A relative of mine wanted to buy a laptop, so I purchased one on their behalf.
http://h50146.www5.hp.com/directplus/personal/promotions/notebooks/nx6120ct_campaign/
I’ve helped buy computers for people before, but this time the requirements were:
・Wireless LAN to use the internet anywhere in the house
・Just needs to handle email and browsing
So I went with a laptop like this.
Honestly, I think it’s overkill for their needs.
For email and browsing,
Celeron 500MHz
Memory 128MByte
That would be more than enough, I think. Really.
But realistically, nobody’s going to be satisfied with that — so here we are.
All they need now is a wireless LAN access point with a router and it’ll be perfect.
Still, a Centrino-equipped laptop under 100,000 yen is genuinely cheap.
Centrino, by the way, is an Intel marketing strategy: you only get to call it “Centrino” if it uses an Intel chipset (motherboard) + Intel Pentium M CPU + Intel wireless LAN. All three have to be Intel.
My gut feeling was that a brand-name Centrino laptop would cost around 200,000 yen (value notebooks in the 100,000s usually have a Celeron M CPU, which isn’t Centrino). So times really have changed.
It must be tough to turn a profit running a PC shop these days.
For reference: about six and a half months ago I bought a similar HP laptop at the same price point — and back then it came with 256MB RAM and a Celeron M at 1.4GHz.
The downside of BTO (build-to-order) is the two-week lead time, but I’ll look forward to it in the meantime. (I’ve had it delivered to my house so I can handle the initial setup.)