Acer Laptop Recommendation/Review Request

Right now I’m running a Presario 900, mobile amd athlon(tm) xp 1500+
1.33 GHz, 240 MB RAM, 18.6 GB HD. As can be expected, working simultaneously in Flash and Photoshop, while browsing and doing other miscellaneous things, can be a bit overbearing. Recently I became interested in upgrading, but found out that the potential is extremely low, so my conclusion is getting a new laptop. I have been researching various kinds and have found that the “Acer TravelMate 4500 Series Intel Pentium M 745” (http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=264231) boasts impressive statistics, including 1.8 ghz, 1gb ram, 2gb l2 cache, and a 100gb hd. This is the best deal that I have found, but because of my lack of experience with Acer I would like to know of any comments any of you have on this laptop, and/or recommendations for another (btw, the price for this is about $1500 and I would like to stay near this price.) As a side note, I do not know much about graphics cards..this one has the “Intel® 855GME chipset with integrated graphics”, will this do well for modern video games also?

Very respectfully,
clicky

You're not going to get much better performance from a laptop. You are better off going with a gamer desktop if you are looking for performance. You will probably not notice much difference between this new laptop and your current one. If you upgrade the memory and hdd space you are basically going to have the same laptop as your current one.

To answer your question, this new laptop will definitely not do any better with modern games than your original one will. I think it is important for you to understand that the main concept of centrino technology is to make laptops more power efficient, not more performance oriented.

I've never had any experience with a laptop but from looking at the specs on your old laptop to your new one. You'll definitely notice a boost in performance power in that you'll be able to run your programs more smoothly.

Going from 240Mb of ram to 1Gb is a HUGE difference, however like bigcheeez said you won't be able to play modern games with their highest setting and what not.

I don't know if I read your specs right but a 2Gb L2 cache seems almost impossible...considering the fact that the L2 cache for most processors are in the Kb...the max being around 2MB.

In fact it's quite impossible for the L2 cache to have MORE memory than the RAM. So either your specs are wrong...or the book I'm looking at (2003 A+ Textbook) is WAY out of day, and a whole generation of processors went by without me noticing.

But yea, you'll notice improvement because of your RAM but don't expect too much of your video card. No matter what the laptop won't compare with a PC with similar specs.

Good luck.

Edit. Looked at the link, it says 2Mb cache. Thank the lord, had me scared there haha.

However notice that the RAM it's using is SDRAM, which is becoming quite outdated. DDR2 is about to become mainstream. You should post up more detailed specs of your laptop before we can tell you if there will be a definite performace boost.

Things too add:
Speed of FSB
Type of RAM

Here are more detailed specs of my current laptop:

Motherboard
CPU Type Mobile AMD Athlon XP, 1100 MHz (3 x 367)
Motherboard Name Compaq Presario 900
Motherboard Chipset ATI Radeon IGP-320M
System Memory 240 MB (PC2100 DDR SDRAM)
BIOS Type Phoenix (09/05/02)
Communication Port ECP Printer Port (LPT1)

Display
Video Adapter Mobility U1 (16 MB)
3D Accelerator ATI Radeon IGP-320M (U1)
Monitor Digital Flat Panel (1024x768)

Multimedia
Audio Adapter ALi M5451 AC-Link Controller Audio Device

Storage
Disk Drive FUJITSU MHR2020AT (20 GB, 4200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)
Optical Drive Generic DVD-ROM SCSI CdRom Device
Optical Drive TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-R2312 (DVD:8x, CD:24x/10x/24x DVD-ROM/CD-RW)

Input
Keyboard Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Mouse HID-compliant mouse
Mouse Synaptics PS/2 Port TouchPad

And how would the aforementioned Acer compare to this http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=34-147-207&depa=3
(only $50 more)

Just to clarify things, gaming is not as important as multitasking in processor intensive programs. I would only play occasionally and could live with low settings.