PC processor

[Carole]

My friend has asked me to help her choose a new laptop as she is currently using a clapped out old Windows 95 desktop.

She is keen on an HP laptop.  I know about RAM and HD space, but am not well up on Processors.

The one we have seen has a processor
Intel Pentium dual core B940 processor. 2GHz processor speed

Would this be a reasonable processor for a laptop?
I don't think she will be doing much more than E Mailing, surfing, banking, webcam video calls and maybe the odd laptop game perhaps. 

It comes with  free McAfee for a year, but most people I know seem to have had problems with this, so would you advise using FreeAVG instead?

Thanks for your help.

Carole

[Carole]

Oh, and she's asked me to move all her files and favourites to her laptop when she gets it. 
Not sure how to move favourites, can you just copy the favourites file from one PC to another?

Carole

[Mac]

Intel Pentium dual core B940 processor. 2GHz processor speed

I don't think she will be doing much more than E Mailing, surfing, banking, webcam video calls and maybe the odd laptop game perhaps. 

probably serious overkill then,

should be fine.

Not sure how to move favourites, can you just copy the favourites file from one PC to another

yup its normally in a folder called favorites., just copy and paste,

Mac

[Carole]

Thanks Mac.

Carole

[mickw]

With W95, your friend will probably be using Outlook Express (email)

W7 has the all singing and dancing Windows Live (crap).

Your friend may want to practice with other email clients - Thunderbird or Gmail etc. - before swapping laptops.

[Carole]

She's been using hotmail for E mail, and as she's used to that I expect she will probably stick to it.

I am sure she is going to get me to set it all up for her so I'll take a look at what is on offer and maybe introduce her to something a bit more sophisticated.

I'm not sure what sort of broadband she has got, but hopefully it should be straight forward.

Carole

[Mac]

it should be straight forward

No chance its windows,

[Mike]

It will depend on what type of "laptop games" you mean. Even some flash games require a fair amount of GFX processing power. So the amount of ram the graphics processor will have may be important. System ram is also important, the more the merrier.

Apart from that, the specs for simply emails and surfing are not going to be all that important.

Pentium processors are considered quite old technology now and the best processors for raw power are the i3, i5 and i7 processors with more cores and more power the higher the number is.

[Carole]

Thanks Mike.  I don't think she will want to do much more than the games which normally come included with the laptop, like cards games etc, I doubt she will be downloading anything.

Carole