I caved in... (DUDE! He's getting a DELL!)

[strredwolf]

Christmas got me a few work shirts and pants that were nessisary in easing tension in the household... but...

I've caved in.

The cheapest, yet modern NVidia laptop would be $1500.  A Whitebook (no-OS, custom) would be $850 if I skimped on the processor and GPU.

Yet an ATI Radeon X1300 sporting Dell Inspiron E1505, with a Core Duo processor, only costs $870.  Under $900.  For a Core Duo!

So, I caved.  The laptop's being built now.

Comments

[bobskunk.livejournal.com]

Hope the build quality's good, or at least better than I've seen as of late. I just can't help but wonder how the prices get so low.

[rhanlav.livejournal.com]

End of the year sales. They try to drive in the cash by buying a ton so they can offer massive low sales. I deal with their corporate folks on getting office systems, and know a bit about how they do it. The Core Duos actually bump up the price compared to the Pentium Ds, just because they can't get them as good a discount from Intel.

--Salen

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

That, and the delay in getting Vista out means they got to discount them and tack on "Free VISTA UPGRADE!" coupons just to get hardware out the door.

Doesn't matter to me now.

[bibliophage.livejournal.com]

If that's the best bang for the buck, you buy it.

Unfortunately, there's little way of telling quality in laptops - IBM was EXTREMELY solid, no matter what, but it had a price to match. Panasonic Toughbooks are next to indestructible - but see above.

My Averatec's been working fine. I had to send it off for a hard drive replacement once, but that's because I paid for the extra warranty in case something nasty happened - the cost of the warranty was less than the replacement drive cost would have been. Paid for itself.

[bibliophage.livejournal.com]

Just looked at it - that Radeon shares half of its memory from the operating system. the 128 has 64 of its own, and 64 snitched from the OS. The 256 has 128 on-board, and 128 snitched.

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

I'll have to make sure I set Xorg up and force it to 64. Damn, shared memory's going to be slooooooooooow.