[BleedBurgundy]

Originally Posted by Schneed10

Soliciting advice on computer hardware again from the trusty Warpath community.

I recently set up a wireless N network in my house. My desktop in the basement connects to this network through it's wireless-N adapter.

I'm now looking for a laptop to add to the equation. I just want the laptop to successfully and smoothly do the following:

- Surf internet
- Email
- Stream video from sites like YouTube
- Pull up files, such as home videos of my kids which are housed on the desktop in the basement, and watch them on the laptop

As you can see I'm not asking it to do much. I don't need it to hold large files. It will not hold my music or video libraries, so it doesn't need much hard drive. Seems like one of those Mini Net Books would be perfect for my needs, except for the fact that I'm unwilling to have smaller than a 13 inch display. And I want something with an N adapter to take advantage of my existing N network.

So I've been looking at 13-15 inch laptops and trying to decide what hardware I need. I have the following questions:

Will a celeron processor be adequate to perform the above tasks?
Depends on the speed and OS, but if you're trying to save $, take a look at AMD procs.

Will 2GB of RAM be adequate?

For Vista? Nay, sir. But again, save coin by buying a laptop with minimal ram and upgrade on your own from Tigerdirect, Newegg, etc.

Will Vista give me a headache because of the Celeron processor - or is Vista just a pain regardless of your processor speed?

I run a quad core AMD proc at home with 8 gb's of ram. Never had an issue. Again, it depends on the specific hardware.

Any other things I should be concerned with?

Keep in mind that Windows 7 is just around the corner and from everything i've heard, it does a much better job of utilizing resources than Vista. Hell, they said it runs on an Atom processor, so you should be fine with the Celeron for the applications you mentioned.

Thanks fellas.

bolded responses above.