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Intel of course.

Pentium or Celeron?

Why?

Thanks.

pentium. more front side bus, more storage on the processor. the celeron is cheaper because it's slower. if you like sitting there looking at the mouse arrow turning into an hourglass, get the celeron.

but i am an AMD guy...would rather use their processor than intel.

and don't buy the i3...old technology- if you're upgrading then UPGRADE!

Just bought a Dell laptop from Sam's Club for $300 to replace my wife's which crashed. It came with Intel Pentium. I don't think there is a big difference though. HAJ could be more specific I bet!

All ears.....

Won't be for gaming, so dual core vs. quad?

And while we're dreaming, std seems to be 500gb and 4gb (mebbee mb? ) of what used to be called RAM.

Upgrade that?


Btw, it for my girl kid in college.

Go big on RAM.

Yep it came with a 500 GB hard drive and 4 GB RAM. More RAM is always better but for $300 it was a steal and she doesn't game on it. Just for work stuff and a bit of personal use. Movies stream fine.

Couple questions.

How much do you want to spend?

Desktop or laptop?

A-S

It's a laptop and looking for bang-for-the-buck, but probably <400.

Well, you're not going to get an I-5 for that price.........

I have an I-5 Sony laptop & it's a great computer but it will cost you north of $750; just needed to replace an old XP desktop so I bought a Win 8.1 desktop all-in-one HP with an AMD A6 processor with 8G of RAM........great price & excellent performance for routine work & non-high end gaming.

I don't care much for integrated graphics cards, but for all I do with it, it's more than sufficient.

In a laptop, you'll likely get more bang for your buck with an AMD running it.

MM

We tried to go inexpensive with my son's first school computer, and he quickly outgrew it. Truth is, kids use them alot harder then you imagine. I'd spend a few extra bucks, step up to something like this, so I would have to buy another in a couple of years:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8927031&CatId=3982

I-7
quad core
8 gigs memory
$700.00

My son just graduated HS and we got him a Dell w. an intel core i5.

Is that the same?

I Googled 'core i5 and it appears there is a range of chips under that name?

The i7 is a generation newer. It's a more capable chip.

We did that with the first laptop when she graduated HS 3 years ago.

While overseas the screen got cracked and no longer works. aptop works on HDMI into a TV. It crashed when she was in Argentina and lost all aftermarket programs - firefox, pdf, flashplayer, ccleaner, etc. A pain, but they were reinstalled.

Now it does not recognize her printer.

We were going to replace the screen, but even that thing is $250. Figure that is better spent on a new machine.

That first one was a very nice computer that rang up right at $1K.

Get the one with the fastest processor speed.........i5 will do all he/you need to do with it.

i7 is not newer, just faster & more capable; i3,i5 & i7 all came out at the same time, all are on 3rd or 4th generation.

MM

Thanks.

Next - how fast is fast enough and how much of a price premium is it worth?

I run this and I manage to stall it out now and then, I am not a gamer.

If you are talking about the internet & doing things there, you speed will be limited not by your processor, but by your Ethernet card or wireless devices & the connection speed of your ISP & also by the individual websites you are using.

For office type apps, like Excel, Work or PowerPoint, they should open within a couple of second of starting them.

If you are having to wait for more than a few seconds for an application to run, or do tasks, it's too slow.

An i5 running at 2.6 Hz or better with 6-8 gigs of memory will easily satisfy you................unless you are doing lots of graphics work or playing high end games w/o a separate graphics card.

MM

college computer.

She's going to order a 15" HP. It has an i3 w/ 2.16GHz chip.

The Univ ethernet is about 20x faster than what we have at home.

The i3 isn't a screaming chip, but is plenty for web browsing and doing homework. The 15" screen is nice for toting around in a backpack all day - the 17" machines are a pain.

Good choice.

Also buy her a USB hard drive to back her machine up to. A 4GB or so thumb drive is also useful to transfer things back and forth with others.

Yup - fortunately she had an EHD and stuff backed up before 'something' happened in Argentina. My guess is a voltage spike.

Do chargers protect against V surge?