Is this a good deal for a laptop

[srothfuss]

Definently don't get that one you listed for $250.00. That thing would be about as old as your current computer. The first one you listed was definently better

You need LOTS of RAM to watch movies and you'll need a lot of harddrive space / processing power to run windows XP. We have a HP laptop that has the Pentium 4-M chip, 40Gig's of harddrive space and 1.0 gig or RAM. The battery lasts about 2 hours and works flawlessly.

 

[Roland69]

I don't need a laptop I would rather find a better tower but it just seems like I can find laptops cheaper than pc's

 

[jrichker]

I don't need a laptop I would rather find a better tower but it just seems like I can find laptops cheaper than pc's

Buy a nice, used desktop PC. You'll be happier in the long run.

My day job is fixing PC's for a bank. I see 10 broken laptops for every broken desktop. The desktops and laptops are all Compaq, and are good quality machines. The laptop failures are typically bad hard drives, and system board failures, with an occasional LCD panel that dies. The desktops run like electric clocks, rarely failing. The failure mode for desktops seems to be power supplies and hard drives.

The laptops also run slower than a desktop of the same vintage. The power conservation/heat dissapation scheme on most laptops causes them to run at 50%-60% of the rated speed of the CPU chip. Desktops always run at the full rated speed of the CPU chip, unless there is a problem. I have a Burn In Test that verifies the CPU speed, and I have only seen a laptop run at full CPU speed one time in about 100 test cycles on different laptops. The desktops run at full CPU speed every time, all the time.