700m vs. i9300

I'm going into my 3rd year at university. I like the dedicated graphics of the 9300 but I'm not a gamer. I will be doing some CAD stuff with my laptop.

I also like the small sizes and weight of the laptops though and that's why I was thinking 700m. The 9300 is also very costly right now. If I upgrade the video to 128MB and lose out on the battery by getting a smaller one, and drop the DVDRW, it's also $100 more expensive.

http://chel.ca/quote.pdf

Help me out. Price really is a factor and I don't want to spend that much.

 

Well, those laptops are completely different machines, the 9300 is a lot bigger and heavier than the 700m.

 

I am assuming that you will upgrade the ram yourself later. 256mb isn't really enough to boot windows xp home much less do anything else. It would be so slow (I have an old machine like this) you would not enjoy using it at all.

If you need to cut back like this to save money I would look at cheaper machines in general and get a dvd burner because it can be used to make rw disks into 4.7gb floppies which are useful to warehouse things which change once in a while. Also I would try to get 1gb of ram, it will cut the page faults alot and make the computer run much faster. If cad matters alot (much more than a hobby) look further into the video boards and especially what happens when you cut the ram installed.

For me personally I could not imagine no WIFI and no BlueTooth(around $30 I think) Bluetooth allows the connection of mice and pdas without wires or dongles which is very nice when you are out and about. Also WIFI will allow you to connect to the internet almost anyplace these days. Around here it appears that even the donut shops have free WIFI.

I9300 2.0ghz 1.0gb ram 100gb disk 256MB NVIDIA 6800 dvd rw UXGA Bluetooth Intel WiFi Media Center