[CONSUMER ADVICE] Laptop Buying

Anyway, a Mini probably doesn't have enough oomph

my brother happily runs logic studio on his!

yeah i was thinking about carting a (lightweight) monitor around, but sounds a bit too complicated.

anyone know of a good place to buy a reconditioned mac from? im looking for a pretty high-spec one, for around £800ish. (new ones are around £1400 arent they?)

so the new macbook is still a much better deal than the new macbook air, which does not have ethernet, right? does the aluminum mean you don't need a protective cover at all? do people just carry laptops in their rucksacks without any protective covering? and nothing happens to them?

yeah it seems to work for lots of folks actually

MacBook Air really isn't all that.

^^Truth bomb.

Nate, yes I would like to be able to use it for more than wp and the web. I'd love. I am not going to make you an offer because I loathe that process. Email me and tell me what you'd like for it, please!

<3

Whoever Kyle is, send me your email address dude. Emily, I'll write you. :)

So, I ended up with a myspace acquaintance buying my laptop yesterday. I cleaned off all the data and set it up for her. She gave me a check.

Today, I deposited the check. All good.

This evening, she called me. She dropped it on accident, really hard. It no longer works.

!!!

(yes, it's under Applecare and will be fixed as long as she can convince them that she didn't drop it).

I dropped an iBook once, a week after the 1 year of non-Applecare warranty had expired, right on the plugged-in power adapter. Thereafter, the machine would freeze up after about 5 minutes of use. (I peeked at the logs and I seem to have killed the graphics chip.)

Since then, every Mac I get is Applecared.

Do you guys know anything about Netbooks/Mini Laptops? I'm considering:

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-NC10-14GB-10-2-Inch-Netbook-Processor/dp/B001I45TA8

or

http://www.amazon.com/1035NR-10-2-Inch-Netbook-Intel-Processor/dp/B001J6N9J8

An ex-girlfriend of mine set her laptop on the floor while make her bed, then proceeded to step on it, completely breaking the screen.

She was one high stress/high maintenance lady.

bro-in-law suggests Inspiron 1525 for my basic needs.

i've had a toshiba laptop for a few years now and it has been great all that time, no major problems whatsoever.

is it possible to get a laptop with 2gb of ram for £650? where is best to buy from?

― siobh (siobh), Monday, February 5, 2007 9:40 PM

what kinda Toshiba will meet my basic web/write/mail needs?

I am mind-controlled by World's No. 1 risky terrorist Toshiba Satellite E105. Very good EMR pattern! Super shipping!! A++++++++

^about twice what I can spend

why not just the Satellite L305

newegg.com

hey guys im looking to sell my macbook parts - what could i sell and how much could i fetch? screen, cd-drive etc are perfect. also im paranoid about selling my hard drive. should i be?

xp: thx!

Are there brands to avoid bcz of servicing ripoffs? -- Someone claimed to me that only Dell fixes Dells at extortionist rates.

Can't I just get similar warranties w/ anything at newegg?

bro-in-law suggests Inspiron 1525 for my basic needs.

I just bought one from the Dell Outlet site, with a -%20 rebate code that I found. Ended up being $480 after everything. Works fantastic - even though it has Vista on it - I'm very pleased.

vostro laptops are super cheap on the small business side

hey guys im looking to sell my macbook parts - what could i sell and how much could i fetch? screen, cd-drive etc are perfect. also im paranoid about selling my hard drive. should i be?

― jordan s (J0rdan S.), Monday, January 5, 2009 1:07 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

You have 3 options

1. Sell it,
2. Destroy it, or
3. Carry it around with you for the rest of yr life.

I think there's nothing wrong with #1 as long as you have blanked it with zeroes. No, that's not perfect security, but you have to have some mighty powerful enemies for it to matter.

If you prefer 2., then you can go out to the firing range with Morbs or Tom and I'm sure they'll help you turn it into swiss disk.

Can't I just get similar warranties w/ anything at newegg?

I'm unfortunately no help on this question because all the I'M A PCs I know are hobbyist types who service their own machines and get spare parts from ebay

jordan, reformat the HD and ebay the whole unit

if you can't reformat the HD then just remove it and ebay it without one

anyone rep for Acer? their Extensa goes for about $100 less on Newegg right now than Toshiba L305.

As far as I'm concerned, the support offerings for a PC lappy are more important than the hardware itself.

yeah I'm sure, which means I pretty much need my brother-in-law to select all that.

