If you want Intel take Intel Centrino Technology - good power and lower
battery "consumption" !
Intel M is OK but I recommend you buying AMD Athlon 64 - powerfull and cheap
; buy at least 1 GB of RAM !
Hope this helps !
Best Regards,
J. Jarocki
As long as the processor is of reasonable speed (and probably not a
Celeron), it should handle ProE with no trouble.
I would pay more attention to RAM, the graphics card, and OS. 512MB
is the minimum (probably the bare minimum) for acceptable performance
and 1GB desirable. Also, beware the ATI Radeon graphics card. It is
virtually the only thing Dell offers in the Inspiron line, except in
the lower range, and spells death to ProE. I have tried almost every
hack available to make these cards work well with ProE, but have had
little success. Get ready for complete, power-down system lock-ups
when opening more than 4 or 5 parts simultaneously. Also, these
laptops are going to come standard with XP Home, when XP Pro is best.
A better choice is the GEForce graphic card, found on most Latitude
and Precision M60 laptops.
Regards
Thank you for your advice and help.
In the contrary, 17" AMD 64 laptop is more expensive than Pentium M at
least for this particular case due to 15% rebate at Dell. It starts
around $2500 min and go up to $3000+ with similar configuration.
While Pentium M and P4 will run about $2200 max. I also try other 17"
manufacture such as Sony and Toshiba, their price usually in the $2700
is out of my range.
I hope that Dell will offer Nvidia card later on next year. If they
do, I may have a chance to upgrade then. I do a little research and
believe that many Inspiron owners have been able to upgrade their
display adapter from ATI to Nvidia in the past. In the worst case
scenario where Dell doesn't offer any Nvidia card, I will purchase one
from M60 and try to put it in my laptop. If it doesn't work, I am
still able to return the product. The OS and RAM is not a problem.
Since it's easy enough to increase the RAM and install XP Prof.
By the way, I've drop ATI techsupport a line about my findings and
waiting for their response. Let's wait and see what their response
will be.
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