Upgrading

by Paul , Friday, January 27, 2012, 11:19 (4632 days ago) @ uncowboy

Last year I took the plunge. The old Toshiba had served faithfully for five years before it took a shot. The even older Compaq that replaced it was wheezing. So I started looking around. Even drifted over to Toshiba Direct and took at look at what they had. Compared with Best Buy, Amazon, NewEgg.com, etc. They had a special deal going on TD that I simply couldn't beat elsewhere. Shucks, couldn't even meet it. So I ended up with a Quad Core AMD machine with 6 gigs of RAM. I spent $100 more than your ceiling, but ended up with a nice machine that should last me another five years. Oh, and it has a nice 17" screen on it. My wife's desktop has a 20 or 21" screen and she was impressed to see how the new one looks. It's not bad for a laptop.

Anyway, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread - don't skimp on RAM. My personal minimum is 4 gigs of RAM. Hard drive size is subject to your needs and wants. I prefer to keep old files and pics on an external hard drive so my laptop doesn't need a huge HD. This one is around 640 gigs, IIRC. I just went over to Toshiba Direct and clicked the "17 and up", "$400-$600" and the "Prebuilt" choices in the left column. They have two similar machines for $559 and $599 each. The difference is the processor. One's Intel and the other is AMD. The AMD is the one I got, and it's been lightening fast (compared to my old core duo machine). As also mentioned, a lot of your browsing speed has to do with your internet company. Ours has been upgrading and I can't believe how fast email comes down and files go up, etc. Still, a reasonably decent machine helps out a lot as well.