Three "Centrino Duo" Laptops For Students

Admission season is upon us and with a lot of new students all set to enter MBA/ IIM/ Engineering colleges, one thing they need to purchase to allow them to work seamlessly, is a laptop. A laptop for a student is a necessity now, as most campuses now days have Wi-Fi. This allows them to function from virtually any corner and when one looks at the rather cramped quarters most universities have, a laptop becomes an essential requirement and not a luxury.

This brings us to the real problem. Intel recently launched their new platform “Santa Rosa”, which talks about significant performance upgrades, better battery life and greater compatibility with Windows Vista. Now this is where the problem starts. Quite a few companies have announced a rash of products without really phasing out their previous Core 2 Duo lines. Most manufacturers now offer both generations of products leading to confusion among users as what to buy. While choice for consumers is always a good thing, most manufacturers just don’t take the trouble of having a coherent product naming scheme that differentiates on product lines and makes the choice easier for the consumer.

So we decided to go through the various product launches and pick out 3 laptops that are based on the new “Centrino Duo” aka “Santa Rosa”.

Dell Inspiron 1520




It is rare to contemplate any kind of roundup, without a single Dell product in its ranks. The newly introduced Inspiron 1520 is a typical Dell product, that offers a range of new “Merom” processors ranging from the T7100 upwards, has a standard of 1 GB RAM, storage space of 120 GB, a choice of Nvidia’s graphical chipsets (8400 GT and 8600 GT), 802.11n support and a 15.4 inch screen with a native resolution of 1280x800. Apart from these basic specifications, it is the range of customization that Dell offers which makes this laptop interesting. Not only can one upgrade to an HD ready resolution of 1680x1050, it offers the choice of adding in a webcam and a Blu-Ray drive. With prices starting at Rs. 58,000, this is ideally our first choice for anyone looking to purchase a solid and a dependable future-ready product.