Sold Desktop, Bought a Dell Inspiron 1501

Okay, so I just sold my desktop PC which I had built primarily for gaming. I had eventually lost an interest in gaming and started becoming more interested in music production and DJing. So I had sold my Intel Core 2 Duo e4300. 8800 GTS 640MB, & 2GB DDR2-800 and purchased with the money I got a...

Dell Inspiron 1501
- 15.4" Screen w/ TrueLife (To pair up with my 19" Widescreen 5MS monitor I currently have)
- AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TK-53
- 120GB 5,400 RPM HDD
- 2GB DDR2

So, disregarding the new laptops performance in games, how will it run Vista? I am not familiar with AMD processors at all, so how does this stack up to some current C2D's? Also, is multi-tasking really out of the question? (burning DVD, listneing to music, browsing internet, messaging friends, working on PhotoShop) Thanks!

 

That's excellent for Vista and multi-tasking. 2 cores and 2GB of memory really help the speed. Those Turions (or is that some weird X2 mobile?) tend to be slower than Core 2 Duo (when comparing Turions on C2Ds, add 500Mhz to the C2D), but it's plenty of speed for non-gaming. If you wanted another speed boost, i'd get a large 7200RPM hard drive.

 

I got a 500GB'er ready to be 'externalized' and put into a case, how will the speeds of the 7,200 RPM and 5,400 RPM compare when the 7,200RPM is external and installed through USB?

 

USB (1.5/12Mbps) absolutely cripples hard drive speed. I can download off the internet faster than USB. USB2 (480Mbps) is much better, but it's still no where near the speed of the slowest internal hard drives or the now standard Serial ATA (3Gbps).

Games and videos will be very choppy if you run them off a USB/USB2 hard drive.

 

Basically you mean for loading games. In-game play shouldn't be an issue at all since most games "pre-load" which has a lag for a second or two on a regular HDD.

 

Some games (GTA) load the next level while you're playing to eliminate or drastically shorten load times. A slow hard drive may not have as big an effect as CPU speed, but there's a very discernable difference.

 

Not really. Maybe for loading games and applications you might notice a slight delay, but for playing movies, music etc. USB2 is more than good enough (not choppy at all). USB2 bandwidth is even sufficient to transfer UNCOMPRESSED 640x480 video. When we consider the overall HDD performance, Maximum transfer rates doesn’t matter as much as Random access times or Average Read/Write performance, therefore if you check some benchmarks you’d see that USB drives are not far behind internal drives in those areas. Besides, you may have heard of Vista Ready boost technology: a new caching technique based on USB interface functioning as a complement to system RAM (which clearly shows that USB bandwidth is not that bad)

@Karant : eSATA is currently the fastest interface for external HDDs. It is as fast as SATA internal hard disks. Therefore, if you are very concerned about HDD performance then you might want to take a look at that instead.