blonde poker forum

Help required!
Close to buying a Laptop as a back up to my PC, would appreciate a little advice.

I suppose the main reason for buying a Laptop/notebook would be the convenience of using it to play Poker in any room in the house (fed up being isolated in a small dull study!) have a great conservatory which I am seldom in!

I am currently looking at a Dell Inspiron 6400 which I think would meet my needs, which are modest.  It looks like good value to me.

Before I click the "buy" button has anyone got any thoughts, re suitability, addons etc.

Any comments re the best wireless connection would also be appreciated.

Oh any advice on internet connection when using it abroad when on holiday would be great.


The following is the spec on the Dell Inspiropn 6400 I am considering:

InspironTM 6400
Larger hard drive for storing more    
£449
Includes VAT & Shipping

Product Details

Processor
 Intel® Pentium® Dual-Core T2080 Processor (1.73GHz,533MHz,1MB L2 cache)   
Operating system
 
Genuine Windows Vista™ Home Premium - English
   
Memory
 1024MB 533MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x512]   

Monitor
 15.4" Wide Screen WXGA (1280 x 800) Display   

Harddrive
 120GB (5400rpm) SATA Hard Drive   
Optical Drive
 
Fixed Internal 8X DVD+/-RW Drive including software   
Graphic Card
 
Intel® Media Accelerator 950 Graphics Up to 256MB shared graphics memory   

Not that I know much about laptops but usually use dabs as they have a good way of breaking down what you want and then leaving u with the options and prices af what is there..

http://www.dabs.com/productlist.aspx?&NavigationKey=11105&NavigationKey=4294959538&NavigationKey=46160000&NavigationKey=49290000&NavigationKey=42880000&NavigationKey=408450000&NavigationKey=49340000&NavigationKey=49320000&NavigationKey=407140000&CategorySelectedId=11105&PageMode=1

Got that, but ur better probably doing your own search, but the price u have seems good..
Good luck..

If you can, get XP instead of Vista. Vista is horrible bloated spyware

Spend another 20 minutes shopping around, i bet you can find a laptop with a better processor (intel core 2 duo). It will be worth it, trust me :)



Nevermind i used google:

£414-http://www.google.co.uk/product_url?q=http://www.vartate.com/purchase/product.cfm%3FManufacturer%3DAcer%26Partno%3DLX.TH90X.001&fr=ABwfaj-26_ptURWuEV9-JG3A96RvuHeawAAAAAAAAAAA&gl=uk&hl=en (http://www.google.co.uk/product_url?q=http://www.vartate.com/purchase/product.cfm%3FManufacturer%3DAcer%26Partno%3DLX.TH90X.001&fr=ABwfaj-26_ptURWuEV9-JG3A96RvuHeawAAAAAAAAAAA&gl=uk&hl=en)

£423- http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=19554 (http://www.microdirect.co.uk/ProductInfo.aspx?ProductID=19554)

Although most people dont know a whole lot about computers, processors are usually the most important thing, and you getting an "intel core 2 duo" instead of an "intel core duo" is a pretty big difference. If you are prepared to pay £450 for a laptop you should be getting better than what you posted above (Dell dont make cheap laptops, i learned this a couple years ago)

I saw the advert for this on TV the other day, looks interesting http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/freelaptop (http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/editorial/freelaptop)

Also, with Dell give them a call rather than just buying it, they can reduce the prices a bit.

If you want a cheap notebook then drop me a line - can do you a good deal on one :)up

forgot to mention - they come in lots of different colours..............

As others have said, try to get XP instead of Vista. If you can not avoid Vista then it is worth considering upping the ram to 2meg instead of the standard 1meg.
You will notice the difference.

I'd go with vista not XP, gotta upgrade sometime and as the laptop is designed to come with vista you shouldn't have the hardware / driver issues that cause most people the problems. Maybe look for 2GB RAM, it's pretty standard on desktops these days but not essential.

I would stick with XP, why fix what ain't broke.

Not sure of the exact number but it's some in the range of 30 out of 70 Vista components 'phone home' some of them daily
Problems with copying, moving and deleting files because DRM is checking every byte to make sure you have a licensed copy, if it detects (possibly falsely) that something is not right it will purposefully degrade performance
It's sold on a $1=£1 basis for no good reason except we're total mugs.
And a litany of other little bugs and privacy, incompatibility and security issues. Add on to that an operating system shouldn't need a top of the range machine to run it cos at the end of the day its just a damn operating system.
Sure it's got a gee-whiz-neato 3d window selector but it's still a steaming pile of crap.

The only reason anyone should need a top of the range pc is to either play games or run NASA from the OP it look like what's needed is a laptop that can play some poker, surf the net, send emails and possibly a few other things that aren't going to be to taxing on the machine, why pay top dollar just on Microsofts say-so.




IMHO.  :)

I turned DRM off in the first 10 minutres of having vista.

