Laptop selection help

[SnoringFrog]

For all my love of computers, I'm almost hopeless in trying to buy one because I know next-to-nothing about hardware. My parents are trying to figure out what to get me for college, but I'm pretty much useless to help them because I don't know what I want or need.

Right now I'm looking at these: http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/laptop_great_deals?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs&redirect=1 and trying to compare them. I'm not really sure what the difference in the processors is (some are "Intel® Pentium® Dual Core™ T4400 (2.2GHz/800MHz FSB/1MB cache)" and there's also "NEW 2010 Intel®Core™ i3 - 330M" and "NEW 2010 Intel® Core™ i3-330M 2.13GHz (3M cache)")

For the memory, what's the difference between DDR2 and DDR3, and how much of a difference will that make?

The RPMs for the hard drive would determine data access speeds, correct?
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If anyone can offer more of a general idea of what it is I'm looking for, here's what I want to be able to do with my laptop:

Browse the web -- I tend to be tab heavy, and at times, flash heavy. I almost always have at least 8 or 9 tabs open, if not more (especially if I get stuck in one of those seemingly infinite chains of Wikipedia articles XD)

Audio/Video/Image editing -- At the moment, these are things I've only dabbled in, or just fell out of, but I do want to be able to do them in case I can finally work them into my schedule (or if I need them).

Games -- I don't do much computer gaming at all outside of flash games, but occasionally I like to pick up an older computer game to give me something to do. I have a feeling this shouldn't effect much, but figured I'd mention it anyways.

Coding/Programming -- This is something else I've fallen out of, but I know I'll be getting back into this as soon as I can.

Watching movies/tv online -- This has been happening more and more with me lately.

Multitask- I tend to have a ton of tabs open, and on occasion will be trying to run a web browser, music, code editor, and an image editor like photoshop or gimp all at once. I'm not sure how much power that should take, I'm used to being stuck with my 386mb ram and 3.3ghz (I think, could be way off) processor on this computer.

I also would like a good-sized harddrive, right now my music collection is about 42gb, but I get a ton of music, so I have no doubt that it will increase greatly with time. I do have a 500gb external drive, but I like having easy access to my music all the time, so I prefer to keep it on the main drive when I can.

I think that's about everything I would need to do with my laptop. I'm not sure what types of processors or how much RAM I should look for or anything though.

[Mithrandir]

In my professional opinion, I would steer you away from doing serious video editing on a laptop. Casual stuff may be fine, but no video editors I know (and I know a great many, oddly enough) would use a laptop. It's like using a screwdriver to pound in a nail. I guess you could do it if you were patient, but it's not really designed for that.

I would also recommend you really consider what kind of video games you will playing on the machine. If you think you might want to play high-end games in the future, you'll pretty much be SOL. Many of the high-end games are tough to play on anything but the most recent (and even then, expensive) machines. That being said, if you are only interested in the old games like you said, just about any computer will probably work.

If you use lots of tabs and multitask, here's my biggest advice: RAM = 4GB or more. If you can afford it, max our your RAM. However much you can get, do it. Most of the time, that will give you a bit of extra "snappiness" in your laptop.


You may find some good info on PCWorld's site for deciding if you want a laptop vs a netbook (IMHO netbooks aren't really anything more than two-year disposable machines):
http://www.pcworld.com/products/computers/laptops.html

HIH!

[Warrior4Christ]

For the processors, Pentium Dual Core is worse than Core 2 Duo, which is presumably worse than Core i3. 3MB of cache is much better than 1MB.

I don't know how much better DDR3 is... but I suspect that systems that take DDR3 can only take DDR3, and systems that take DDR2 can only take DDR2. So it's more of a decision between Core 2 Duo (DDR2) or Core i3 (DDR3).

Last time I checked, all the sensibly priced laptop hard disks were 5400RPM. The spinning speed is a factor, but cache, drive design, etc mean not all drives have equal performance.

And.. 8 or 9 tabs is tab heavy?? LOL, I have like 70 tabs open currently...

[shooraijin]

My mother does video work on a laptop, but her actual videos are stored and edited on a striped external RAID volume, connected via an ExpressCard eSATA card. If she did this on the internal drive, she'd go nuts, I'm sure (this is a MacBook Pro running Final Cut Pro).

[Mithrandir]

If she did this on the internal drive, she'd go nuts, I'm sure (this is a MacBook Pro running Final Cut Pro).

I've done exactly that on said laptop. Yes. She would go nuts. I did. XD

[SnoringFrog]

Thanks for the help everyone; I wasn't planning to do any major editing, just a little here and there if there was nothing else to do, so that shouldn't be too much of a concern.

@W4C: 70 tabs? Why would you need that many at once? That's insane.

[Warrior4Christ]

@W4C: 70 tabs? Why would you need that many at once? That's insane.

Opera sessions, man, it's the way of the future! Bookmarks are so old school.

[SnoringFrog]

Opera sessions, man, it's the way of the future! Bookmarks are so old school.

XD I have done something like that before, but it's only with 3 tabs or so. I prefer navigating overpopulated bookmarks folders.

[Mithrandir]

I think my record was 84 tabs. That's 5 windows with 15+ tabs each. Oh, wait... At least one time on CAA I had 237 tabs open. I forgot about that. I closed them all the same night, though.

[Warrior4Christ]

I think my record was 84 tabs. That's 5 windows with 15+ tabs each. Oh, wait... At least one time on CAA I had 237 tabs open. I forgot about that. I closed them all the same night, though.

That's impressive.. is that with Opera?

I think my record for a single window is about 100 tabs in Opera.

[Tsukuyomi]

You both are madmen I say.. MADMEN

I'm always afraid Fire Fox will die on me if I have too many tabs opened O__O; I usually have two Firefox windows opened and then how many ever tabs in each one ^^

[Mithrandir]

That's impressive.. is that with Opera?

I think my record for a single window is about 100 tabs in Opera.

It's Firefox. I've never had a problem with it if I have too many tabs open, actually. Of course, this machine I'm on right now has 16GB of RAM, and that's the weaker system out of the two I use.

[SnoringFrog]

I think I opened 40-50 pages at once in Firefox once for work because I needed to count the number of webpages for something and the easiest way I could think of was to open them all then try to close the window to get the "you are about to close ## tabs" warning.

[Icarus]

open them all then try to close the window to get the "you are about to close ## tabs" warning.

... I turned that off ages back. I've never really been a fan of my software asking "Are you sure you want to do that?"

[Warrior4Christ]

When Ctrl-W (close tab) is so close to Ctrl-Q (close program), it's quite useful....

For what it's worth, I've generally found Opera handles excessive numbers of tabs better than Firefox.