I really need to make this decision soon....help!

Why is it that the final decisions take sooooo long to make! I started out on a simple quest...get my wife a new laptop to replace her 4 year old Sony Vaio. She surfs the net, rips some cd's, prints some photos, does some word processing and email and plays some softcore games...the most taxing would be a sims like game. Simple enough....

It took a couple of weeks of shopping the net, reading reviews and various posts, and taking a ride out to the mall and Best Buy to check out Dell, HP and Toshiba offerings. I thought I was going to love the HP dv6000 - I didn't...I thought I would hate the Dell e1505 - I didn't. I actually like it a lot more than I would have thought. I must be getting old, but I thought it WAS stylish. The Toshiba build quality and looks were good, but, for the money they just didn't make the cut.

So I'm done right? Go with the e1505 and be done with it. Wrong! I ran so many configurations yesterday that I woke up thinking about new ones...make this trade off and don't use the 20% coupon - what do you get? Make that trade off and use the 20% coupon - what do you get? Add this, that and the other thing and what do you get...WHAT do you get? WHAT DO you get? WHAT DO YOU GET?????

You could help.....

I've got it down to one of two options. I am already above my wifes needs but I figure I'd like for this to last 3-4 years for her and then we have children that love to use our old technology....they will still be young enough to have some fun with this down the road.

Option 1:
Core Duo T2050
1 GB DDR2 SDRAM
80 GB hard drive 7200
x1400 GPU (256 mb)
6 cell battery

or

Option 2:
go with the 80 GB hard drive @ 5400 rpm and upgrade the Core Duo T2050 to the Core Duo 2 T5500

Probably marginal benefit either way...my wife could benefit a little today with 7200 rpm (or does she really need this) or the kids could benefit from any 64 bit software down the road (but then again, who can predict the future).

I'm happy to be almost done with this decision tree...but something tells me I'm not done yet -- i.e. buy today or wait and see if there is a labor day sale, or maybe an after back to school sale, or maybe a Thanksgiving Day sale....hey, I know, prices will surely come down for Christmas....after Christmas might be the best time.......

 

i thought i'd hate the e1505 as well, but i was about to pay an extra £200 for similar specs just because it looked ugly in my opinion. but the e1505 does offer good value for money, what are the prices for the configurations, if its marginal i'd say go for your second one

 

Both options come out to just under $850 U.S..

I could pay another $40 and just do both the Core Duo 2 and 7200 hard drive, but like I said, her base needs would probably warrant a $750 machine and I'm already spending $100 over that. Thanks.

 

Second one, the hdd dont help that much, i am using it on the xps 1210

 

For the tasks that she is doing then the HD doesn't need to be 7200 RPM, I would go with the better CPU, because if you do end up wanting to upgrade the hard drive at a later time, its really simple, or you can always get an external one.