[CONSUMER ADVICE] Laptop Buying

but, haha.

I went to john lewis, today, and looked at the HP 17" laptop, that I wanted. it seemed a little less robust, than I had hoped for. I looked around and found this. it is the same spec, as the HP, but with double the RAM and the memory card reader is hotswappable, with a second battery and stuff. also, the lid is steel. robuster. it is also slightly smaller and lighter. it is priced at slightly higher, than the HP. I have found some, on ebay. it seems that gateway have kinda stopped trading, in the UK. does anyone know any more?

Oh, and beware of random refurb outlets, I bought a laptop from Refurb Depot and they sent me a piece of shit that wasn't working properly and then gave me massive attitude and headaches when I tried to return it - had to send my credit card people after them, who luckily saved me from getting ripped off to the tune of $1100.

I've bought parts and things from Buy.com and they've been great so far. What about checking customer reviews on Amazon to see what others say? Also epinions, even searching on Slashdot. Best to do your research.

mine is over a year old and i havent had it freeze up on me to the point of rebooting a single time. it is fabulous. pretty quiet as well.

Well, my sister and a friend, both with good positive feeback, were phished and before they realised it high end electrical goods suddenly appeared on their seller lists. Look at their payment options, avoid anything which asks for a money order or wire transfer only.

- Can't be a Mac. Boo hiss etc.
- Reasonable price (around 1200 UKP tops - cheaper the better)
- It'll be used for basic Home Office stuff - no need for
super-duper graphics accelerator etc. Reasonable sized HD
(20Gb would be fine). Processor needs to be good enough to
handle Dreamweaver, Word, Excel, Acrobat. Not blazing super
duper but not clunky old shite
- key issue - needs built in 56K Modem, Ethernet card and
wireless ready - 11g standard if poss. But wireless is not necessary if has PCMIA card slot for
wireless card - how much do they go for? Is it better to go
for a built in standard, or use card slots?
- Pretty robust as it'll be moved a bit, and not too heavy
either (ie, given the price, a nice Vaio is out, but nor do
we want an anvil typewriter stylee thing).

A general tip is to buy a laptop which uses the Pentium M CPU (Centrino) since the CPU uses less power than the Pentium 4. Oh, and I'd choose a built-in wireless solution instead of using the PCMCIA route.

The Dell Inspiron line looks like it has a few good deals depending on what he's looking for.

Samsung X20 might be what you are looking for.

I also think the screens on the Vaio are superb; are samsung screens OK?

do you own a laptop?

MAXDATA ECO 4000 IW
Basic System

Processor: Intel® Celeron® M processor 370
(1.50 GHz, 400 MHz, 1 MB cache)
Operating System: Original Microsoft® Windows® XP
Home
Display/Resolution: 15.4 inch TFT -WXGA (1280 x 800)
Capacity: 256 MB DDR2 SDRAM
Chipset: Intel® 910 GML / ICH6-M
Disk: 40.0 GB hard drive, 5.400 (U/min)
Graphics: Intel® Media Accelerator 900
Sound: HD Audio System
Drives: DVD/CD-RW combo drive
Modem: Internal 56k modem/V.92
WLAN: WLAN 802.11 b/g
Network: LAN 10/100 MBit/s onboard
Interfaces: 3 x USB 2.0, 1 x PCMCIA Type II,
1 x LAN, 1 x Modem, 1 x IEEE1394
(FireWire), 1 x VGA external,
1 x S-Video-Out, 1 x Line-Out,
1 x Line-In, 1 x Mic-In,
1 x Kensington Lock
Dimensions: 353.8 x 25–33.5 x 250 mm
Weight: approx. 2.9 kg (depending on
configuration)
Software: Norton AntiVirus, Nero Express,
Power DVD Player
Warranty: 2 year warranty, 1 year pick-up &
return service (have to check this...)

or hang on longer for a low-end refurb mac costing twice as much, and with the possibly still latent possibility of making me FURIOUS every other day?

price: £300 vs £210
proc: celeron 1.5 vs pentium m 1.7
xp: home vs professional
ram: 512 vs 512
hd: 80 vs 80

cant remember the rest of the stuff, i only bought it to fuck around with linux on, though the fact that it runs better than my powerbook means i might shift reaktor over there.

i guess they're pretty comparable, but the fact you can pay £90 less not to have celeron must be worth investigating

a 2.16ghz macbookpro is £1349. and apparently you need some sort of seatbelt too

other than some graphicy stuff, explain to me what is so good about the MBP. you can shout if you like, i don't mind!

I wonder if I can hold of till WWDC.... Ed, any word on what's next for the desktop Macs?

oh, the macbook has to have a glossy screen? i dont like the sound of that

i could get dell inspirion 6400 for another £300 less, also core 2 duo, but 1.66ghz, rather than 2

you all hate dells still though, right?

when the quads come out, is everything going to drop, pricewise, again?

MBPs will get the next serious bump around Expo '08 (slight chance xmas 07) when 45nm quad core chips with proper shared cache become available. In time for my next upgrade.

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

As a supplement to my fading fast desktop, is this one any good?

http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Samsung_R40_Plus_LWM_440_NP-R40XY02-SUK/version.asp

must...resist...

We're thinking about getting one of those XO laptops next month in the "Give One Get One" program.

better: http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_5710WLMi_LX.AHB0X.093/version.asp

I've got an Acer Aspire, 15 months old. Just got it back from my local computer shop where it was in for 6 weeks getting repaired.

okays i defer to thy wisdom. excuse my ignorance but how's it better?

it's got a proper core 2 duo processor unlike the first one which has a celeron :( :( :(

aaah i seeeee. that's good enough for me. and is that price okay?

pretty much. you get a 'better' version of vista on the acer as well but it probably wouldn't make much difference.

of course if the budget allows you could always lol get a mac (etc)

what spec is good for playing live music from? im thinking a 2gb ram, maybe this one http://www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Asus_F3Jp_Laptop_F3JP-AS113C/version.asp but is there anything i need to know about processor and stuff? am i right in thinking i can just wipe over the vista crap and stick xp on there instead, or do some laptops not work like this?

i made the mistake of whacking vista on my pc and after realising my mistake tried to put xp back but it appears to have done something that's fucked the xp install program. so possibly not.

for music i'd say get a macbook (no, seriously) and logic express 8, use the education discount store, they never check

it's weird about the vista xp thing, is there some kind of solution to it? annoyingly i can't get a mac as my music-playing program doesn't work on macs.

what is best processor-wise when it comes to playing music - reliability is key, obv

well the in-thing at the moment is intel's core 2 duo and the low end apple laptops have superior versions of it to any pc laptop at similar prices, but probably the difference isn't noticeable. just don't get a celeron :(

i don't know if there's a solution to the OS problem because i'm not sure what the problem actually is, it's just like the pc is sulking or something

Best processor for playing music....

All processors are reliable unless they are faulty, all modern processors are more than capable of playing music.

Your OS problem, I have no idea give us some more information, when you are installing XP are you formatting the hard disk?

im using a porgram which can eat up processor speed by adding effects, an external behringer mixer, external soundcard etc. is there a certain type of processor which is better than others for this type of thing or all they all pretty much the same?

surely you can install xp over vista, couldn't you do this with xp and me and 98 ?

vista changes some bootup process which makes installing xp after vista a headache.

Your program may use certain processor features to speed things up, its doubtful, some audio software such as Guitar Rig requires things like Altivec on older Macs.

People use Athlon 64s to run multiple effects on multitrack audio like Cubase so even previous generation processors are enough for audio and effects.

A Core 2 Duo should be more than enough.