Help me chose?

April 4, 2011 4:08 PM

Toshiba L650 vs C650. Replacing a secondary notebook. The former has a core i5-480M processor and the latter a pentium P6200 .All other specs are essentially the same. The laptop will be used primarily for word processing, internet and data storage. Is the more powerful processor worth me spending $100 more given the applications it will run?
posted by Neiltupper to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

If you can afford it, buy the better processor. Over the course of that computer's life, that hundred dollars amounts to how much, per hour of you using it? Five cents an hour? Three?

An incremental improvement to your experience is probably worth more than a nickel an hour.
posted by mhoye at 4:59 PM on April 4, 2011

Both processors will be more than adequate for tasks like word processing and browsing text-oriented sites like Metafilter. You might be better off spending $100 on a good mouse and extra RAM or a SSD. mhoye is right about the long-term cost, though - getting the better processor AND the accessories, for 10 cents/hour, wouldn't be a bad idea either. Barring breakdowns, it might even extend the usable life of the machine.
posted by marakesh at 4:38 PM on April 6, 2011