<p>I really don't know that much about how computers run, and on dell's website they keep showing all these extra upgrades you can get and I'm not sure which ones are worth it or not. here's my main questions.</p>
<p>1) whats the best processor on a budget: pentium M, pentium 4, celeron...</p>
<p>2) if I'm maining using internet, mp3, and ms word
---would the 80 gb hard drive upgrade be worthwhile (as opposed to the 40gb)
---would the 512mb of RAM upgrade be a lot better than the 256?</p>
<p>Thanks for your help, I got to buy a pc soon!</p>
<p>I'm assuming you're getting a laptop, because otherwise, pentium M wouldn't be on the list. P4 offers the best speed, Celeron the best monetary value, and PM the least power consumption (I think...)</p>
<p>If you REALLY like music, go for the hard drive upgrade (nice round figure: 1GB = 20 songs on CD quality, much more for compressed mp3s), since they usually aren't too expensive. Otherwise, though, 40GB is plenty. (I have an 80GB hard drive and use less than 7GB of it...)</p>
<p>RAM upgrade: unnecessary unless you like to keep a lot of windows open at once</p>
<p>Definitely upgrade the RAM, but it's cheaper to do it yourself sometimes. If you're not very good with computers, do you maybe have a friend that would be willing to install some for you? It's a 20-30 minute thing.</p>
<p>Celerons are cheaper, but if you can avoid them in any way, do. They may have the same speed as, say, some Pentium Ms, but they will perform much slower because of lower front side bus speed. In short, it'll be like having a computer half the speed.</p>
<p>"Definitely upgrade the RAM, but it's cheaper to do it yourself sometimes. If you're not very good with computers, do you maybe have a friend that would be willing to install some for you? It's a 20-30 minute thing."</p>
<p>Isn't it difficult to upgrade the RAM of a laptop?</p>
<p>It's my understand that with the exception of apples, all you have to do is open up a door on the underside. I've never done it, thought, so I'm not totally sure. I know that it's difficult to change anything else on a laptop.</p>
<p>Um the Pentium M is great for power consumption and power. The 2ghz model ranks right up there with the top P4's in the 3ghz+ range. If you are getting a laptop, a Pentium M is the way to go. You'll find that a Celeron M is quite underpowered for many tasks and you should spend enough money, but not too much on a quality laptop that will last you awhile. A Pentium M will generally get you around 3-4 hours of battery life on an 8 cell battery afaik. A Pentium 4 in a laptop on the other hand will get you about 45 minutes and wouldn't be worth it. Laptops that use the Pentium M processor usually weigh less too. A new option is the AMD Turion 64, which sports 64bit capability and it doesn't cost much more than a Pentium M, in some cases much less. For surfing the web though a Pentium M 1.5-1.7ghz will do you just fine. The ram and hard drive upgrades are also recommended. You will find that 40gb will fill up quite fast.</p>
<p>Personally, I don't care about hard drive space but I always upgrade the RAM to the max. For most storage I use external drives and media so my hard drive is always empty...</p>
<p>... so I'd say upgrade the RAM and do nothing with the hard drive.</p>
<p>definately go with the RAM. I recently went from 512mb to 1024mb and notice that at times the OS alone will use over 500mb! 256mb is really too slow for a modern OS like Windows XP.</p>
<p>A Pentium 4 will not be good in a laptop. If you need the power of a Pentium 4, go with a Pentium M. Your battery life is nothing with a power hungry P4.</p>
<p>if you say it is not a desktop because of the processor M, you are wrong, because they now have motherboards and adapters to use them in desktops (they are NICELY overclockable)</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's my understand that with the exception of apples, all you have to do is open up a door on the underside. I've never done it, thought, so I'm not totally sure. I know that it's difficult to change anything else on a laptop.
[/quote]
It's easy enough to change the RAM on an iBook too. Just lift the keyboard, take the wireless card out, unscrew the shield and slot it into the mobo. :)</p>
<p>To upgrade the RAM in a laptop takes about 30 seconds. You should definitely have at least 512MB for Windows XP.</p>
<p>The Pentium M is a more efficient version of the Pentium 4, which is much more powerful than a Celeron, which is a dumbed down version of the Pentium 4. The difference will be seen in boot time, burning CDs, and just about everything you do.</p>
<p>Get a Pentium M if you can afford one (1.5 or 1.6 GHz is fine). If not, I recommend an Athlon-64 as your next choice -- I know Dell doesn't sell these. Avoid Celeron M and Pentium 4 if at all possible (bad battery life). Spend on the processor now because you will not easily be able to upgrade it. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a Pentium M. It has good processing power and I can get 5+ hours of battery life when I'm doing basic tasks.</p>
<p>RAM is important and cheap. I say get 512 MB at the very least if you're planning on using Windows XP, no matter what you're doing. (You can easily upgrade in the future)</p>
<p>Hard drives are less important but still should matter. An average MP3 might be 5MB so you can store 200 songs per GB. You can survive with 40GB but 80GB is nicer. (You can upgrade this too in the future, but less easily)</p>
<p>If you buy a smaller hard drive now, it is possible that in the future you could buy an external hard drive for storage if you don't always need to carry all of your music collection with you at any one time. External hard drives are getting cheaper, and often have wacky rebates at Fry's.</p>
<p>RAM is what programs use while they are operating. The more you have the merrier and 256, though OK now (except for many newer games), will likely be not enough in a few years for a lot of things. 512 is quickly becoming the minimum needed.</p>
<p>Hard drive space given in gb's is where your computer stores all your programs and everything you create or download. You could probably stick microsoft word documents forever on a 40 GB hard drive and never use up the space; however, if you store a lot of music, photos, or any kind of graphic material on your hard drive you can use up space fairly quickly and getting more than 40 GB is advisable but you have the option of storing things on disks or buying a separate external hard drive that you can hook up to your computer.</p>
<p>Pentium 4, Pentium M, and Celeron are your processing chips which are used to get things started, open programs, and generally run your computer operations. The faster and more sophisticated the chip the quicker your computer will do things such as startup, open or switch programs, download, etc. P4 is generally for desktops and the highest speed ones are faster than the other two. Pentium M is not, for the most part, any noticeably slower than a 4 and is used mainly in laptops because it is designed to use less power to do the same tasks as a 4, which is important for preserving battery life. Intel actually announced last year that it would be replacing the 4 with the M even for desktops as it developed new M's, although that decision appears now up in the air. The Celeron is Intel's cheap chip (a Pentium 4 lite) which is less powerful than the other two but performs most tasks satisfactorily. </p>
<p>Upgrading RAM in a computer is easier than most who have never done so think. Even when you buy an extra RAM chip it comes with short instructions for putting it in (and anything with a computer that comes with short instructions must be easy). It basically consists of simply opening the computer, finding the RAM slots (easy to find because the RAM chip you are holding in your hand to put in will look the same as the RAM chip that is in your computer and nothing else in there looks like it) and putting it into the available slot.</p>