Laptop brand names help..

[mopower440]

Looking at used or refurbished laptops, want one to just surf and watch you tube videos and stuff, looking at either dell, HP, or IBM, wondering if they are all about the same as far as durability and how long they last? are the IBM's as good as the HP and dell? again, not speaking of speed or storage capacity as that will vary, just the brand names in general.
thanks

[Train]

My favorite is Toshiba. But no matter what brand you get, follow these instructions.
http://h20239.www2.hp.com/techcenter...attery_max.htm

Prolong the battery life, some brands have batteries that are costly!

[mopower440]

my next concern is processor speed, i want the fastest one for the money and i am looking at 2 different ones for the same price, one has 1.8 ghz pentium M centrino, and the other is 1.6 ghz pentium core duo? Wich one is gonna be the better and faster processor? All i really do is surf the web and watch online videos, but iwill have antivirus running in the background and it tends to suck up processor speed so i want the quicker processor of the 2 i listed so i dont get choppiness or freezing when using the thing..If i understand right, the 1.6 core duo is really 3.2 ghz being its dual core? If so then obviously its way faster but dont know if im right on that or not..

[Ol'Tunzafun]

The 1.6 dual core (probably a T2330) will be considerably faster than the Pentium M.

[mopower440]

ok, even tho the M is bigger? (1.8 )

[bruceb]

Yes, the other one is a Dual Core processor, the M is a single core.

[Ol'Tunzafun]

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/midlow_range_cpus.html

[mopower440]

ok, let me ask this, is the pentium M faster than the regular pentium4? i thought i read that the M is faster than the regular 4? They said something about a 1.6 ghz M was equall to a 2.4 ghz pentium 4?

[Train]

Pentium M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M

[mopower440]

ya i read that but dont really understand..

[Train]

Depending on your OS and the way the program was written, the more cores the cpu has, the faster it can do things.

And generally a mobile core is slower than the desktop cpu.

[Rocketmech]

You have to consider the faster/wider FSB, bigger L2 cache memory and a greater number of processing transistors when comparing the P4-M vs Core Duo.

Example:
P4-M @ 1.8 ghz, 400Mhz FSB, 512mb cache, 55 million transistors
T2300 Core Duo @ 1.6 ghz, 667Mhz FSB, 2mb cache, 151 million transistors

The FSB, frontside bus, in this case, also indicates the speed of the system board and memory. So, the whole system runs faster in the newer Core Duo laptop. You really notice the difference during multitasking.

We all have a brand we prefer, but they are all basically the same. The big difference is usually how good is their support. I try to encourage everyone getting a laptop to get an extended warranty. They are just not built to last.

[skivvy]

One of the ONLY places I would buy an extended warranty. Rocketmech gave sound advice. Laptops break.