Which R20 T5500 or T2250?

Hi all,

I received a used Lenovo N100, it didn't ship with a power supply and I am returning it to the seller company.

Having seen the R20 next to the N100 in the flesh I have changed my mind and decided to get an R20. I will be an aid worker shortly going overseas and will want a smaller laptop for emails, photos, the odd DVD and the very infrequent game.

I have seen an R20 with a T2250 and 80GB hard disk for £430 or a T5500 with 160GB for £487.

Now I can buy a 160GB HD for about £60 (will new drives on way that price will drop shortly) and that would allow me to use the existing 80GB as a backup drive, save me carting round my Lacie with its PSU. So the only difference is the CPU. I could buy the 160 version and then buy another external 2.5 hard disk £45 for a 80GB.

So the question, is the T5500 performance worth an extra £45.00 over the T2250?? Prior to going away I will be ripping a lot of DIVX so I have the films I want on small DVDs, that the only CPU intensive task I will have really.

I have 2GB of Ram on the way so that will have more performance than going from a CD to C2D?

 

This was discussed previously somewhere in the R20 thread.

The T2250 is 1.73GHz with 533MHz FSB while the T5500 is 1.66GHz with 667MHz FSB. In general, at the same CPU speed, the Core 2 Duo is around 5% to 10% faster than the Core Duo due to internal improvements, but this is partly offset by the higher clock speed of the T2250 (and if you want more speed, you can use ClockGen to increase the FSB of the T2250). Therefore the T2250 represents better value as a CPU.

Your strategy of keeping the existing HDD as backup is a sound one provided you keep it as a bootable HDD (I do the same). The easiest way to do this is with cloning software. I've only just noticed HDClone, but it's free and might do the job.

John

PS. Before buying a new HDD, double-check what is in your R20. It is probably SATA. You will then need a SATA external caddy which are less common and more expensive than the PATA version.

 

A word of caution about R20, it uses AMD's x1250M and that AMD's catalyst driver refuse to install(at least on my R40plus). You can run the installation program but the driver won't change.

This means if you have trouble with the GPU(incompatbility with certain program, bugs etc. in the driver), you can only pray that Samsung would update their driver. AMD has a monthly schedule in updating their driver(8.385 now), Samsung is still at 8.333.