Category: Geeks r Us
Ok, geekers. I'm in the market for a notebook/laptop. Nothing super fancy. I surf the net, download music and programs, I do a bit of multi tasking, and of course word processer stuff. What do you recommend? Brands, speeds, etc. For the most part, I'd like to stay around the $1000 and under mark. I'd really like a small one; 14" screen or smaller. The large screens are pointless to me. The vision I have in my eye, I shouldn't strain that much. So, what do you have to say? I've been researching like crazy. I'd love some input. Thanks!
Lol, forgot to mention I'd like to connect to the net wirelessly. To my existing cable conection. Grin, is wirelessly a word? LOL!
Get one of the $500 dells, upgrade the ram to 512 megs or a gig, get a dvd burner, and a hard drive no smaller then 60 gigs, you don't need a pentium 4 processor so go cheep and just upgrade those two components.
Here are my specs of my laptop:
p4 2.8 ghz
768 meg ram (Did come with 256 ram, but only had 224 coz of shard graphics, so made it have 64 shared graphics, and it ran better, then got it an extra stick of 512 for £40)
40 gig harddrive (not much i know, but i don't store much on there, all i wanted to do was to use wireless a lil bit of sound and just stuff like that.
Dvd + - rw and a 802.11g card.
All that came to £799 including extra ram and a wireless card.
Its just over 1 year old now, and it still works fine for me.
Although i would like one of them sony's, that have like 2 80 gig hdd's, but they way like 4 kg!
BEWN.
Del often times has good deals, sony and IBM usually have more respect behind them name wise. Tashiba as well. I'd suggest not going with hp. I had one, and I think I've used 486's that acted like they ran faster. I've heard multiple views backing me up on this. Hope this helps some, and if you want me to illaborate on anything, just drop me a line.
I have a dell inspiron 1150 but that model isn't sold anymore you can pay for a laptop and buy a card for it to be wireless I have had mine almost a year and have had no issues with it but if you buy the computer then the card you might save money i don't know the state got mine
You could get HP, there a good service, my mom has them, and one of my sisters has a dell notebook.
You can buy a 400 dell notebook i think.
Dells a really good company, and so is sony.
I got 512 MB, a CDR-w drive, a CD/DVD burner, and some other stuff i can't remember.
Are those cheep Dels able to work out of the box with jaws? I recently attempted to install Jaws on a Toshiba and it royally fucked the machine up. This also happened to a Del desktop I tried to put jaws on. I was thinking that maybe the fact that the video cards weren't independant of the system were the contributing factor. U know, the video feeds off the computer's resources, but I wasn't sure. I know most of the cheep laptops are set up that way. I'm also in the market for a laptop, so would apreciate any information on this.
I'm not an Intel fan by any means, so I'd definitely recommend one of the HP or Compaq computers with the Turion or Athlon64 processors. You get more processor for your buck, but I definitely concur with Jared...Upgrade the memory to at least a gig, whatever you get. The Compaq with the Turion's selling all over the place for under $1000, and the display's a 14-inch. Keep in mind also that Dell is number 1 on the return list. People just aren't happy with them.
About del being crappy quality I've had no problems with myne, so I guess it's just luck of the draw. As to jaws not working on the laptop weard, I'd say make sure your installing the latest version of jaws, and don't use windows server 2003. I have run jaws on machines with integrated vidio and had no problems, so not sure why you would have issues. Did you try reformatting it and not putting on any of that preinstalled crap that comes by default?
I've never had problems with shared video, either.
Gateway 4540GZ. Bought it in late March of 05. It's five and a half pounds, 80G, 512 memory, Wireless Intel 2200 B/G card; DVD drive, 15 inch screen, 4-5 hour battery life, and the memory can be upgraded to 2G. For somewhere just under 1000 bucks, I couldn't be happier.
No, I hadn't tried all of those settings, but this laptop already had stuff done to it. Since it wasn't mine, I didn't mess with it. Just booted the machine up in safe mode, ran the system restore utility, and returned the computer to its state before the jaws disaster.
good luck with the gateway cd rom drives. They always end up needing to be replaced. I've been using Dell for ten years, am ok with them though I might try an hp when I have the money for it. keep your eyes peeled for deals, that's the best thing you cando. I ended up getting a free scanner when dell wouldn't give my this desktop on time. Don't hesitate to do that if the people are being stupid, never know what you might get fre.
Thank you all for the input. Smile, I'm still shopping around. Oy, I tend to over think things. I'm leaning a bit twards the hp notebooks. Does anyone know, is hp and compaq vertually the same thing these days? I've looked at this averatec, but it has really mixed reviews. Hmmm...
With a computer someone else has been using who knows what was intersepting the vidio chain such as screen recording/capture programs, you shouldn't have any problems with brand new laptops though.
Hp and compaq are the same company, and they have many of the same pc's. The only difference is that the Compaqs usually are more geared toward business, so they tend to skimp on the video cards, unless you custom order the upgrade.
thanks Jared. I guess I'll just pick up a cheep laptop and add some ram to it. There was an add for a dell for $499 somewhere around here
That's the way to go unless you have a need to do a lot of programming, run math programs like matlab or do database stuff with a lot of data.