Buying a new laptop
 "Anthrocon's (un)official brewmaster and beer delivery reptile" Location: Hyde Park NY
Website: [Link]
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Putting this out there because here in the next couple weeks I plan on buying a new laptop, thins one at this point is the quintessential used car whose wheel falls off when the saleman leans on it. translation: it still works fine but it's showing it's age and new games can't be played. This is the curse of laptops, highly mobile and fun but near impossible to upgrade like a desktop. So, I put this out to you board monekeys/dragons/woves/foxes/hybrids/ and whoever else hangs around here; what is a good dependable system? I have my heart set on an Alienware Area-51 M15 with all the good stuffs; Nvdia 8700m GT, 120G HD, 2.5gh intel, 2-4G memory, blah, blah blah. Using this as a standard what comes close? Just wondering since everyone says X brand is the best and Y sucks, but in either case I'd like to find something that won't cost me $2,400. |
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Location: Ardmore, PA
Website: [Link]
Blog: [Link]
One that comes with a 3-year warranty.
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permalinkLocation: Laredo, TX
Website: [Link]
Bestbuy perhaps? On their website they have a laptop recommendation center on whats the right one for you based on what features you want. Theres one I want thats around the $1000 range. I need to sell my desktop first though because I cant afford to keep both of them, and theres no point anyway. Mine is only a couple years old and works pretty fast although the video card kinda sucks so it cant play the latest PC games.
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permalinkLocation: Hyde Park NY
Website: [Link]
rar...
I've poked around bestbuy, the only computer I've seen they have that I kinda like is a 17 inch Gears of War themed Orange Box-colored gateway. That's kinda what I want, only a little smaller and a tad more powerful
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permalinkSigh. The only answer to this is that if you really want the AlienWare laptop, get it. If anyone manages to talk you into another machine, you'll always wonder how much better it would have been.
I will say that I'm responding from a Winbook GL30. (This is a house brand at MicroCenter.) It came with NVIDIA GO 7300 (256MB), 1GB, 120 GB SATA, 6 USB ports, RJ45, RJ11, IEEE 1394, Bluetooth A/B/G, 1.3 megapixel camera, built-in microphone and stereo speakers (the last three are, admittedly, pretty much useless). Of course, DVD+-RW as well. (I bumped the memory to 2 GB.) I've never had any problem with it. List price? $1350, but I paid about $200 less and got a 'free' inkjet printer with it. (Before anyone says anything, I am aware that most laptops come similarly equipped.)
This is two years old, and is obsolete. The current top model comes with 250GB, 2 GB memory NVIDIA GeForce 8400M... and lists at $1200.
In short, buy what will make you happy. If you run across another machine you like, you can always ask for other furs experience with the brand.
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permalinkLocation: In a small little box in your small little mind.
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Make sure you look at the Dell XPS laptops. i recall seeing one in a wal-mart for 1.5 to 2 k with a 8800GT in it. With that, you could play almost anything .
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permalinkLocation: USA; Michigan
Depends on your choice of system.
As of their new release in April, 2008, I now use a 17" MacBook Pro myself.
Running 2.5GHz (or 2.9GHz overclocked) Intel Core 2 Duo w/ 6MB L2 cache
4GB PC6400-DDR2 667MHz RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 8600m GT with GDDR3-512MB VRAM
200GB Harddrive @ 7200rpm
I run both Bootcamp and Leopard OS X and I couldn't complain about anything if I ever needed to. Then again, I doubt you'd want to spend $3,099.99 on a laptop plus a 3-year ACCIDENTAL damage coverage plan & warranty, something very handy to have on a computer that is very costly to fix itself. However, since I do graphic design with Adobe CS3, the occasional project in Final Cut Studio, and play some games, the MacBook Pro is a very reliable tool.
I've never had another 'current' beast of a laptop. Last one I bought was a DELL Inspiron 600m back in 2003, and it was considered top of the line business standard laptop with its incredible 1.59GHz Intel Centrino processor, 1GB DDR 333MHz RAM, and whopping 60GB harddrive- and that was $1,499.99 with business discount from DELL manufacturers. X]
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permalinkLocation: Hyde Park NY
Website: [Link]
rar...
ah the good ol days of 1.59... sadly the compaq I bought in 05 was slightly less. your mac intreagues me, that looks about what alienware I was considereing and no doubtably $1000 less. my brother has a mac and he plays TF2 on it, by far it blows my computer away, but I'll never ad mit that to him. freaking long-haird hippy mac user... no offense.
