I just can't resist a bargain. And sometimes this gets the better of me. A lot of students have been asking me about the best computer for our course. I've been saying that just about anything that you buy will deliver the goods as far as the practical portion is concerned. This week I thought I'd put my money where my mouth is, and so I bought the cheapest laptop I could find and tried to find out just how much good it is. I could do with a new laptop for my work, and so off I went.
Now, when you buy a very cheap laptop you have to be a bit careful. It must have a processor by AMD or Intel (there are some out there with Cyrix chips which are to be avoided). And don't get anything with less than 256 MB of RAM and 20 GB of hard disk. Having said that, I managed to get a very presentable machine, made by Acer and incorporating an Intel Celeron, 256MB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, DVD/CD ROM burner and a nice 15 inch display. This cost me 499 pounds, which I reckon is excellent value. It is made by Acer (not a bad brand) and is their 2303LC. I bought it from Comet, a well known supplier. It has all the usual connections, including wired network, telephone modem, sound, video and USB ports. The only thing that it really lacks is a WIFI wireless network connection. But you can pick up PCMCIA cards which do this for around 35 quid if you want. I had one lying around at home and so I've been using it very successfully.
Like many other machines in this price band the unit is shipped with Windows XP home, a DVD player program, a CD writer program and not much else - which is fair enough. If you are a student you can get just about all the other Microsoft software free of charge one way or another. This works best if, like Hull, your department is in the Microsoft Academic Alliance. In that case you can get just about everything but Office on your machine. It turns out that the lowly Wordpad program, which ships with Windows XP is actually quite good for turning out reports, even handling things like embedded images quite well. If you want Office you will have to pay money for that, but there are a number of good schemes to get hold of this stuff. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/uk/academia/students/discounts/ for more info.
But I wanted to see how well my shiny new machine would let me write programs. So it was on with Visual Studio 2003 and the Smartphone SDK (both of which we have been giving away to students from the start of the semester). Now conventional wisdom is that a big program like Visual Studio would struggle in only 256MB of RAM. Well, it might do - but I didn't notice. I've taken the precaution of ordering another 512MB of ram for this machine (which I got for 74 quid from orcalogic (http://www.orcalogic.co.uk/asp/default.asp) but I don't think it is needed for running Studio by itself. (however it will be useful if I want to write documents and compile programs at the same time).
The next step is to try some of the graphics practical work on the machine. I'm not expecting great shakes, but I'm not too worried either. I didn't buy this machine for playing fast moving games, and I've spent quite a few happy hours playing Counterstrike and Unreal Tournament on a machine with very similar performance. I'll let you know how I get on.
But for now, all I can say is that at this price the machine is a steal. It has the advantage of being around half the price of many others and, once I get the extra memory fitted I reckon that it will give systems over 1,000 pounds a really good run for their money on office and programming tasks. Extra memory really does compensate for processor speed and not many machines under 1K have over 512MB of ram. My advice, if you are looking for a portable workhorse machine would be to get one of these.