life but at 4 hours its enough for what i need and i'm hoping someone makes a larger battery for my laptop its only 6 cell
 
well I would be considering a dual core Atom (preferably with VT extension), but not a single core one.
better to have two weak CPU that one weak CPU.

A five-year-old laptop would destroy it in a lot of tasks, even gaming, but a dual Atom would bear the load more easily with its second core and using a 500GB, 5400 rpm hard disk rather than a 40GB, 4200 rpm one.
I shortly used a dual pentium pro 200 with scsi, back when that was already a piece of crap, it would only do 20fps in quake 3 but was very smooth at desktop stuff.

I agree that you can ignore Atom if you need a powerful PC.
 
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