Laptop Recommendations

[cyanide]

A friend of mine is interesting in purchasing a laptop. Can anyone recommend a good reliable, sturdy one?

Seems to be alot of choice out there, hard to decide.

Please don't mention IBM, though.
She was ripped off by them once already !

I'm not too well-versed with notebooks, although I'm starting to casually look for one also.

If you can provide specs and maybe even a link, that would great !!

Thanks

[Ann Bee]

Hey cyanide,
Try Website
http://www.adminbiz.com
They have PC Configurator

Ann

[flood6]

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 (http://www.compgeeks.com/details.asp?invtid=NBEGG732C15)-$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 (http://www.buyxtremegear.com/intel306.html)-$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 (http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=20-120-204&depa=1). 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 (http://www.computergiants.com/items/one_item.asp?part=70343&cat=99&subsubcat=1720). $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 (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=26-105-130&catalog=65&manufactory=BROWSE&depa=1). $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.

[Dragonsi]

My experiances of laptops has been just as painful, when I started my business some 2 years ago, I purchased a laptop thinking it was the best choice - I needed something to do my main design work on and something to go mobile to show clients work-in-progress and final results. I too then spent days searching for the best product for my money and ended up spending £1,200 on a AMD 1.4GHz with a good array of ports etc.

Unfortuatly for me, the graphical capabilities of the unit could not handle high end graphic production from applications like Photoshop, the unit kept crashing because the shared memory of the AGP graphics and tiny cooling fan could not handle the work load. Also the LCD screen cannot display the true colours needed for graphic design and I often got a false impression of what the work looked like. So after several months, I bought a meaty desktop and 19" monitor. So now the laptop is only used for testing websites and showing work to clients at their locations.

So when choosing a laptop, you need to know excatly what you're gonna do with it. If you just want something for basic office work (word processing, spreadsheets etc) and surfing the net, then great - there's loads of choice. If you want something to perform the full range of multimedia tasks and good graphic handeling - stay with desktops..

[netman4ttm]

OK!

For the really insane try www.alienware.com

Not the whimpy mobile laptops but 17 inch monitor 3.2 Ghz models.

We love them. And because we carry them around so much we have gained 2 inches in arm length.

Seriously, as developement machines these are great. If all you plan to do can be done with MS Office, go to CompUSA, Circuit City etc. and get a HP or Compaq.

[my74]

Who wouldn't want an alienware!{{grin}} Just wish I could afford one.

I purchased the Compaq X1000 Wi Fi Notebook. Handles like a dream. I work with Photo Shop and Dreamweaver. No problem. Reasonable price too!