My old computer has an Intel Pentium 4 CPU and I'm looking to buy a laptop in addition. The one I'm looking at has an Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo T2390 CPU. Can you tell me how much more powerful this is compared to my old PC? Also would it be more useful for me to upgrade to 4Gb RAM (the basic laptop has 2GB) or to go for a more powerful CPU? I use my computer mainly for web browsing, email, word processing and storing photographs. No gaming and not much downloading. The laptop is running Vista.

Thanks in advance.

Lizzie

The Core 2 Duo is quite a bit more powerful than your P4...hard to say exactly how much more, but definately noticable...the way the Core 2 chips are constructed vastly outperforms P4 chips, even if the P4 clocks higher (not to mention the fact that the Core 2 Duo is a true dual-core processor).

As far as upgrading either, for the needs you specified you use the computer for, you could leave it alone and be fine, saving some cash along the way.

Thanks for your advice Grihn. As you say, I can save a bit by not upgrading to more RAM. I think I'll go for the basic package.