Need some laptop advice

[Geese]

I'm looking to get a laptop for myself for xmas, mainly for school work, plus photoshop+after effects (gfx and video editing stuff) while I on the go. I've been considering a Inspiron 1520 with the following specs -

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz/800Mhz FSB/4MB cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Edition
High Resolution, glossy widescreen 15.4 inch display (1440x900)
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce® 8600M GT
2GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 667MHz
250GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
CD / DVD writer (DVD+/-RW Drive)
Dell Wireless 1390 802.11g Mini-Card
85Whr Lithium Ion Battery (9 cell)
High Definition Audio 2.0
TV Tuner

got a few questions as well

1. 2GB Dual Channel or 3GB ? Which would be better ? The extra gig would cost me about $125US extra
2. I'm concerned that 2GB ram won't be enough for Vista when I think about rendering videos (especially particles) in After Effects @ 720 x 480. In this regard are their any advantages of Vista over XP ?

[ecktt]

1. Once its a 32 Bit operation system, Vista or XP, 3gb is the max addressable memory space. My advice to you is, take as little ram as possible and it afterwards since Laptop DDR2 ram is pretty cheap. In fact you can prob get a 4gb Kits for 140usd.

2. Vista is a whole new operating system (no i don't have shares in M$) with many future looking features and operating system enhancement in general. The down side is, it is still new. There are still bugs and performance issues that have not been ironed out. It has been my personal experience that Vista just does not like laptops in terms of desktop performance.

The video card is over kill for the task u mentioned yet under powered for gaming; so u might want to upgrade(more performance)/downgrade(more battery life) that.

Glossy screens my not be the best thing for editing photos but they are very nice when dealing with text and documents.

Get a fast HD,esp since u want to do photoshop work. You can always use an external HD for data stores.

Intel Wifi NICs work better in my experience.

The fact that u can have 3GB of memory in dual channel mode is interesting. It suggest that you might be able to install 5GB of ram total. With Vista 64, your Adobe apps will fly since they will have the full 3GB of memory allocated to them while the rest of the OS and apps can play very comfortably with the remaining 2GB (which vista will suck up regardless). Thats a huge plus for power as well since the HD will Trash less to get work done.

[mojo]

Video editing also involves capturing, and other tasks that quality is affected by disk write speed. If you are just using the system for rendering and encoding, then by all means ignore this paragraph. If not, and disk write speed could be problematic, consider a 17" model capable of housing 2 hard drives for a raid configuration. The 17" screen is a major hit to portability, but would be better for video editing.


I already made the same recommendations as ecktt over msn, so now u see him confirming what i told u before. XP is dead... SP3 is the last of support for XP ever, Vista 64 is the way to go, and u can address more memory space in a 64 bit OS.

[phoenix31tt]

XP is dead... SP3 is the last of support for XP ever, Vista 64 is the way to go, and u can address more memory space in a 64 bit OS.


rofl men crazy yes... xp dead... ROFL!!!

neways... there's always xp 64 if u want more memory :D

[Xen_Lunchbox]

THATS a school laptop? lmao looks like a portable gaming rig

[ecktt]

gaming systems can often pass for cheap workstations

[Xen_Lunchbox]

THIS is a cheap workstation
Mobile inytel pentium 4 process L2 512kBytes
512 MB DDR RAM @ 166.4 MHz 2.5-3-3-7 (had to buy another 256)
Gefroce Fx5200go 64 MB RAM
32 Gig harddrive
No wireless
2 PCI slots
1 Pc card slot

And i play wc3 on this!
ah baddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd

[mojo]

umm das not a workstation, thas a ghetto pc...