I realize cyanide posted this about a month ago, but I decided to post my experience anyway in case someone is looking for how to tackle a similar situation. Someone might have a smaller, or larger budget, but again this might help point someone in the right direction.
My day job gave me a $1400 budget to get a laptop. I'm not as comfortable with laptops as I am with desktops, but I thought I would try to approach it like I would if I were building a PC.
After much searching and reading here is what i did:
I searched for a long time to find a
barebone system to start with. I ended up going with
this one-
$791 shipped. I was desperately trying to go with AMD, but could not find nearly enough selection. The one I went with doesn't support hyper threading :( but the price was right and compared to the competition I found, it seemed to be closest to what I was looking for. It included a CD-RW/DVD rom.
Needed a
CPU so I went to
www.pricewatch.com to search for a P4 3.06Ghz (the largest supported by the mobo) and found the best deal
here-
$232 shipped.
Needed
RAM. Back to pricewatch. I had to go with some off-brand ram to keep within the budget. I found 2 sticks of 512 pc2100 at (my favorite parts store)
www.newegg.com here. The reviews said it was good, so I gave it a shot. I'm wondering if I should have gotten pc2700 instead due to the 533 FSB...any comments? Anyway,
$170 shipped.
Needed a
HDD. Back to pricewatch. I knew I wanted a 7200rpm drive. 20 gig is what I was looking for (I'm pretty frugal with disk space), but the smallest "quality" drive at that speed I could find was 50gig, which is why I skimped on ram quality above. You can see it
here.
$197 shipped.
This brought me to a nice $10 under budget at
$1390. I then broke out my personal credit card and went back to newegg to get a notebook mouse seen
here. $28 shipped.
Lessons/Regrets
Had to skimp on quality with the RAM, also wondering if I should have gone with pc2700 instead of 2100. No hyper threading support with the mobo...such is life, I guess. Barebones AMD laptops are in short selection...a business idea if anyone is interested in filling this void. I couldn't find a quality 7200 rpm 2.5" with less than 50gigs. No floppy...oh well, I have a 128k USB flash drive that I think I can use as a substitute for most cases. That CPU is going to drain that generic power supply like it was a hearing aid battery. No operating system, I think I can fix that easily enough. Stock video and sound...maybe a future upgrade. No support or overall warrantee (most of the items come with individual warrantees), but I stopped caring about that stuff a long time ago.
I guess I'll see how everything goes together. This is the first notebook I've built from scratch, so it will be a learning experience. Hopefully everything I bought will be compatible...we'll see. If I can get it to work, I think it should be a pretty ballsy machine.
Hope someone finds this useful.
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