Proccessor up to par? Did i get a deal?

Well first of all, this forum is great and has been useful to me for about a week now and I decided to register today, the same day i bought my laptop.

I was shopping around looking to buy a laptop where i could get the most for my $1000.00 budget. I looked at dells inspirons first, then their vostros, then finally arrived at the xps line. I was instructed to avoid vista from a friend, but from consumers reviews, vista seemed to have less problems than the apple commercials suggest. Anyways I ended up getting a dell xps 1530 for a price i think is reasonably cheap and I think I still get an above par laptop. Here's the specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo t5750 2.0 ghz (667Mhz fsb/ 2mb cache)
Genuine Vista Home Premium
3 gb shared dual channel ddr2 sdram at 667 Mhz (2 dimms)
glossy, widescreen 15.4 inch lcd (1280x800); 2.0 mp camera
256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600m gt
160 gb 7200 rpm SATA Hard Drive Free Fall Sensor
Audio: HD Audio 2.0
Drive: CD/DVD reader/burner
Securitiy: Fingerprint reader
Battery: 56 whr 6 cell lithium primary battery
Wi Networking cards: Dell Wireless 1395 802.11g Mini card
Support/Hardware Services: 2 yr in home service,parts labor, 24x7 phone
Datasafe: 3 GB DataSafe online backup for 1 year

Do you think that processor will be good enough for that gfx card, and with multitasking(Itunes and internet explorer running at the same time)? I would of bought a better cpu but couldn't afford $150 more. I bought the laptop for about 980.00 out the door after taxes and shipping. Hopefully everything will work out great with my new laptop, thanks in advance

 

Your CPU isnt considered outdated yet but YES it is powerful enough to run everything these days.

 

IMHO, that laptop is decent but that processor is on the lower though it should handle your tasks pretty easily. Two things off the top of my head; #1 is that the lowest ram you could get? If not see if you can get a lower amount and upgrade yourself as it will be cheaper and wont void your warranty. #2 see the following link

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=261463

 

Nice setup. It should be fine with doing everything you want to do outside extreme performance applications (like high settings on newer games or hardcore UGNX3 or something like that). Have fun with your new setup!!

 

thanks for the replies. Do you think i got the most value for my $1000? It's sleek design and dedicated gfx card were big for me. Hard to find a laptop with dedicated gfx card under 1000. Waiting for more replies...thanks

 

I think you got a pretty great deal. Unless you somehow got a crazy coupon somewhere I am not sure where you could've gotten a better deal than that. XD

 

Well, a cheaper option would have been the Gateway M152XL.

Nonetheless, this XPS looks like a rather good deal.

 

I see this gateway has a much nicer cpu : T8300 (2.40GHz, 800MHz FSB, 3MB L2 cache)

But its gfx card im unsure about: Intel® PM965 Chipset and ATI Mobility™ Radeon® HD 2600 Graphics with 512MB GDDR3 Dedicated Memory

This laptop is 999 before taxes and shipping....1000 was my absolute max after the dust clears so i dont think this would be a good buy for me.

Thanks for your suggestion though.

 

The 2600 is slightly slower than the 8600M GT.

If you call up gateway, you can actually get a discount on it.

Nonetheless, you did get a rather decent deal with on the M1530.

 

Yes exactly. You could have saved alot, possibly enough to upgrade one of your other components, if you had simply opted to upgrade the ram yourself. Dell is extortionate for ram upgrades. Also, the 8600m gt is a bit luckluster in performance, however I suppose its good enough to run all but the latest games.

 

unless he had to use a coupon, which meant he had to reach a certain amount of $$ or the coupon wont work.

I would have opted for a better res screen though

other than that, good price.

 

Your processor is fine for almost any task. Gaming-wise, your GPU will be your bottleneck far before your processor will.

 

Yea I would have only put 1 gig if i could then install my own ram but this was not a customizable laptop unless I threw out the discount and went with dell.com...flip i was thinking about the resolution but im used to web browsers filling up the whole page and desktop icons the size of nickels...lol..stormeffect thats what i wanted to know.....thanks for your replies.