Cheap VIA C1 laptop
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I'm looking for a cheap laptop (probably new not second-hand) for a student. Mainly for word processing, a bit of spreadsheet stuff, etc. Certainly no programming, and I don't care about games! Since it is certain to be lost / stolen / broken / filled with coffee, I have no interest in buying anything even remotely state-of-the-art. I have seen a laptop using 1GHz VIA C1, 256Meg RAM, 40Gig HD, WinXP Home, for 25% cheaper than any other new laptops. Any comments?
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I'm looking for a cheap laptop (probably new not second-hand) for a student. Mainly for word processing, a bit of spreadsheet stuff, etc. Certainly no programming, and I don't care about games! Since it is certain to be lost / stolen / broken / filled with coffee, I have no interest in buying anything even remotely state-of-the-art. I have seen a laptop using 1GHz VIA C1, 256Meg RAM, 40Gig HD, WinXP Home, for 25% cheaper than any other new laptops. Any comments?
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IIRC the via chip only does half/cycle as a p3/athlon does, so performance wise it's a athlon 500, or p4 650. Shouldn't matter for what you intend but you should be aware of what you're actaully getting.
Thanks. For what it's worth, I got the processor wrong - it's a VIA C3, not C1. I found some reviews (Tom's Hardware, etc) which indicate that the floating point unit on a C3 is lousy. On benchmarks, the 1GHz C3 performs between a 433MHz Celeron and a 1GHz Celeron (depends on the test.) Since I was happy until recently with my 667 MHz Celeron (when I wasn't building projects in Visual Studio 6), a student can live with a 1GHz C3 notebook!