Looking to buy a new laptop

[Ele'ill]

Looking to buy a new laptop- I'm in the US.

I am not able to pay over $450- I will be using it for school and likely for media type stuff-

What are your recommendations?

The problem I have with ordering from a company is that in the event I need to use a warranty I have to send it out- it might be out for a week and all I have as backup is this shitty thinkpad 600 that's half broken.

I've built gaming rigs and such and consider myself fairly savvy with such things but I've been away from technology for a while now and am unsure what's out there.


Thanks

[synthesis]

One option I was looking at is the notebooks at the Verizon store. You pay around $40 for the notebook and then sign up for a two year $40/month contract for the notebook's broadband, which isn't that bad considering you can get Internet anywhere (I think) and pay probably as much as you would for Comcast or whatever. Of course, I could be completely misinterpreting how it works, but it's probably worth looking into.

[Manifesto]

A laptop for that cheap? You would have to find one used because besides netbooks you are just not going to find something even worth buying for that price.

[synthesis]

I think it's that they recoup the price with the contract, like how a $50 cell phone will be around $400 without a contract. I guess I don't know all that much about the different models, but I think it's worth looking into.

[Kléber]

These are cheap and have really great battery life (subtract an hour from what the manufacturer says but 8-10 hours is still nice), huge power supply attached to a simple netbook, i think the other companies have similar models worth checking out too. They can play movies and run photoshop fine, as well as play older games. Not an ideal computer for video and sound editing of course, although I tried and could do both with some slowdown, but I doubt anything is in that price range, even desktops. They're so light and portable too, don't get in the way in class or work or travel. The keyboards on netbooks are fine for taking notes, web browsing etc. but they can be annoying for long-term writing projects, that's why they have the wide ones i guess. I fell in love with mine and took it everywhere, around the world even, until it died tragically (due to no fault in the design). :'(

http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-1000HE-10-1-Inch-Black-Netbook/dp/B001QTXL82

http://www.amazon.com/ASUS-1101HA-MU1X-BK-11-6-Inch-Black-Netbook/dp/B002JINFS0

[Blackscare]

One option I was looking at is the notebooks at the Verizon store. You pay around $40 for the notebook and then sign up for a two year $40/month contract for the notebook's broadband, which isn't that bad considering you can get Internet anywhere (I think) and pay probably as much as you would for Comcast or whatever. Of course, I could be completely misinterpreting how it works, but it's probably worth looking into.


You have to be very wary with that shit though, my friend's mom got a similar "internet access anywhere" sprint dongle thingy, it works ok but if you go over the 5 gig monthly limit, which anyone would, you get charged something totally abhorrent like a few dollars a megabyte. She got a $900 bill the first month.

Still, you could just use wireless hotspots etc as often as possible, only using the built-in service when totally necessary. Kind of like using a prepaid phone and watching your minutes.




Also, to OP, what do you mean by "media stuff"?

If you just mean youtube and movies, music, etc, just get a netbook.


I'll find some links on newegg and post them in a few minutes.

[synthesis]

Yeah, obviously you'd want to research something like that. I doubt there would be an issue with just, say, YouTube, but if you also wanted to use BitTorrent, or whatever, it's probably a different story.

[Martin Blank]

Try eBay. I got my laptop (a Panasonic Toughbook, military surplus) and all the hardware I needed to upgrade it (larger HD, more memory, DVD burner, etc.) for about $450. It's designed for easy upgrades, so you don't have to have PhDs in computer science and engineering to do the work. I use mine to do media work (print, radio and video), write, cruise the Internet and game. It was a great buy -- much better than going somewhere like Best Buy or Wal-Mart.

[Ele'ill]

Thanks everyone.

[Animal Farm Pig]

It may be a bit late, but I would really like to recommend IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad and Dell Latitude laptops. For less then $450, you'll have to buy used, but I think it's worth it.

They're very very sturdy-- which is important if you are carrying it with you a lot. I had an old Dell Inspiron that was literally shaken apart after less than a year of the 5km walk + hour bus ride that was my commute.

The keyboards are of very good quality-- which is important if you want to actually type on your laptop. The Thinkpads have especially good keyboards. They also have pointing sticks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick), which (I don't care what anyone else says) is a far superior input method in comparison to touch pads.

Thinkpads and Latitudes have fairly standard parts. While manufacturers like Toshiba or Acer or Sony will just use whatever is cheapest in each production run and change sub-model numbers each month, the hardware on a Thinkpad or Latitude stays fairly constant across each model number. This simplifies finding drivers (Dell's 'service tag' system is also very nice), and it means that parts are well supported across various versions of Windows (or Linux). Standardization also extends to batteries and optical drives. A battery from a Latitude D610 works in a D820 works in a D630. This drives down replacement costs when the battery dies and the optical drive breaks.

