My dad asked me about this, and I have not been keeping up with PC laptops lately. It’ll be used for small business administrative tasks and some light development (html, js, zencart admin/template work). It’ll be stationary most of the time, if not always.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
the hard drive sucks (switch to 7200 rpm HDD or 512GB SSD), and I would recommend finding the same model at a showroom to check the quality and resolution of the display.
Otherwise it’s decent enough. The GMA onboard video is going to be terrible for anything beyond your requirements so resale value is going to be quite low.
I don’t think the hard drive being a bit slow matters for the tasks you outline.
If your Dad wants to check it out, Bestbuy has the same model for $0.50 more, so he could go and check it out and even buy it there if he wanted to. (Of course, he may live somewhere that Amazon doesn’t charge tax and be better off with them, as long as he’s not the type who actually pays the use tax.)
If it’s always stationary you could probably get far better reliability from a desktop at a similar price point. It depends on what the perceived lifespan of it should be. In my world a sub $1000 laptop is something I don’t buy warranties on and don’t worry too much about reliability on, because I figure I’ll be replacing it every 3-4 years anyway as progress marches forward. A desktop I expect to last a bit longer (since I can upgrade components).
Yeah, great idea. Put in a SSD that’s almost the price of the laptop itself.
The screen resolution is only 1366x768 but since it’s going to be stationary most of the time you could use an extra monitor (and be slightly more productive by using both). It’s not a great deal, but those specs should be fine for what you want it to do.
a faster drive would turn the laptop into a decent temporary test server for clients to access websites from (assuming the office doesn’t have really low upstream bandwidth caps). Especially if the faster drive was SSD and the site had a 15 people trying out an e-commerce type site simultaneously.
Great feedback & suggestions, thanks guys :) that’ll help.