Hi, One of my friends is wanting a laptop and has managed to spot a good deal (I think). There is a bunch of Laptops and PDA's for sale for half price at K-Mart, pretty much all the stuff they cant sell. There is a Laptop for $299(Australian) with a VIA C3 CPU, 40GB Hard drive and a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. Unfortunately we cant seem to find how much RAM it has. It dosent come with any software either, so no O/S or anything. We figured if its got less than 512MB we can add another 512 for less than $50 anyway. We already got the O/S covered. It seems like a good deal but I have no clue how VIA CPU's perform. This one is a VIA C3 @ 1.2GHz. Is that OK or would it be a slug? Thanks for any advice. Mattwizz3 : Vista Home Basic 2.2GHz Sempron 1GB DDR400 GeForce 6800Ultra

http://www.cpushack.net/VIA.html I have not been impressed by VIA MOBO chipsets. I have no experience with VIA CPUs.

i recently had a pc with a VIA C3 866mhz cpu. This is intercangeable with pentium 3 as had same socket type. for simple stuff like internet and word it was fine, but anything else more demanding it was very slow. I googled: Review VIA C3 and read some reviews showing performance charts compared to AMD Athlons and Pentium 3 etc and it was poor for anything other than simple un-demanding stuff. The only things in its favour was it used less power and created littel heat so was more attractive to people who wanted silent fanless systems

I agree with the last couple of comments from cliffpage. http://www.computing.net/windowsvis...

VIA CPU's are mainly aimed low power consumption devices like STB's and similar: http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/p...

Stay far away from it. Quite a while ago (I think it was in PC Mag) there was an article about super-cheap desktops, and the one desktop based on the 1GHz C3 (or maybe it was a Crusoe?) with 512MB of RAM was put to shame by a P3-500 with half the RAM. Pentium III--Descendant of Intel Core. Pentium III-S 1400 @ 1.63GHz, 512K L2 X800XT AIW OC 580/600 2GB of RAM 250GB HD SB Audigy 2 QDI Advance 12 mobo Smugly running Vista

Heh, Sabertooth I think you gave me the wrong link. But on the basis of what jackbomb said, I'll stay away. Thanks everyone. Mattwizz3 : Vista Home Basic 2.2GHz Sempron 1GB DDR400 GeForce 6800Ultra