The Thinkpad has the UltraBay system. Latitudes have a similar system. What it means is that if you're like 99% of people and almost never use the optical drive, you can remove it and replace it with an additional battery or a second hard drive. With the modular bay battery installed, I got 6 hours of battery life out of my old Latitude.

Both the Thinkpad and Latitude (in the D6x0 and D8x0 series) offer higher screen resolutions. My current Thinkpad T60 does 1680x1050. My old Latitude did 1600x1200. Most consumer laptops are at 1280x800. Those extra pixels (especially the horizontal ones) matter. It means that I can have two spreadsheets open side-by-side and work with both simultaneously. It means that I can have a Python interpreter or SQL console in 1/3 of the screen and browse code or documentation in the other 2/3. None of that is comfortable on a lower resolution display.

Sorry if this sounds like a sales pitch. I don't get anything from promoting those laptops. I just see a lot of my comrades who have bought the laptop that looked pretty at the store or the one that was cheap, and they tend to break a lot, and I always end up being the guy repairing them. I also travel a lot and do a lot of work behind a laptop screen, so I demand quality.

In general when looking for a laptop, the things to consider are screen size and keyboard. The smaller the screen, the more portable, but the less useful it is for real work. A smaller screen often leads to a worse keyboard. Pick what feels right for you.

Processor, memory, and hard drive--

You want a 64 bit processor. This means a Core 2 Duo or newer on the Intel side. AMD processors have been 64 bit for a long time, so no worries there. You also want dual core-- the improvement in responsiveness for a marginal increase in cost is totally worth it. This rules out most Atom processors used in laptops (older ones are not 64 bit and most aren't dual core), Core Duo (not 64 bit), Celeron (not dual core), and some AMD processors for laptop/netbook (can't be arsed to keep up with model names-- but some aren't dual core).

As far as processor speed... it matters a bit but not too much. My current laptop has a C2D at 2.0 GHz. It seems okay for 98% of what I do. It's not noticeably slow for any basic web browsing or document creation work. Sometimes I'll bog it down with badly written, by me, code. The only time I wish for something faster is when working with very big data sets in ArcMap (like California census data [something like 30,000 polygons and a bunch of tabular data] or county parcel data [a shitload of polygons]).

I think memory follows the 80/20 rule-- you get 80% of the results for 20% of the cost. Don't worry about memory speed or DDR2 vs DDR3. It will be fine. Just be sure to have as much as you can afford.

The hard drive is where you shouldn't skimp. I'm not talking about capacity, I'm talking about speed. Get a 7200 rpm drive. If you can afford it, get a Seagate Momentus XT (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3734/seagates-momentus-xt-review-finally-a-good-hybrid-hdd). If you had enough money to afford an SSD, you wouldn't be looking for laptops under $450 :D . The hard drive is the slowest component in just about any modern computer-- especially a laptop. My local Fry's just had a deal of $52 for a 320GB 7200 rpm Hitachi TravelStar (by the way, I've had great experience with Seagate and Hitachi hard drives, other manufacturers... not so much), so there's no excuse not to go to 7200 rpm. Hard drives are cheap and easy to upgrade, so I wouldn't hesitate to buy an otherwise decent machine that's just needing a faster or larger hard drive. One thing to watch out for is netbooks and some laptops that use non-standard hard drives. This is especially the case for netbooks with SSD's. Laptops using non-standard drives tend to be some ultra-portables with weird 1.8" drives-- an example is the Dell Latitude D4x0 machines.

This post was longer than I intended, but I hope it was helpful. For finding a laptop, I'd recommend geeks.com (http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=NBB), Dell Financial Services Direct (http://www.dfsdirectsales.com/) for off-lease corporate laptops, and your local craigslist.

[Ele'ill]

Thanks

So I'm thinking that I should buy from a store that's in my area rather than ordering from a company- my thinking is that when I get back into college here this January I'm not going to want to send it away for a week at a time if something happens (I am good with computers and went to school for such back in the day and it is a hobby of mine to an extent but still)

I would rather walk in and buy it from some place such as Best Buy and just be done with it- and be able to return it if it gets dropped- perhaps more out of convenience than anything else.

[khad]

I find it odd that no one's asked what you're going to be using this for. Light portable or desktop replacement? What are you going to be running on it, word, photoshop, games? Only then can we figure out what you need.

