how powerful should my new laptop be?

[petitmaman]

i am going to buy a new laptop tomorrw. i know nothing about computers but want to do mumsnet, store photos, facebook ebay, blah blah blah on it. nothing special but i dont want to have to wait hours for stuff to load.
amthinking of getting a Dell inspiron 1545 which (apparently ) has:
Intel dual core 2.0Ghz
3GB DDR2 RAM
160GB hard disk
DVD +/- RW

this means nothing to me but does it sound ok? is it powerful enough to stop me going mad? would anyone have anything to recommend/ advise? thanks

anyone?

As powerful as you can afford.

DP asks if it has a graphics card - apparently if you don't then doing things that involve pictures sucks power from the processor.

That sounds pretty good to me - quite a bit better than my laptop (bought Jan 08).

petitmaman - the new laptop I am on right now bought 4 days ago for £425 (unbranded computer from a local IT shop) is:

1.8 GHz and only 896 MB of RAM (about 1/3 of the RAM you have). It has a Celeron processor but not Dual Core.

It is really quite powerful enough for serious web browsing and photo viewing etc.

Your hard drive is quite big eneough for a huge amount of photo storage and you can always put them on CD anyway.

For what you need, I suggest you may be buying too much PC unless you want to watch films or do serious PC game playing.

As Trillian says - the graphics card may be useful but only if you are watching films and complex graphics in games.

petitmaman - I have the laptop you are thinking of getting.

It's brilliant.
I bought a whole package from PC World a few weeks back.

I'm a right pooter novice, but I'm finding this little piece of technology fabbo!

Its very fast, I have a few problems with connection sometimes, but I thinmk thats got more to do with my Orange dongle more that the laptop.

All I do on laptop is MN, store pics, ebay, bit of shopping etc. All the basics really. I don't Fakebook, but I do lots of other bits on it.

It's a good little laptop

I was told that you need at least 2 Gb of RAM if you want to use Vista happily.

I can watch films etc on my laptop (with no graphics card) but it does get quite warm and whirr a little bit.

Thank you everyone, I am off to spend my hard earned money!