OK, so...as a sort of post joining college thing Im getting a Notebook. Go me. There are however 2 problems with this, firstly that it has to be a Dell because my parents wont buy it from anywhere else and secondly I have a budget of around £400 ($800 ish american.)

So anyway Im stuck with either an Inspiron 1501 with a 1.9ghz Turion processor with an ati 256mb video card thing with appauling battery life and little hd space, or an Inspiron 6400, formerly the e1505 with a 1.86ghz processor, good hd space and battery life but an integrated (shudder) gma 950 video card.

So I ask to you, people of Tangler which one is best?

What's the full name of the 256MB ATI? Could be it's not that hot either.

It really depends what you want to do with it - doesn't sound like either one is going to make much of a games machine, so maybe it'd be best to cut your losses, take the better HD and battery and stick to less graphics-intensive stuff.

Yeah, comes down to whether you want to play games that much. Are you going to take it too classes/or just leave it in your room - in which case the battery life may not matter that much.

Well my games arent that really state of the art but if I was to buy a newer game would it be able to cope?

The battery life, granted I dont need that much but its other stuff too like the 6400 comes with a truelife screen and a 1 year warranty (compared to 90 days on the 1501) and as its a Dell its bound to set itself on fire.

Looking at Dell's selection of laptops, I see the 2 you're looking at (I think)

You could always take the £349 1501 and upgrade to a 9 cell battery (+£30) and a 120GB hard drive (+£20)

Still comes in within the £400 budget, and you can avoid the GMA graphics accelerator.

Another £10 would get it up to a 160GB hard drive, the Truelife stuff on the screen is £20, £40 gets you an extra GB of RAM which would probably be more of a boost than the extra hard drive space or Truelife screen. You could go to a dual core CPU for an extra £30... all these customisable options

Pick and choose what's most important to you, then rethink your priorities and try again to get the price down below £700. Hehe, that's probably how Dell make their money - lead you in with a £349 base system, then make all the incremental upgrade prices small on a per-component basis, but collectively they bump the price up considerably.

But you can use it to your advantage if you have a clear idea of what you want the machine to do - and hence which things you can cheap out on, and which things to upgrade as far as you can afford.

Oh, and bear in mind that ATI's hypermemory thing means it'll be borrowing some space in RAM to make up the difference with the dedicated memory on the card itself - most likely it has 128MB on the card, and nicks 128MB from RAM.

Although an integrated chip will be doing the same... just saying that 256MB of hypermemory isn't nearly the same as a 256MB graphics card.

With that in mind.. I wouldn't expect to get much gaming done with anything too recent.

kk cheers. Should be ordering it by the end of the week. This will come in handy.