Need a crash course in modern laptops!

[Heta]

buy me some pie

[Mojo]

Here's the offer:

Module Description
Inspiron 6000D
Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 (2 GHz/2MB Cache/533MHz FSB)
Genuine Windows® XP Home
15.4 inch UltraSharp WSXGA+ LCD Panel
1GB DDR2 SDRAM 2 Dimms
ATI MOBILITY™ RADEON® X300 64MB HyperMemory™
60GB 5400rpmHard Drive
Integrated 10/100 Network Card and Modem
Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 6.0
Combo/DVD+RW Drives 24X CD Burner/DVD Combo Drive
Wireless Networking Card Intel® PRO 2915 and Dell 350 Bluetooth Internal Wireless Cards
Microsoft Office Basic - Includes Word, Excel, and Outlook email
Anti-Virus/Security Suite (Pre-installed) McAfee Security Center with VirusScan, Firewall, Spyware Removal, 36-months
Digital Music Musicmatch Plus by Yahoo!Music- More features with 90 days of On Demand
6-cell Lithium Ion Battery (53 WHr)
Hardware Warranty SAVE $60 (after rebate) 4Yr Ltd Warranty, At-Home Svc, and HW Warranty Supt
Dial-Up Internet Access 6 Months America Online Internet Access Included
Digital Imaging Corel Photo Album 6 Premium - Starter plus Back up, Share, Create, and more
Financial Software No QuickBooks package selected - includes limited use trial
Operating System Backup & Recovery PC Restore recovery system by Symantec

Really pleased with it, bumped me to 1gb of RAM instead of my old 512mb. 2.13ghz version of the Pentium M instead of my old 2ghz classic chip, also built in wireless and bluetooth which is nice. I notice they included 4 years warranty in the quote which is interesting, I wonder if I can hold them to that seeing as my old warranty has expired? I've asked if they can bump it to the 1920x1200 res screen instead of the 1680x1050 they've offered me so far as my old screen was 1600x1200 and hence 1920x1200 is the correct wide screen equivalent, I've also asked them to chuck in an external floppy drive seeing as my old one had one, I'll see what they say on monday but the worst they can say is no and leave me with the above so it's a pretty good result.

Would have been better with a Centrino IMO, appart from that and the fact u have extra 20gig HDD it's same as what I have.

[pikeh]

Okay to cut a long story short, Dell suck ass and have spent the last 3months taking my laptop back and fourth failing to fix it, all it needs honestly is a new video card but obviously they're too incompetent to realise that. I got it back for the 4th time on Monday and last night, once again, display corruption, laptop crashes even at BIOS level. I phoned Dell up again and they've said we're sorry blah blah blah but we'll give you a new laptop instead which I don't mind as mine is out of warranty now (3 years) although it wasn't 3 months ago when the problem started, it's an old Inspiron 8200, 2ghz.

Now Dell have said the laptop they replace with will be equivalent or better and that they'll send me the specs for me to accept, now I haven't kept uptodate on laptop tech in a year or two because we're only using them for office and stuff at work and I haven't been inclined to buy a new gaming one at home so I'm wondering on a couple of things:
- How do mobile graphics cards like the ATI X300 cope with modern games? I'm not expecting anything amazing out of them but I do expect something capable of running 3D applications at least
- How do Pentium M processor compare? My old one was a 2.0ghz, I notice these new Pentium Ms generally have lower clock speeds, is there speed boosted in other ways or are they simply lower clock to save power as some rumours have suggested?

My old laptop could do 1600x1200 too so I'm going to make sure I get something that can match that res. at least. Looks like you can only get widescreen laptops now though, not that I'm complaining if that's what they offer but I get a sneaking suspicion they'll try offer me some crap which I wont accept Anyone had any experience with Dell in this respect to have some idea of what kind of replacements they offer, are they good/bad?

http://www.novatech.co.uk