Hi,

I'm looking for a portable 12.1" laptop and I saw a nice HP laptop at Costco with a touch screen for 1000$. The specs are nice: 3GB ram, 250GB@5400 HDD, LightScribe DVDRW and ATI 3200HD with 64MB on board (with available 1400 shared memory support).

The only downside is the CPU, it has a AMD Turion™ X2 RM-70 dual-core mobile processor 2 GHz with 1MB L2 cache processor (and that's probably the reason for the low price tag). It runs Win Vista premium.

The main purpose of this laptop will be email, office, web and some Visual Studio development. Will this CPU be enough? Can it run 64 bit windows? What Intel CPU is comparable to this one?

Thanks.

I'd need a loupe with that


For everyday tasks like you mentioned? For sure.


Yep.


Hard to say exactly how fast it is compared to C2D's, and there don't really seem to be any benchmarks of it anywhere. Either ways, it should be plenty for most stuff. As long as you don't plan on doing a lot of CPU-bound battery-melting work on it it should be fine, else go for a faster CPU and possibly an extra battery...

There you have a good point with laptops; Always go for a 6 to 12 cell battery, most of the time each cell count can provide 15 minutes of normal computer use. Besides that, make sure you get enough RAM with the computer but as far I can see that looks right with 3GB; it will swap less to the harddisk thus using less power. Remember that RAM always uses less power than a Harddisk as a harddisk is just storage medium...

For most 'everyday' stuff like email, web browsing etc. there is no effective difference between AMD and Intel processors of comparable spec. It's only when you get into high-end number crunching tasks like video processing/encoding, gaming etc. that you might notice a difference.

Of course, having said that I've not noticed any difference between the Turion X2 and the Core 2 Duo even when running multiple VMs.