Would this used laptop be OK for me?

[alphabeta]

Hello everyone, hope you are having a great day so far!

I am wanting to purchase a second-hand laptop for the only purpose of writing notes at university -- so I would be using Office, and that's it. No games, no Internet, no multiple windows open at a time.

I am looking at this one laptop that we have available at a supply story in my city, it is a Pentium II-233, with 64RAM, a 14-inches screen (not that it counts), a 2Mb video card, and it has Windows 2000 installed, with 1 Gig of actual memory (not RAM, but space, not too sure what the proper word is for that). For 40$ the laptop can be upgraded to 128 RAM, but I am assuming I will not need this. It has a 40 minutes guaranteed lasting battery (might be longer but it is at least that) -- my laptop would rarely be on battery.

I own a Pentium 4 at home and don't know much about laptops. I really don't want to pay a lot... all I need is something that will allow me to take notes.

Is this laptop reliable? (It also has a 30-days warranty).

Thank you in advance!

 

[CplusX2]

My advice is no.

which version of office? I beleive that office 2000 requires 64 megs of ram just for that. A 233 is just not going to be able to do much very quickly and will probably lock up on you just running excel.

 

[Jorsoft]

I agree. If you were running Windows 95 or 98 then I'd say go for it, but 2000 requires quite a bit of oomph just for itself. A 1 gigabyte hard drive (I think that's what you're looking for) isn't going to be nearly large enough either. When I had my laptop with just Windows 98 and nothing else it still took up at least 500-600 megs, so very little will be left for you.
My reccomendations:

1. Get a similar laptop with Windows 95/98 and Office on it
2. Buy a laptop with at least:

350 mhz, 128 mb ram, 4 gb hard drive.

233 mhz and 64 mb of ram will be barely enough for even just Office. Shop around at the smaller computer shops in your area. I got a nice P3 550 w/ 128 mb RAM, 8 MB Rage 3D, and 6 gb hd for $325 (on sale) after I looked around.

 

[ShoobieRat]

How much you looking to spend?

I mean, you could get a decent NEW laptop for not much.

 

[Win2kpatcher]

That will be plenty if that is all you do want to do. Here at work we have tons of users on very OLD machines and they do a lot more than type word documents. I work for a newspaper and the majority of the editorial PC's are IBM 300 GL's running Intel Pentium 233 MMX processor's, 96MB RAM, 2GB HD...this is just a "pentium" not pentium II..lol..

They have multiple pieces of software running at once including outlook, internet, word, and our Goodnews (editorial-pagination software) and they do ok. They are also running Windows 2000 and I upgraded all of them to service pack 4 (pita with no space to work with!!). Now if all you do is type word documents that 1GB HD will last you a LONG LONG time..even a large 100 page essay will take up a couple of megabytes...if its cheap I say do it..no more than $150-175 though

 

[Win2kpatcher]

On a side note we have 50 new Dell PC's running 2.8GHZ, 1GB RAM coming in so that should take care of maybe 25% of the editorial..lol...and guess who gets to setup all those new PC's and merge over all the users data!!! haha...I love it though..I don't make $5.25 an hour for nuthin.

 

[alphabeta]

Hi everyone, and thank you very much for your help.
I just bought a laptop on Ebay for 200$ US incld. shipping and handling and there is a 7-day warranty so I'll test it the best I can the first week. It's a P2 233Hz It has a 4gig hard-drive, but only 64 of RAM, and runs Windows 98. At worst -- I can get it upgraded for 40$ to 128 RAM in store. At that price it wouldn't matter much, but I still hope I can get it to run office!

 

[BRoWZ]

I would say upgrade it to 128mb ram, it will give a performance boost then, everything else should run fine.

 

[ShoobieRat]

Jeez...5.25 to be a newspaper sys-tech? Are your benefits peanuts and free coffee-stir-sticks? Last time I got paid 5.25, I was still in high-school and working at a movie theater.

 

[alphabeta]

I just informed myself and unless I buy my laptop from them, upgrading to 128RAM may cost me more than 100$.

Now this may seem like a silly question -- but if I am only going to be running Microsoft Word, one copy at a time, and that is the only program I am planning to use -- I am Ok with 64 RAM?