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permalinkUgh, Alienware... "a sad joke played on rich kids." as one person said from a forum a galaxy away. No offense.
My recommendation is to ask yourself what you want to do with it. If you want gaming, PC Gamer just did a very good round-up of laptops for gaming near the end of their magazine (which is out now) and included pricing, with reference to graphic quality used and frames per second. I'd check it out.
Also, be sure to take a look at Newegg for good deals on laptops.
_________________
My Anthrocon 2008 montage video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xfIYmueKeI
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permalinkWebsite: [Link]
I second the MBP. I've been using this 17" Core Duo machine for a little more than 2 years now, and it still runs great. They're a tad pricey though. If you're in college, or have some way of getting an educational discount, that's the way to go.
The model I have is a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo model, with
2 Gb of RAM,
120GB internal HD @ 5400 rpm,
DVD DL burner (max 8x), and a
ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, (internal display @ 1680 x 1050 pixels).
Kinda dated at this point, but everything runs great. I've got some external drives hooked up through the FW800 port, wacom tablet, and sometimes an external display as well.
So far this machine has taken some pretty heavy loads without complaining - such as running multiple OSes at the same time with VMware for testing an app I was developing, or running Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator simultaneously, while watching a movie on the external screen (a big tv at the time). Something else that may be of value to you, is the Unix backbone of the Mac OS, and how useful the terminal can be. To be honest, I haven't tried running windows games like HL2 or TF2 on my machine, but a friend of mine here at college who has an identical machine does, and they seem to run rather well.
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permalinkLocation: New Brighton, MN, USA
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The MacBook Pro is worth it, solely for the graphics card, but get the $2499 model, and bump it up to 4GB of RAM (Don't get Apple memory, get Corsair or OCZ, which would run you roughly $100 and is easily self-installable.) Make sure to get AppleCare, too. A machine like that needs coverage.
The Nvidia 8800 GT w/ 512MB of RAM has very good performance. And since MacBook Pros are well capable of running Vista and Windows XP, there is no limit to the types of games that you can run.
The 17" model is a waste of money unless you absolutely have to have a big screen. The other difference is that the 17" has a third USB port. That's it. Everything else is the same when compared to the 15" $2499 model.
*is an Apple Product Professional*
I will admit, there are some decent laptops out there that are not Apple's. Sony is a good close competitor that seems to underprice Apple by just a tad, but pretty much the same hardware. You just can't run OS X on it, and Sony is far more proprietary than anyone else. Lenovo is second best in the industry for support (Apple is #1), and whilst they don't win any awards for design, Lenovos are tough machines. Hewlett-Packard and Toshiba are the next I would think. I like their designs because of their killer sound systems. Pretty good for laptops.
Things to look for in a laptop:
RAM: 2GB is good, but get 4GB if you can.
Hard Drive: 160GB should suffice. More is better, though.
Graphics: DEDICATED. Never shared, unless there is a combination of shared and dedicated memory. Go for an Nvidia graphics card if you want hardcore gaming. Integrated graphics cards are far too slow. 256MB for decent performance, 512MB or better for excellent performance.
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GHz or better (The MBP comes with a 2.5GHz). AMD just doesn't perform as well as Intel, but they get pretty close. Stay away from Pentiums, Celerons, Semprons, or Athlons, even their dual-core versions. Those processors come in machines of what I like to call "Webtops." They're good for Microsoft Office and the internet. That's it.
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permalinkWebsite: [Link]
I agree with everything you just said!
I like my big screen... (I use it for design work among other things, and even then I sometimes seek more screen space) but a really insane thing to do is to get the extra high resolution screen in the 17" machine. Having said that, 15" is definitely good enough for most people, and would be the way to go.
Applecare = totally worth it. Pretty much any repair will cost more than the cost of it, so it wouldn't hurt to get it honestly.
Also, just to put it out there, a site that I've gotten most of my ram for my macs from, and had good experience with is crucial. I asked some of my mac Genius friends at the Apple Store where they get their ram, and they pointed me there.
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