[atart]

Looking to buy a laptop for college and am considering a dell since they always seem to have these coupon sales going. anyway, was checking out their site and ran into the budget latitude line of laptops and very much like the look, dont quite appreciate the look on the current line inspirons.

since this is going to be for college use strictly, maybe minimal gaming (age of empires

) how does this look?

Latitude D520

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/prod...=04&l=en&s=bsd

Planning to spec it to:

Core Duo T2300
XP Home w/ SP2
14.1 inch (would the 15 offer better clarity etc. over the 14 or is just a size upgrade?)
512mb ddr-2 533mhz ram (once the laptop's here, i'll take it out and sell it on ebay, thinking of buy 2 1gb sticks of corsair value select on newegg)
40gb 5400 rpm hard drive
24X CD-Rom (have an external drive to dump data on, barely burn cd's anyway)
Intel 3945 wireless card
6 cell battery


anything that needs to be changed? will the extra mhz of the T2400 be beneficial for everyday computing needs (movies, word processing, internet, maybe a bit of encoding)

im pretty much set on the extra ram since i always have a whole bunch of stuff running in the background, not sure if i have 2gb worth, so need to decide between one stick of 1gb or two.

any suggestions welcome, thanks

 

[smuh]

We got the Dell D600 and D610's at work. The D600 overheat almost all the time. You find yourself putting the D600 in the fridge while installing Windows XP or loading an image on it...

The D610's battery don't really last that long and the touchpads are slow responding and unprecise. The plastic of the case feels cheap.

I am the the lucky user of one of the few HP 6125's/HP8220's/6220's before we started buying/exchanging everything with Dell.

The Desktops we got are okay, but on 5% of all desktops the psu's are faulty...

I would try to find a cheap HP/Compaq.

Regards,
André