Laptop 101: I will use it for Wireless Internet (forums and email) MS Money, Picture Editing, videos, etc…?

Question

One thing I would like is the laptop to not be bogged down from 4 webpages open at once.

My minimums so far are:

DVD +/- RW

Integrated Wireless Card

512Mb of memory

60Gb hard drive

----------------------------------

I need help with:

AMD Turion 64 or Intel Core

Will I see faster webpage loads with more memory than 512Mb?

Do I need a graphics card or use the common shared memory?

LightScribe DVD+/-RW w/Double Layer
or
Super Multi 8X DVD+/-R/RW w/Double Layer Support

802.11b/g WLAN or
802.11a/b/g WLAN

6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery or
12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery

Answer 1

First, go up to 1M of ram if you are going to multitask.
60G HD is OK, but remember video files and pics can suck up a lot of space. Consider 100G. you only need the 5400 rpm, not the 7200 rpm

Intel core 2 duo t7200 if you can afford it (check out below link), although I just bought AMD TL-56 for my new laptop (link supplied)

Yes if you have a lot of processes running. Most of the time, the bottleneck is the network.

If youre not gaming or CAD, you can use internal graphics.

Lightscribe is cool to label your disks and the majors are including it on a lot of their systems with no additional charge.

a/b/g (what about $20 bluetooth as well?)

12 cell for battery life away from a power source.

Answer 2

AMD Turion 64 or Intel Core
***AMD and Intel both provide fast processors. For what you described that you want to do it's more of a personal preference.


Will I see faster webpage loads with more memory than 512Mb?
***The more memory you have the faster your machine will be regardless. See if you can get 1Gig

Do I need a graphics card or use the common shared memory?
***If the Laptop has the capability of having a separate Video Card then get it. It will improve performance quite a bit. Any time you are offloading some processing to an external source (ie video card) that takes the burden of the main processor you will see performance improvement.


LightScribe DVD+/-RW w/Double Layer
or
Super Multi 8X DVD+/-R/RW w/Double Layer Support
***Personal preference again. Depends upon what you want to do with your DVD. Lightscribe allows you to put a label on the DVD using the DVD player.
Double layer means that you can have high density DVD's


802.11b/g WLAN or
802.11a/b/g WLAN
***the 'a' is almost never used anymore. Having compatibility with a/b/g will open more places (hot spots) for you to surf. Older, legacy systems may still be 802.11b so the 'g' by itself would probably not work.


6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery or
12 Cell Lithium Ion Battery
***(wish we had fuel cells) whichever has the longest continuous charge. I'm not sure on this one.