Considering - Page 2

A suggestion, do check out SSD deals, too. For everyday use (email, web browsing, word processing, etc), a $300~350 Core i3 laptop with $150~160 240/256GB SSD will be faster than a $500~600 Core i7 laptop with 7200RPM HDD.

Yeah, it'll do the stuff you want. With an SSD, it'll feel faster compared to laptops with newer processors. I have a Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz CULV laptop and it feels faster and more responsive compared to my new Sandy Bridge i7 laptop with HDD (waiting for a good Black Friday deal on a 512GB SSD before I upgrade ).

For normal tasks, we've had an excess of CPU power ever since Penryn (Core 2 45nm). The biggest bottleneck in most day to day tasks is the storage subsystem (HDD).

To give you an idea, I booted 2 laptops at the same time, the Core 2 Duo Penryn CULV with a 3-year old Windows 7 install with a bunch of apps loading at start-up, while the Core i7 Sandy Bridge had a fairly clean Windows 7 install (factory install but with the Asus bloatware removed). The old Core 2 system finished initializing Dropbox, SugarSync and all the other start-up apps while the i7 system was just showing the Windows logo. Tried loading Firefox on both at the same time, and again, the Core 2 finished quicker. I expect with enough RAM and once SuperFetch is properly trained, the difference when loading frequently used applications will become less pronounced. I just don't see it being able to catch up to SSD boot times, though, particularly not if I start loading it up with the same apps on the old laptop.

The SSD on the Core 2 was actually just recently installed. It was cloned from a Seagate 5400.6 500GB that came with the laptop. With the Seagate, boot time was well over a minute. In fact, I usually just turned on my laptop, left it to get snacks, etc and by the time I came back, often, Dropbox is still finishing it's initialization. The difference from that to booting faster and being more responsive than a brand new system with a faster CPU, more RAM and a clean Windows 7 install is amazing. If I didn't require the extra CPU power for other tasks, I wouldn't even have needed to buy a new laptop. The SSD upgrade would've been more than enough of a performance boost.