dell inspirion 6400

Hi i am about to buy my daughter a dell laptop she is 18 so will use it for collage
I have been offered a Dell inspirion 6400 model PP20L for £100.00,it's been looked after just needs a new battery and could do with a new charger. It has 1GIG ram so will upgrade that any thing else i could do to it??
And most important is this worth £100.00??

 

Given the current exchange rate 0.6 pounds to the dollar, 100 pounds is probably a fair deal for what you are getting. You can upgrade the processor, memory, and hard drive easily, and possibly other parts with less ease.

 

I have the Inspiron 6400 but I recently bought a new computer to replace it.

These are some of the possible upgrades you could do to for the 6400: New battery/charger, an Intel Core 2 Duo (T7200, T7400 or T7600) processor, 4GB RAM, new hard drive (500GB-1TB) and Windows 7 installed. For the cost of all that and your 100 pounds for the computer, you could almost buy a new Inspiron 15R or 17R.

It also depends what your daughter's computer needs are. This computer is pretty heavy and she won't want to take it anywhere. But, it will be ok if she just needs a desktop replacement and nothing mobile. For a student though, portability is a huge factor so that they can use their computer in the library or various study areas... If this is the case, I'd recommend getting a 13-15" laptop.

It may also be relevant to look at what subjects she is taking at her university. Will she be doing subjects that require a more powerful computer (graphic design) OR does she just need it for the internet and Microsoft/Open Office?

 

thanks some good points there will have a rethink

 

I'm sorry Andrew... I confused the 6400 (15") with the 9400 (17"... that I have). Both are pretty much the same except for the size so the possible upgrades remain the same.

The weight/portability issue might not be a problem with the 6400... Looking online, it weighs about 6.2 pounds for the 6400 versus 8.1 pounds for the 9400.

 

The 6400 and 9400 can take the same selection of CPU/RAM/HDD and even screen resolutions. The 9400 has a couple more GPU options, but they're all exorbitantly priced and most are subject to the Nvidia GPU BGA issue.

 

Inspiron 9400 comes with WUXGA w/ TrueLife as a factory option. You should be able to swap a WUXGA panel from a Latitude into the 6400 as long as you get the same LVDS cable.

 

A working 6400 for less then 200 US would be awesome. I still use mine as my bed PC (web browsing and heavy movie watching). I have the x1050 truelife screen option too so it stands up well for excellent HD movie watching.

I upped the lcd and video card when I first bought it and then upped the ram to 2 gigs after. Thats pretty much the only upgrades I have done to it, although I do have 2 USB 2.0 hard drives to handle some of my additional programs as well as all my movies. It dosn't help that a backup copy of WoW I keep on it is taking up 22 gigs of space.

 

6400/E1505 same thing. You can upgrade to 4GB of RAM but your computer will only see 3.25 GB available for use, with 64 bit OS.

 

thanks , well looks like he wants to swap it for my desktop,so in the end it will work out fine although he's gonna get a pretty new and fast pc for an old laptop