Just sold a PC need a second portable

[richie]

Just sold a compaq AMD2200 and now want to buy a second portable for my kids. I have already an ACER Centrino with 15"4 screen and am very happy with it.

Acer are doing an offer at the moment for a Portable with Celeron 2.6 processor.

Anyone have any experience with celeron processors in portables. My Centrino is the bees knees but a bit expensive for th kids.

Its an ACER, Centrino 2,6 with 256 ram, 30GB hard disque, DVD burner and 15"4 screen for €900...

Very cheap. Or should a bite the bullet and splash out €1200 for a HP with centrino 1,6 but only 15" screen...

 

[richie]

This

 

[richie]

Or this...

 

[trotsky]

We've used a few portables with celerons in and they are fine. The ones we've had are a bit bulkier than the centrino rough equivalents as the centrino motherboards supply a bit more of the wifi bits and pieces and similar but they are perfectly fine.

I would only say that the "for the kids" bit raises a couple of small issues. If it is "for the kids to do their homework on" then you are probably fine. If it is "for the kids to do their homework on and play some games" then you might find the 256MB of RAM a bit of a limitation, and I'd worry more about the screen resolution and refresh rate. LCheaper laptops don't always have the finist in 3D graphics and video acceleration. The 256MB is a bit low for Windows XP anyway; I recently built a PC for a friend's kid from old bits "for homework" and found that I needed to get it up to 384MB to avoid it slowing down occasionally. I'd also say - what's the sound output like - 30GB is going to fill up with MP3 files faster than you can shake a stick at it if the student's PCs I see here at work are anything to go by... They are also full of spyware, so antivirus, spybot and updates are a must. All those take memory...

 

[richie]

Ta for that, not to worried about games as they won't be playing many. As for memory you are correct I'll have to see how much extra it costs for 512.

AVG, and zonealarm will be installed toute de suite...

 

[Banjaxed]

And Spybot...

Checked my stepson's computer? One hundred and ten pieces of spyware/malware, including two illicit autodialers. Good job we're on broadband...