I like Acer for their monitors but know nothing about their full machines.

advantage of going years and years between buying computers = even the cheapest stuff appears to have mindblowing specs

Has the amount of time you keep your computer gone up ? how long have you had your computer?

actually: I was thinking it had been like 6 years, but apparently it's been just under 4? so never mind that alleged realization.

looking back into desktops is even more mindblowing, though, geez

Okay, here's my question. I have a 6 year old Mac PowerBook. For one of my sources of income I need to run Windows. I have this Virtual PC program so I can run Windows on the Powerbook, but the software I use that requires Windows keeps getting upgraded so that it runs slower and slower, plus it's really picky about what printers it can print to. This is a problem, because currently I have to print a lot of things.

Should I get a new or one year old Mac laptop that could run Windows faster or should I just get a PC laptop and save over $1000?

I'd get the Mac; it's your baseline platform and will be a boost for everything you do, not just the Windows stuff.

But everything else I do works fine on the 6 year old powerbook, and I worry about having to upgrade a bunch of mac software. Are there things that you all know of that work in 10.4 that need new versions in 10.5? If I were to get a used Windows XP laptop I wouldn't have to upgrade anything.

xp Bob Six: Actually yes, my previous computers before the laptop I only had for four years, this one is 5 years and counting.

This is probably the sort of thing you say and then are immediately proven wrong on, but I feel like we might be getting past the point where there are such constant sudden leaps in what normal people do with computers that super-frequent updating is necessary. I mean, is there anything on the horizon that's about to get everyday users to scramble up?

(I know, I know, five years from now we will look back at that post and go "hahaha how did he ever think we could live without being able to sequence the human genome on a laptop at the dinner table")

The "what normal people do" is crucial. The Powerbook I bought in 2001 still does what I want it to do just fine. It runs new browsers and so the WWW just loads more slowly than it used to when everything looked like ILX. On the other hand I do my writing on a typesetting system that predates the PC so computer speed's not a big concern for my work; maybe my needs are abnormally undemanding. As far as I know you wouldn't have to upgrade any Mac software...b/w OS X and what's available freely, software needn't be a huge expense if you're on a Mac---this depends a ton on what software you use, though;

"What normal people do" = yeah, I probably wouldn't be bothered, specs-wise, for a long time, if it weren't for making/recording music stuff. Although I guess a good share of normal people play games, which is pretty obvious driver of computing needs.

I mean, is there anything on the horizon that's about to get everyday users to scramble up?

aside from that megalomaniac gates and his memory guzzling OS?

I've used XP on my last 2 laptops for about 5-6 years now and it's never given me a moments hassle. Im amazed at how often MacOS has updates. Ive not changed OS for almost this whole decade, I think. No hard drive deaths, no registry screwups, no viruses, no loss of data, no slowdowns (apart from needing faster video cards for gaming). Perhaps I dont do a lot of demanding things on my system, I dunno.

(I cant see myself going to vista in a hurry, is what Im sayin)

i'm in the middle of a windows special episode right now, so please allow me some gates hate

ps i'm using XP too :(

XP was a great operating system, it ran more or less without any issues on my dell desktop for six years. I finally got a mac but the windows install I run on vmware fusion is XP and it still works really well.

darraghpc vs darraghmac

If you get a new Mac you can run Windows natively on it, using the Boot Camp software which comes with 10.5. However, your programs might have to be upgraded to run on 10.5. If you have license keys, the upgrade should probably be free.

It used to be that you could get refurbished Macbooks (refurbished meaning hand-checked by Apple, re-bathed in unicorn tears, etc.) from the Apple Store for less than 900 - however it seems their stock has run dry at the moment. I would keep an eye on their refurb page to see if any Macbooks pop up.

I've got a Dell that's 5 years old that mostly works fine but a) has become increasingly slow at i) booting up, ii) opening Firefox, iii) seems to run out of memory more and more, and b) has a relatively small hard disk that constantly has me burning stuff to CDRs and offloading to my external HD (which I try not to use too often in order to preserve it).

So, having been out the game for 5 years, which brands are the ones to look at? Dell and Lenovo ThinkPads? What's the word on HP and Toshiba (for which I see a lot of ads/coupons/deals)? Should I be willing to spend more money to get a better/faster processor, based on the idea that it'll be more useful for me for a longer time?