laptop spec help please

[psalliss]

laptop spec help please
what do you think of the price and spec of this laptop please

Toshiba Satellite A20-S103
Intel Desktop Pentium 4 2.8GHz
256MB RAM
40GB Hard Drive
Trident CyberALADDiN-P4™ 32MB
DVD 8x, CDRW 24x24x10x Optical Drive
Touchpad Mouse
86 key Keyboard
56K - V.90 Modem
TFT 15" Flatscreen
16 bit stereo & built-in speakers
3xUSB 2.0, IR, TV Out Ports
10/100 LAN
1 Year Collect and Return Warranty
SD Card slot
up to 3.3 hours Battery Time
Weighs 3.6 kg
Integrated Intel USB ADSL Modem
342 x 297 x 39 (front) / 50 (back) mm

£1199

or
Toshiba Tecra S1
Intel® Centrino™
256MB RAM
40GB Hard Drive
32MB ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON™ 9000 Graphics Card
Slim SelectBay DVD-ROM drive
weight : 2.92 kg
Lithium-ion 5.4 Battery
14.1 " TFT color display
1 x TV-out (NTSC/PAL; RCA connector), 1 x parallel (ECP), 3 x USB 2.0 ports
Wi-Fi™ Compliant.
V.90 56kbps modem
10/100 Base-TX
Built-in stereo speakers
86-key Keyboard
3-year international warranty


The package includes the following software:

Windows® XP Professional


How much will it cost?

£1,199.00 including VAT





i get a special offer from work. its cheaper interest free finance that is also tax free, and comes straight out of you wages

[Darkmatter]

Both look pretty well speced, not sure about the Trident GFX card on the P4 lappy. Price very good, if i was going to have one id take the centrino based laptop and have a CDRW upgrade.

But im happy with my trusty Dell

[Austin]

Well (IIRC) Centrino is the marketing name for the latest Mobile Intel CPU coupled with a mobo supporting ALL of the advanced power saving features. So basically the P4 is likely to be a fair deal faster BUT will kill your battery. If you will be near a wall socket or want max power then P4 makes sense, if you need full mobility the Centrino easily wins.

As for the gfx, Trident are abysmal (TNT2 IIRC) whereas Rad9000 mobility are hugely better and will give you full DX8 & compatibility with GF3 type speeds. Rad9000 is about as good as any moderately sensibly priced laptop is going to get. GF4TI4200go 'mobile' is power hungry and only really comparable to Rad9000 thanks to LOW clocks. GF-FX & Rad9600 mobile variants should be out soon and are great mobile chips BUT will cost a bomb and be rare esp in anything but the highest laptops.

It depends upon your specific reqs and prefs but for me the Toshiba Tecra S1 easily wins.

[SilentDeath]

if i was gettinga laptop, i would want it capable of atleast some games, so i wouldnt pay for one lower than this (would have it for free though )

~1.5-2ghz amd mobile cpu thingy
512mb ram
30gb hdd
Rad9600 mobile (not in most laptops, so i woudl wait a while) or r9000 mobile

[malfunction]

psalliss,

Main questions are:

1) What do you want the laptop for? Games? Office? Surfing?

2) How will you use it? Do you want / need to be able to use it away from mains power for more than 1-2 hours and do you want something with a big screen that's heavy or something that sacrifices screen size (and other features) for weight?

I've got a Toshiba Satellite that's got a 14.1" TFT, on board 16MB GF4MX and a DVD drive (only a 1.5GHz P4 Celeron too - came with 256MB RAM but I've bumped that up to 512MB). It's a big bugger and you wouldn't really want to take if from A to B twice a day every day and it will last 2 hours max on a single charge.

There are some really nice Toshiba Potégé laptops available - the Portégé M100 has a 1.2GHz Pentium M (not as slow as it sounds I imagine), a 12.1" TFT (1024x768 still), 256MB RAM (max 2048MB!), 40GB HDD and 8x DVD. On the downside it uses a variation of Intel's on-board graphics (855M chipset - presumably sharing system memory - the specs don't explicitly say this but as they say 16-64MB GFX RAM I'm making the assumption). It's also got all the usual stuff (wired LAN, wireless LAN, modem, etc) and only weighs 2Kg the best bit though is that it will go for 4.4 hours on a single battery (and you can fit a 2nd battery to push that up to 8.6 hours - probably requires you to unplug the DVD to plug in the 2nd battery though - I haven't checked that last point but that's the usually where the 2nd battery goes)... Tosh's website reckons that one is about £1,499 though.