o.k cheap laptop?

[Zurtex]

A friend wants to buy a new laptop, she was just going to get something at about £300 (so essentially crap). I've convinced it's worth putting a bit more money into it get something more worthwhile.

However I'm a bit stumped. Most laptops seem to come with Vista pre-installed, so all the laptop has to be able to do is run Vista and other applications fairly smoothly and responsively.

Getting a dual core (AMD or Core2) doesn't seem to be expensive, nor getting a 2 GiB of RAM is that bad. However, I'm a bit stuck on whats a good VGA chip and whether it'll be able to keep things smooth under Vista. Are the Intel X3100 or ATi X1200 any good at all?

 

[Zurtex]

Just been reading other threads.

Would people suggest the Dell Vostro 1500 as a good laptop?

 

[Zurtex]

Reading some reviews I notice the specs seem to be considerably variable, so here is what the Dell site offers for £399 atm:

Intel® Core? 2 Duo Processor T7250 (2.00 GHz, 800 MHz FSB, 2 MB L2-cache)
2048MB (2x1024) 667MHz DDR2 Dual Channel
128MB nVidia® GeForce® 8400M GS

 

[Jax Omen]

That should be more than adequate for Vista and some apps. I assume she doesn't game on her laptop (beyond flash games, at least).

 

[Zurtex]

Originally posted by: Jax Omen
That should be more than adequate for Vista and some apps. I assume she doesn't game on her laptop (beyond flash games, at least).

Nope, not a gamer.

Thanks . I'm very impressed with this find, was worried I was going to have to suggest something with a GMA X3100 or a ATi X1200 on it.