now i know i'm gonna open a can of worms by saying this, but i'm going to buy a dell laptop for uni.

i'm looking to spend about £600 and want a general fast laptop that will run autocad and some animation stuff. wireless too. dell seem to offer the best stuff for the keenest price.

my problem is that in the small business section, the same spec laptop as in the home section seems to be cheaper and i like the look of the vostro cases. i'm just wondering if they'll be missing something i really need for what i'm after.

i'm looking at the £449 + vat one

it either comes with vista business or XP pro......i'm tempted to go with XP if only because i know what i have at the minute works well and it's XP. software otherwise, i pretty much have everything i need, so it doesn't really have to come with anything.

the only other thing is the graphics card. i assume since i don't really need any gaming capability or much video editing type stuff, a 256MB nvidia card will do.

as you can probably guess, the insides of computers aren't my strong point, so if you have any advice, help me........please!

cheers,
tom

im no PC buff myself, but they seem reliable.

im typing this on my Dell dimension 8400.
cant remember how long i have had it but never had a ny problems.

My youngest son has a Dell laptop, had it for over 18 months, and he,s never off it...never had a prob with it.

my tip...get the best amount of memory you can afford at the time.

I would expect something like animation and autocad would like a nice fast graphics card for rendering polygons. Vista prefers a large memory graphics card and will off load more of the rendering tasks to the card if poss from what I recall.

Go for 2Gb RAM these days, its cheap at the moment, take advantage of that. If you can push the boat out, get 4Gb as the standard 2GB is 2x1GB sticks, so will need both replacing if you go to 4Gb.

The video editing won't be too excessive on the graphics card, but anthing drawing polygons will push it a bit harder.

Cheaper laptops are usually the result of cost cutting motherboard, strength of the case and quality of the display. I've seen more than one Advent laptop shatter the display just because they were closed from the edge rather than the middle of the screen.

Why have you chosen dell? Acer ftw ^__^ Dell comes with so much crap installed on them.

Also Vista > XP

I have been IT hardware and software support for 20 years. When the company I supported (FORD) switched from IBM to Dell we thought the worst but they ended up being quite good. Good warranty ect. If its a laptop I would never buy one without the longest best warranty you can get. A new screen repair or system board will cost more than the unit did to start with. Without coverage you through it out and get a new one if something remotely serious goes wrong hardware wise. That goes for Dell or anyone in my opinion.

Dale

As a computer systems engineer.... Dell are fantastic! Good price good specs and generally bomb proof!. My advice though is ditch Vista and have it preinstalled with XP Pro. Or if you want to do it properly buy an Apple!

be careful - business warrentys are pretty good, personal warrentys are rubbish. When dell's work they are great, when they fail the customer service gets renamed into 'hell'.

do a search, someone has asked this sort of question recently (i posted a reply if it helps you find it)

Definatly ditch vista and get XP pro
(personaly I'd get 2000 pro given the chance, but its getting a bit old these days)

Have a look at ASUS laptops - I got one of there cheepest for uni 4 years ago and its still going strong with only a little cosmetic damage