Laptop Advice

[Sparky Joe]

My girlfriend is looking at buying a laptop, just for general purpose use. What are some key components to look for? she only has about 800 bucks to spend, and she is very impulsive, so a speedy response would be appreciated, thanks

-Joe

 

[Tedster]

memory (at least 1gb) the more memory in latops, the less your hard drive has to work and thus the more battery time you save.
battery life -at least 2 hours or more.
hard drive space (40 to 60gb is plenty for general computing)
Wifi card (essential for laptops)
plenty of usb ports (3 or more)
ethernet port - essential when wifi isn't available
dial up modem (nice for legacy purposes but not essential)
runs cool - very important. Some brands of laptops run very hot - like dell. I don't recommend some of their models for this reason - they burn up easily.

speed is not really an issue for general office use and surfing.
and 1.6ghz or faster laptop is plenty fast.

a 7200rpm hard drive is fast, but not essential

 

[XenaWP]

A 14" minimum screen is useful, 15" better. Unless you're some kind of ... unusual person ... the 17" widescreen displays are just silly in a laptop.

Slim and lightweight is good for us ladies ... easier to tote.

 

[Sparky Joe]

Well she saw a sale at Comp USA(very good deal)850 up front and 250 in rebates. It has a core duo at 1.6(533bus), 1 stick of 512 DDR2(also at 533), video memory is shared(no big deal),2 50gig PATA drives, 15" widescreen, centrino, bluetooth, and a card reader(which surprisingly takes our fuji XD card).

The problem is, we brought it home, turned it on, and saw 63 processes running, which were using about 240Megs of the RAM. How do I get rid of all the preinstalled crap? I would like to just wipe it clean, but don't want to lose the operating system.

Also, we intend to buy more RAM(because there is one empty slot), but I'd like to have the 2 sticks from the same manufacturer, or does it really matter? And would it take dual channel sticks, or do I have to do my reading on whether or not it will?

Thanks -Joe

Oh Yeah, It's and Acer Aspire 5601awlmi