xgrantx Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 I was looking for a cheap netbook and have found a few laptops with dvd drives and higher specs for about the same price. Can you give me your opinion on this laptop. It's cheap 350... and it looks like it would be good enough but I wanted someone more computer literate than me to give me an opinion. I don't game or anything...I will watch video, internet, and music. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834114805 Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sgoodcore Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 For the price and for what you want it looks great. The two things you might want to do are upgrade the hard drive to something both bigger and faster. Something like a 500GB (7200 RPM) drive should allow you to store a ton of movies and music and allow you to access it faster. That said, a higher RPM drive could impact battery life. The other thing I'd do is bump the RAM, at some point, to 4GB. Everything else looks good and Toshiba makes a good product from what I understand. I wouldn't expect the laptop to last more than a couple of years though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamlikesmusic Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 For the price and for what you want it looks great. The two things you might want to do are upgrade the hard drive to something both bigger and faster. Something like a 500GB (7200 RPM) drive should allow you to store a ton of movies and music and allow you to access it faster. That said, a higher RPM drive could impact battery life. The other thing I'd do is bump the RAM, at some point, to 4GB. Everything else looks good and Toshiba makes a good product from what I understand. I wouldn't expect the laptop to last more than a couple of years though. Not that it's all that expensive of an upgrade, but for watching video, internet, and music, I think 2 gigs of memory is more than enough. As for the HDD, I'd say it depends if he's streaming or downloading. I had a Toshiba Satellite 6-7 years ago and it was good. But 13 year old me fucked it up with porn/viruses, so I didn't use it for long. I recently took it out of my closet and reformatted the HDD, and it surprisingly works fine now. Granted it has 512mb of memory and a 20GB HDD. (Which is almost exclusively used for Vista...) Edit - typo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xgrantx Posted April 23, 2010 Author Share Posted April 23, 2010 Those Ram card just plug right in pretty easily right? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
thesupervillain Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 For the price and for what you want it looks great. The two things you might want to do are upgrade the hard drive to something both bigger and faster. Something like a 500GB (7200 RPM) drive should allow you to store a ton of movies and music and allow you to access it faster. That said, a higher RPM drive could impact battery life. The other thing I'd do is bump the RAM, at some point, to 4GB. Everything else looks good and Toshiba makes a good product from what I understand. I wouldn't expect the laptop to last more than a couple of years though. I agree with most of this stuff. A couple things to keep in mind though: 1) A 5400 RPM drive is fine for a laptop. Like he said, 7200 affects your battery life and the tradeoff for a tiny bit of performance compared to a more noticeable drain on your battery just isn't worth it. Also, 7200 RPM drives tend to cause more heat, which is not usually good for a laptop. 2) More RAM is always better, but I'm not sure how accessible this particular laptop is. Upgrading RAM in some laptops can be really frustrating and ultimately not worth the hassle. It might behoove you to do a little Googling about upgrading RAM in that model or line of laptop. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
benc Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest eriathomas Posted April 23, 2010 Share Posted April 23, 2010 Well, the RAM is expandable to 8gig, so I imagine it just has an access door like any laptop. The processor in it is very weak, and only is single-core, but this won't matter much if all you do it browse the web/listen to music/watch dvds- though flash sites like hulu may bog it down. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brennan Posted April 24, 2010 Share Posted April 24, 2010 Honestly I think this laptop is perfect for you. 250GB of movies is a lot. Movies are typically (if you aren't downloading blu ray movies) ripped to 700MB, im pretty sure that's so they fit on a cd (or dvd maybe?) although i do have some that are up to 1.2GB. I have about 150 movies on my pc right now on a 500GB hard drive and i have plenty of spare space. In fact in total im currently using 257GB. If you do download blu ray movies i think they're 4 gigabytes (correct me if i'm wrong someone). I also happen to have 2GB of ram and I am running a gaming PC. I don't play very intensive games though (and i run a high end graphics card). I really don't think you'd ever need more than 2 Gigs of ram for anything. I think I've maxed my ram under only a couple cases (leaving firefox open for a really long time, wmp in the background, and trying to compile a program using some ram intensive IDE). Unless you plan on using some sort of 3d graphing or drafting program 2 gigs should be fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
impact Posted April 25, 2010 Share Posted April 25, 2010 Get a netbook, put a SSD in it, and run ubuntu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sgoodcore Posted April 25, 2010 Share Posted April 25, 2010 Get a netbook, put a SSD in it, and run ubuntu Seems about the level of someone asking for advice on a message board about a computer. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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