A mate of mine's buying a budget laptop

AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3800+
Genuine Windows Vista(TM) Home Basic
512MB RAM Memory
160GB Hard Drive
Dual Layer DVD RW Drive with Lightscribe
NVIDIA GeForce 6150 Graphics
15-in-1 Media Card Reader
6 USB Connections
3 PCI Slots
17" Advent TFT Monitor

It's meant to play games from about a year ago or so (things like civ mainly - for uber games he's got a 360).

I think for £350 that's a steal - are there any real problems with this?

(all digital e-snobbery aside - this is a budget rig, not a gaming rig :P)

512MB is not enough RAM... at the very least 1GB.. RAM is cheap

Should have gone to Specsavers.

He's not going to be running any games on Vista, especially on 512MB RAM.

As a matter of fact, I'm not sure if he'll be running anything on 512MB RAM with Vista.

I would do whatever you can to get XP on that thing, because Vista is going to just RAPE it. That, and it's Home Basic, which is absolutely useless.

Either get more ram, or not vista.

I ran Vista with 512mb of ram. I had to turn EVERYTHING off in order to make it usable.

I highly do not recommend the current config.

We're buying more RAM - the idea was to get a good processor and some graphics and ramp up the RAM from dabs or newegg or wherever (which is much cheaper than PC world)

Also I have a spare copy of XP kicking around should Vista turn out to be a lame duck - my brother in law used to work for MS and got staff discount!

Oh dear, panic over - it seems that's the specs for a DESKTOP and my friend is a spanner.

I'll get back to you when he finds a good laptop...

that processor will annihilate your battery life, also that is going to be a pretty large laptop and probably also quite heavy

those 3 pci slots will just kill his battery life too!