First time buyer of a Inspiron 1720, have some questions

I bought myself an Inspiron 1720 last night from Dell Canada's website. For some reason I still haven't received the confirmation email but customer support says my machine is in production. Anyway, I chose the version with the C2D T7250, 2gb memory, 256mb 8600M GT, 160gb 5400 rpm hard drive, 8x dual layer dvd burner, two 9-cell batteries, Midnight Blue color and the low end 1440x900 screen without TrueLife. A friend of mine has an Inspiron 1501 and his screen has TrueLife, awesome colors and contrast but the reflections are unbearable. I kinda wish I had gone for the higher res screen now. When I placed the order, the best cpu in the bundled packages was the T7250. How much performance am I going to be missing out on due to the 2m cache compared to the 4m cache on the other C2D's? Is it 2m per core or 2m shared between the two? The only way I could have gotten the T7500 or the T7700 was to choose just the basic 1720 and select all the parts myself which would have ended up costing me about 500 bucks more that way. How well will my new notebook play games? I'm not really into any of the modern games, especially first-person shooters. The only modern games I play are WoW and Test Drive Unlimited. Is the T7250 the Merom-2M or the Penryn? What chipset does the 1720 use? Does it have the Centrino duo branding? The estimated delivery date is Dec. 7th. Hopefully there won't be any delays.

 

I'm surprised you didn't get all these questions answered BEFORE you ordered your computer...

You'll be satisfied with your computer. The T7250 is a Merom. Your other questions... Dell should have covered it or you can google it easily.

 

the cache wont make a large difference even less when u are not stressing the cpu.as for games the gpu will run old games at high and new games at medium high so your good to go

 

Dude I almost think you over-configured your laptops for what you need, (but then again, there are future concerns that counts and plus, I don't know any idea about your budget)

as for your concern about cache, I think you would be fine (notice AMD processors usually only have 512KB or 1MB and I don't see them complaning so much about it, although, Intel shares the cache and AMD has it dedicated per core) and Wow and Test drive is pretty low graphically intensive game for "modern" game, so it even runs fine in IGP crap (Intel X3100, nVidia 7150M)
Processor=Merom. Penryn is not out yet bro. 65nm processor is still the reality in 2007

 

Heh, overconfigured. More powah is always good! It's gonna be one heck of a change from my current desktop machine. It's only got an Athlon xp 2400, 768mb pc2100 ram, a 256mb radeon 9600xt and an ancient ECS K7S5A motherboard. My only question now is, does the 1701 with the T7250 use the Santa Rosa platform? I've been doing a lot of reading and it sounds like Santa Rosa has a bunch of nice features for mobile computing.

 

I have a very similar setup.

Wow- Full Graphics, hi-res, full details/enviromental effects, no lag, always have 60 FPS.

Company of heroes plays fine at stock settings, it started lagging when i maxed eerything, so i went back to stock.

HL2/Portal is med-high before any noticeable lag or hang-ups.

Basically, your system will do you just fine, and last a long time for what you use it for.

good luck.

 

I wouldn't worry about the screen resolution too much if I was you.

Every now and again I've thought to myself "I wonder how much sweeter it'd be if I had the higher res on my 1720", but at the end, I'm glad I got 1440x900. After viewing 1680x1050 on a 17" machine in a shop one day, my eyes wouldn't be able to cope with 1920x1200.

I understand the feeling of the stepup of power though. My trusty old desktop is an AXP2600+/512MB/R9500SE, and my 1720 simply blows it out of the water. Vista is a bit of an arse (There are bits of it that I really like), and I'll get around to putting XP on it one day.