300Mhz vs 400Mhz

[mulletfluf]

Hello everyone! I am a college student looking to replace my current handleheld with an Axim. I have gotten a chance to play around with an Axim on several occasions and I feel that this is the handheld that I am looking for. I have a couple of questions though. Dell lists the prices of the 300MHz @ $199 and the 400MHZ @ $293. I know that the 300Mhz does not come with the fancy cradle, hence a slight price difference. My major question is: Is the 400Mhz Axim much better performance wise? Does the 300MHz lag when playing movies, mp3's, etc? I know that the Windows os keeps things running in the background, even after you have shut them down. Does this make an appreciable difference in the 300Mhz? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[commoved]

You probably won't notice the extra 100 MHz. But the 400 MHz has two other important attributes -- more ROM and more RAM.

The extra ROM might come in handy for an OS upgrade someday. (Or it may not -- who knows?) You can also use it to store programs, if you don't write in it too often. (See other threads about how Flash memory degrades after thousands of writes).

No matter what memory cards you may buy, anything that runs on your Ax has to be loaded in RAM first. When the Axim is low on RAM, it gets really slow. Having an extra 32 Meg of RAM can make life easier.

I went for the 400 MHz, but I was comparing the Ax to $600 Ipaqs, so the $300 looked cheap to me.

[slease]

You can always overclock the 300 to a 400 on the other hand. Plus the extra hundred dollars could be used to buy a keyboard, huge memory card, wireless or regular modem card, network cards, cases, or you could put it away towards classes. As a college student I bought the 300 and its working nicely for me. My ram stays plenty free because I load larger apps and games on a SD card that never leaves my axim.

[Dr.Gibbs]

I got the 300MHz because I didn't want to spend more than $300, and I could get all the accessories with it (WiFi card, keyboard, cradle... all the goodies).

I haven't noticed any problems with it so far... I'm not real big on third-party software, so the lack of RAM doesn't mean much to me. I play MP3's and videos without a problem. 300 MHz isn't bottom-line, seeing as how the iPaq 1910 (which is $300) has a 200 MHz CPU. I have yet to try Pocket Quake, which will be the real test... but I'll get around to it eventually :)

[mdcauthen]

Man, ya'll got me going back and fourth. I'm 12 and have a Casio BE-300. 16mb of ram is plenty big. I have saved $190. I already have a 32mb cf and will proably get some sd's. So with my cf I can have 32mb of ram. My parents said they would buy a cradle. So I think I'm going with the 300mhz. UNLESS the 400mhz drops in price.