new laptop

Your first two respondents asked the right questions 1. What would you use it for - if you were only to use it on simple applications such as browsing the internet, using Microsoft Office (Word Document, Excel, Power Point), etc. then you don't need very high requirements. You'll have different needs if you were a gamer (although most gamers know their needs because they often check what specifications are required by most recent games). If you're a programmer then it depends on what platform you use - database-related consume a lot of memory and so do photo and video editing tools. 2. How much is your budget? No matter how good your target laptop specifications are, it still all depends on how much you can spend :P Thank you for your response on my discussion!

What are you going to use it for and how's your budget? :) There are alot of great laptops being sold for under $500 now that are not netbooks (netbooks are those tiny guys 7-9") I think any kind of dual core should be fine just as the post before me said, but you can even run AMD processors for just "browsing and document work" since they are much lower in price. I would recommend 2gb ram for anything nowadays though. Windows Vista eats about 1gb ram and Windows 7 will eat a little bit more, but it is already a lot faster, in beta phase :) I don't know where you're located but if you are in the US you can check out NewEgg (www.newegg.com) browse through their assortment of laptops and you can sort by popularity price and reviews :)

What are you planning on using it for? If you're just using it to send email, myLot, use MSN, browse the web, etc., then a basic dual core with say 1 GIG of memory (RAM), 170 GB hard drive/disk space, wireless capabilities (if you'll need it) should be fine. That's roughly what I'm using, and seems to be the generic base laptop now. Anything higher in processor speed, and it'll be better for multi-tasking (having a million and one things open at once) or heavy duty gaming, like Half-Life for example, but if you're not going to need the extra speed, why pay extra for it? In theory, you should even be fine with a p4, but it would be a little slow. The only problem is, is that Windows 7 is coming out, and I'm sure that a faster processor will be coming out in the next year or two, so knowing computers, the p4 would be that much further behind, and new programs might slow things down even more, but it's up to you.