$1 = £1.... more reason to get it bundled with your PC then?

Incompatibility, mostly harware issues (the serious ones anyway), not likely with a new PC (still possible of course).

Bugs. All seems sorted for me. It has an incredibly good feature which identifies (most of the time) whatever caused a crash or mishap and shows you how to resolve it.

Now the rest of it doesn't hold any weight at all... Yes you shouldn't necessarily need a top end PC just for your OS. Well, you don't, it OPTIONAL. If you are getting a new PC anyway that is more than capable of running it then you can't say there is no point getting that OS becuase your PC shouldn't need to be that good  >:? Regards to what computing power it needed for just poker, you should be critisising the PC choice not the OS choise if anything.

PS, I am mainly doing all this so that you (ImMrChip) aren't turned off to Vista automatically by everyone saying 'go for XP'. Vista isn't that bad (some might even say it's good if they wouldn't be thought an idiot ;whistle;) and chances are you are only going to have to buy a seperate copy and reinstall your OS at some stage in the future.

I'd say RAM is important, but it's something you can always add on after you've purchased (but maybe at a higher cost?).

Anyone who's using 1GB of RAM, upgrade to 2GB and you'll be amazed at the difference, particularly if you run a number of different progams at once (especially graphics packages or pokertracker!).

I have been using vista for some time now with no problems. Rich could you let me know how to turn of the drm.

I bought two laptops at the weekend. The mother in law is visiting for a month(!) and disaproves of poker so I needed a portable refuge uregently as my two PC's are in the spare room and my better half needed a way to check her ebay auctions which I sure as hell wasnt going to be interupted on my laptop in the middle of a tourney for!
So off we trotted to PC World and begrudgingly handed over some cash for two lappys. Impossible to avoid Vista, but that's not the end of the world for me needs. Although I did opt for a machine with 2gb of ram, my other half got one with only a gig and the difference is very noticeable.

Out of interest, has anyone taken advantage of the £300 off deal which Orange broadband are doing? Sounds like it worth considering as £300 is a major saving. Just depends on how bad/good their broadband service is I guess as being tied to them for 2 years could be hell if you have a nice shiney laptop but an inconsistant connection

I'm not sure you can as the os was built around the drm, I think Rich might be confusing it with UAC (user account control). Try Googling Vista DRM, if you find anything complementary about it I'd be surprised.

http://www.forbes.com/security/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html (http://www.forbes.com/security/2007/02/10/microsoft-vista-drm-tech-security-cz_bs_0212vista.html)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/vista_drm_analysis/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/28/vista_drm_analysis/)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/27/windows_drm_monstered/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/27/windows_drm_monstered/)

I also was making my best recommendation to the op, in the same way as I'd recommend Firefox over IE to everyone. On the surface there my not be a huge amount of difference but taking into the account the impact they both have/will have on the industry as a whole I thought I'd chime up. Still it's all about opinions.

Yep,  ;whistle;

Please tell me you work for micro$soft please ? The original post was 100% correct and true.

I've only been programming since ms-dos 1.00 and Vista is a serious disaster which could be the straw that breaks the behomeths back.

Dougie

If you're gonna buy online, use a cashback service like quidco.

what does this mean?

Not from me.
I tried to get a bag thrown in or a discount at the weekend for buying 2 laptops at the same time and had no joy.

I'm no expert but I think that one you linked to has a Intel Pentium Dual Core processor. It is my understanding that the INTEL CORE 2 DUO are considered quite a bit better than the standard dual cores. I'm sure a more technical person could offer more informed input for you.

I thought Ionescu's hack was proved to be rubbish? No? Do you have a link?

Basically, you sign up to quidco or other sites like it, and purchase your goods through an affiliate link they provide. They track the purchase, and give you a percentage of your money back.

MSE.com (http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/shopping/cheap-online-shopping-shopbots)

This link (non-affiliated) should have more information on it, and other ways to save whilst shopping online.

http://www.quidco.com/ (http://www.quidco.com/)

You could look on here for any discount codes,

http://www.hotukdeals.com/main.html (http://www.hotukdeals.com/main.html)

I hope this helps.

Vista is working fine and dandy for me on my main PC. I do have a few PCs and OSes to fall back on if I had problems, but I haven't had many.

For the average user, who will in the not so distant future probably have to pay and take the time to upgrade to vista, I don't think it's that great a decision to go for XP. Maybe still 50/50 but there are plenty of people saying go for XP (all well and good advice) and if you want XP got for it. I'm just giving the other side of it, works fine for me, some nice additions over XP that I like and I'm happy with it. I'm sure there are 1 or 2 others that are happy with vista and are just scared of getting flamed.

How many of you have tried it out medium term? And what was your reason for not sticking with it? Hardware compatibility?? That doesn't count :P

http://www.aldi-stores.co.uk/special_buys/special_buys_pid_56680.html

Don't know if this is any good or not, but seems to have a decent spec.