For general use you really don't need something more than a pentium-m (note, not pentium 4-m), which generally come clocked in the 1.6-2.0ghz range. 64 bit is completely useless unless you are dealing with 4gb or more memory. I was running a dothan back in the day and it beat the shit out of comparably clocked a64 machines.

[Ele'ill]

I will be using it for school and likely for media type stuff-

For standard school stuff- writing mainly-

I'm not looking for light portable as in notebook and I'm not sure I need a desktop replacement to the extent that it can handle say, gaming, but because it will be my main computer I'd want to have a larger screen so as I'm doing research and writing I'm not all squished over the thing etc..

I'm looking for an in-between that I can watch dvd's on, probably at the most.

[khad]

For standard school stuff- writing mainly-

I'm not looking for light portable as in notebook and I'm not sure I need a desktop replacement to the extent that it can handle say, gaming, but because it will be my main computer I'd want to have a larger screen so as I'm doing research and writing I'm not all squished over the thing etc..

I'm looking for an in-between that I can watch dvd's on, probably at the most.
In that case, a good option to consider is an old thinkpad off ebay. You can get some really good deals in the 200-300 dollar range, if you can live with a somewhat smaller hard disk. Just make sure it's a pentium-m and not a pentium 4-m.

[Ele'ill]

Thanks

[Ele'ill]

Change of plans- I'm doing well enough that I can afford internet-

This means I won't need a portable computer (laptop) to get to wifi spots-

This means I can allocate all my funds into building a gaming rig so that I can report on GuildWars 2 in-game market trends for economics courses.....


I can build a machine that's 1/2 the price and 5 times as powerful this way.


Hooray

[khad]

Then may I suggest the phenom II x2 555 3.2ghz

It's a C3 revision, which means it will clock higher with lower volts than the older C2 revision, and it will most likely unlock as well. I've got mine unlocked to x4 and overclocked to 3.7ghz on stock volts.

Currently, it has the best price to performance ratio.

[Ele'ill]

Neat- will look into that tomorrow.

I have not kept up with hardware stuff for the last year. I'm gonna have to do some research but I think I can likely build a rig that can handle newer games for under $500

I'd be shooting for $400 with the capability to upgrade in like 6 months when I have the money again

[khad]

Neat- will look into that tomorrow.

I have not kept up with hardware stuff for the last year. I'm gonna have to do some research but I think I can likely build a rig that can handle newer games for under $500

I'd be shooting for $400 with the capability to upgrade in like 6 months when I have the money again
It'll be good if you can look around first and see what you can scavenge. I pretty much put together this phenom ii machine for about 200 dollars with parts left over from when I upgraded my main rig. That and a broken dell dimension I dumpstered and hollowed out/modded in order to use the case. Broken computers are actually a great way to find common items like cables and floppy/dvd drives.

Also, don't skimp on the power supply. Computers these days are more power hungry than ever, and a weak psu will really limit your upgrade options in the future.

[Ele'ill]

When I was living in Philly I had three rigs that I had dumpstered. I left all that behind when I moved out here.

Tomorrow I'm going to look for small computer shops in the area here and see what kind of stuff they have- I hate ordering and waiting for stuff to arrive.

We should get a RevLeft Guildwars 2 guild together- for those that want to play and are into that kind of thing.

[Ele'ill]

Edit****

[Ele'ill]

Well, I've got about a grand to spend- which isn't bad considering I can rebuild later and build it slowly- I'm allowing this from my savings as I need a computer fucking horribly bad-

For anyone that likes to take the time to suggest components feel free to design one with links to newegg or tigerdirect.

I'm going to go ahead and build it for gaming since it will be able to handle just about anything else. I'd want a mid range system capable of decent upgrades-

FarCry2 should be able to run smoothly on it as well as Guild Wars 2 (which doesn't have sys reqs out yet)

I'll be doing this designing too so in advance- I'm not one of those babies that begs for everyone else to build their rig for them.

Thanks

[Bright Banana Beard]

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/ Check the site out. You can also ask question to them if you have to.

[Ele'ill]

Thanks- the GW 2 forums are pretty helpful as well.

[Ele'ill]

nevermind this build wouldn't work

[khad]

I would definitely wait a month or so for the Radeon 6900 series to come out. The 6800 series right now are actually targeted at the high midrange, an upgrade from the 5700 series.

In general you should go for a mediocre processor that can be overclocked, together with a good power supply and a high-end video card. This will give you the possibility to upgrade to crossfire later when prices come down.

[Ele'ill]

So, I'm feeling a bit lazy and want to get shit ordered and pc built before this lease is up-


The only game I will play is Guild Wars 2 - the rest of the usage will be regular stuff


Opinions on this suggested build?


http://www.hardware-revolution.com/1000-gaming-computer/