Hi there looking into buying a new laptop and i've found one with the following specs i'm leaning toward and just looking for someones experiences with such a setup. specs are: Intel C2D T8100 2.1Ghz, 4096Mb ram, 320gb hdd, nvidia 8400m graphics, 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200) it comes preloaded with vista business sp1,just wondering what kind of performance i could expect from it, at the moment i am using the laptop in my sig, and it needs updating!! also, what kind of experiences have people had with dual booting vista and xp? many thanks
thats one hell of a resolution for such a small screen, do they not do a lower one thats easier to see. another thing id watch is does it come with the 64bit version of vista business, because most system builders put loads of ram in that you cant see using the 32bit one, which seems pretty stupid on their part
hi i think it is actually the 32bit one, does that mean i wont be able to use the max 4gb of ram?! the system is actually coming from Dell, from the outlet and the reason i chose it is actually because of the rather high resolution! my brothers got a 24" dell monitor thats running the same resolution and i've also used one of these at that resolution and although it takes a bit of getting used to, its more what i need (lots of multitasking) what kinda rough performance would i expect? i think im going to immediately swap the hard drive out for a faster 7200rpm one though many thanks for the reply
you should get some pretty decent performance, I've gotta say you'll probably want to wipe all the dell crap of of it first though if you want any kind of real performance. If you're running a 32bit OS with 4 gigs of ram it will probably only recognize 2-3gb of it, see if you can speak to dell on the phone and order the laptop with vista 64. My only other advice is don't expect great things from the 8400m,you'll probably be disappointed, but I'm guessing you didn't get the laptop for gaming, and if you did, then you seriously need a lower resolution screen! That card should be fine for very light gaming but really its for HD movie playback ect.
You'll be stuck at about 3.5GB of ram, as that seems to what Vista 32-bit reports to me on my laptop. As far as performance, that is very similar to my Dell XPS in my sig, which flies with Vista Home Premium, it does not feel at all slower then my desktop with XP Pro. As far as the 8400M, don't expect much native resolution gaming, it is fine for high settings in Source engine games at 1280x800, and medium in newer games at that resolution(haven't tried Crysis and don't plan to). As far as doing office tasks, music listening, movie watching(8400m HD acceleration is nice), web browsing and any combination of those things it will be plenty of speed.
8400 and games at 1920 = absolute rubbish, you can get a decent laptop witha 7900 in these days very cheap
i guess i should've pointed out that this laptop will only ever be used for 'office' based tasks like internet browsing mainly, watching films, tv episodes, msn'ing and the odd word/excel file! i think im still gna change it over to vista x64 then and also dual boot it with xp
