Processor what is betta?

[The Tourist]

Which is better? AMD® Turion™ 64 X2 Mobile Technology TL56, or, Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T5450 Processor (1.66GHz,667MHz,2MB L2 cache)? I have no idea what either means. So please lead me not astray!

[Nak Nak]

The core 2 range is all round decent and you could probably depend on it being good. It looks like one of the lower end c2ds, though. The TL56 has a higher clockspeed (1800mhz as opposed to 200mhz for the core2).

It would be helpful if you could post the specs for both machines. I'll say the TL56 for the moment, but features/price could sway the recommendation.

[The Tourist]

well, it's either the Inspiron 1521 or 1520 that I'm looking at. The price different doesn't really bother me. They're here (http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/notebooks_better?c=uk&cs=ukdhs1&l=en&s=dhs) . Thanks for your help.

[Nak Nak]

Get the 1521 - it is a better package due to the fact that it has a nice-ish gfx card.

Pity they come with Vista.

[The Tourist]

I should add that I'm not looking to play games or anything. Mainly just for writing/music stuff, the occasional DVD. You still reckon the 1521? I was thinking about the 1520 since it was more expensive, thus I assumed it would be somewhat better?

[The Tourist]

oh, and what's wrong with vista?

[Nak Nak]

Oops, sorry, I got them mixed up. The 1520 is what I'd recommend.

Vista requires more component power with no resulting performance gain. The interface is slightly revamped, but nothing functional is particularly different from Winxp, except that it has a smaller library of completely compatible programs and has problems with various peripherals like printers etc.

Since you are not gonna be throwing much at it, it will work fine, both of the laptops are well capable of handling it.

Ps: GFX is important because the user interface in Vista uses some of the graphics memory, thus taking some strain off your other components. I have not noticed a performance difference, though. Probably because it's an insufficient measure.

[The Tourist]

Ah, thank you very much. I shall be ordering the 1520 tomorrow... I'm gonna get the espresso colour one, which means nothing.

[Robert]

Get the 1521 - it is a better package due to the fact that it has a nice-ish gfx card.

Pity they come with Vista.

Core2duo plus Vista = SEX

[Robert]

Aero is about 900 times more efficient than XP's system for drawing windows.

(Ps, you can use Aero and turn off all the fancy stuff, keeping the performance gain, if you really want to)

There is a DISTINCT performance gain, especially if you use the indexing service, on large folders filled with files. There are also a ton of GUI tweaks and features that make surfing your own files easy as crap.


ATI and Nvidia have also both decided to pull their heads out of their collective asses and release decent drivers. Not sure about Intel, but I imagine they had good support from the start.

My mother's Inspiron 1505 has the lowest amount of hardware you could get, except I put 1 gig of ram in it, and it runs Vista like a champ doing all the thing you described above.