Beware the €449 Notebook

A lot of our customers are excited by advertisements that they see for Inspiron notebooks priced at €449 from Dell and similar priced offers from PC World and Harvey Norman. The good news is that, yes, you can buy a new notebook PC for less than €500. The bad news is that you'll probably regret it almost straight away as the performance of such a notebook will be very disappointing.

Question: How do you get a notebook down to €449? Answer: By cutting back on the hardware. The following are things you should note when assessing a potential purchase.

The Processor:
Most bargain basement notebooks use an Intel Celeron or AMD Semperon processor which come from their manufacturer's "value range" of processors. This means that they are cheaper but significantly slower than full-priced processors such as the Pentium and Athlon/Turion processors. Also, you will find that these are generally single-core processors rather than the now standard dual-core processors offered in higher priced models. Dual core processors beat single core processors every time when it comes to speed.

Memory:
We see bargain basement notebooks fitted with 1 GB RAM trying to run Vista Home Premium Edition. Yes, it will run, but like a snail. You cannot get a meaningful experience running Vista Premium on machines with less than 2GB of RAM and for Vista Basic you need 1 GB RAM. Saving money on memory is just mean in our book as memory was never as cheap as it is currently.

Hard Disc:
Budget machines will have budget hard discs, typically 80GB discs running at 5400rpm. In this day and age 80 GB will fill up fast if you have a digital camera or are interested in music and you won't get the performance form a 5400 rpm disc that you would from a 7200 rpm one.

Software:
Many customers who purchased a PC 5 or 6 years ago are horrified to discover that Microsoft Office is no longer bundled "for free" with current models and baulk at the fact that they have to pay extra for it (about €120 for the Home and Student edition which cannot be used in a commercial environment). But pay you must if you want Office.

When you include a faster dual core processor and add extra RAM and a bigger, faster hard disk, Microsoft Office, plus include some of the other options that aren't standard on the budget-priced model, such as built-in webcam, or coloured lid cover then you are looking at closer to €800 to €1000. However, spending this amount gets you a notebook that you will be happy with for some years, rather than a lemon that will leave a sour taste in your mouth.

Windows 7

While Vista may appear to be a new product to many people upgrading their 2+ year-old PC or notebook, it could already be in the golden years of its product life cycle. Word has it that Microsoft may bring the shipment of Windows 7, codenamed Vienna, forward from 2010 to next year. While Vista hasn't exactly bombed, there is a broad consensus that it has failed to deliver the goods when compared to XP. Bloatware is a term frequently used when discussing Vista and the fact that it requires a more powerful PC to run more slowly than XP bears out its lumbering code. Less than 10% of businesses have converted to Vista and its sales success is down to new PC sales to the home and SoHo market. Rumor has it that one key objective for the Windows 7 development team is to slim down the kernel to make it a leaner, faster operating system. Whether this will be achieved remains to be seen, but it would certaily be a welcomed accomplishment.

Vista gets Media Center right

We are not big fans of Vista here at PC Medic, at least not in its current incarnation, and do not recommend it to our customers at this point in time. That may change when Service Pack 1 is released, but for now we have seen problems with networking, hibernation/sleep mode, and miscellaneous program crashing issues.

However, having recently had a Dell Inspiron PC in the workshop fitted with a TV Tuner card and Vista Premium, we can report that one of the things that works superbly in Vista is the Media Center in general and TV in particular. Media Center first entered the world of Windows in 2005 with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. Having had first hand experience of this version I can report that it was flaky and poorly supported.

The current version of Media Center, by contrast is stable, easy to configure and feature rich. Within 10 minutes we had tuned in all our cable TV stations, downloaded the electronic program guide (EPG) and were able to watch, pause and rewind live TV as well as recording programs. The system is as easy to use as a Sky+ box and has the same functionality e.g. from within the EPG you can record single episodes or complete series of your favourite programs with a click of the supplied remote controller.

Of course the Media Center not only handles TV superbly, but also allows you to manage music and photos with equal ease. The Vista Media Center is possibly the best piece of software Microsoft has ever written.

Now if we could just get our hands on Service Pack 1!