Researching a laptop, input needed

GregCavi

GregCavi

Pinnacle Detailing Owner
Hello everyone! I had my graduation party today and got about 1k from all of the cards, and gifts. I want to by a laptop for school, but I am kind of in the dark on which is the best quality etc. I will jot down the things that it will be used for and If you have a suggestion It would be much appreciated.

- I want it to be able to run for at least 3-4 years
- Major uses, Internet, Microsoft Word & Excel, Photoshop CS, no games
- I want at least an 80 gig HD
- want at least a 15" screen but would love a 17"
- Good battery life
- Wireless Internet
- UNDER 1200 bucks ** If that is totally unreasonable please say so **

Thanks!

Greg
 
Check out www.dell.com. That should give you a good idea of what computers are going for.

Something that I found very helpful in college as well as in my career as a trainer is a TabletPC. They have just as much power and are just as usable as a normal laptop, but with the additional benefit of being able to use it like an electronic notebook. There are some great tools for the TabletPC that really help students. I've got a Compaq TC1000 that I use for work and I love it. I wish I would have had one of these several years ago when I started college. It would have been super helpful.
 
I use a trad laptop (HP) bought at Future Shop (Best Buy in the States) because of the warranty. Almost 3 years of 4-12hr/day use. No problems yet, but I'll probably get it into the warranty shop for a coupla weeks on minor things when I get a break this summer.
Get as much as you can afford.
 
Have talked with my wife on the phone about this and the short answer is just as Birdman said. Go to Dell. Purchase a long term warranty. For as long as you are in school. If nothing happens it was money well spent. But, if you break down, Dell will send you a replacement to do yourself or send it in and it will get fixed. Take special care to record all purchase information. Records are where it is at when purchasing with Dell. That and you will have to talk with Aupu from India when you deal with coustomer service

As far as battery life that is something that you will just have to contend with. By an extra one for a spare. Be prepared to replace often. Just be prepared to be hated on by your classmates if you get to nice of one. At least that is what our daughter has related to my wife since the acquisition of her laptop this last last fall when she went back for her Junior year in college.
 
For a computer to last a few years, you need to buy the most powerful you can.

Photoshop requries lots of ram and if you are saving graphics, lots of hard- drive too.
I have a year old PC running Photoshop CS2 with 1 gig of ram, really need two gig.
The 250 gig hard-drive filled quickly, so have two externals too.
I've seen a HP and Toshiba about the same power as my PC for about $1,500 at BestBuy, CircuitCity, Costco and Sams.

Since it is for school, the laptop you need may depend upon your major, some programs require specific computers with specific requirements.
You might want to double check.

I gave my husband a laptop last Christmas.
He just surfs the net and a little bit of forms for work, no heavy requirements.
I watched the Sunday paper and online sites for BestBuy and Circuit City.
Circuit City for about $900 for an 17" Acer that serves his purposes.
Would have been less if it was not during the holidays.

Battery life is an issue, don't know the answer.
I don't think any rechargable battery lasts.
 
I have Photoshop open at work along with a few other programs and 512mb of ram has worked well. That doesn't mean that I couldn't use more, but you need at least 512mb if you want to use that program. Keep in mind that it sucks the life out of your battery, so keep it plugged in whenever you are using it. Using the wireless card will suck your battery dry too. When you are in class and using it unplugged I would stick to taking notes if you want it to still have a charge for your next class.
 
I have a dell with 1.5 gigs of RAM and a 80 gig hard drive and 15 inch screen. For $200 CDN I purchased a 2 year extended warranty (on top of the one year you get with it for a total of 3 years) and it's next day to your door service. No sending it in the mail for me. I have had no problems with the Dell. I have had to use customer service several times for "how to" type things but no software or hardware problems with it knock on wood (knocking on my head:D ). Most times though you get a customer service rep based in India and although they are polite, intelligent, and helpful they can be hard to understand.
 
I've been very happy with my Dell.

I typically use my laptop for heavy internet use, MS Office, some audio and some video. I went with a 17" widescreen, 2ghz processor, 1gb ram, 40gb hd, wireless, etc etc.

Whatever Dell you get (if you do), DON'T SKIP on the COMPLETE CARE. It is a stellar warranty (read: whatever breaks, they fix, for free).


Good Luck.
 
I know everyone here is happy with their dell but recently they have started loading their systems up with spyware on some of their systems. If I were you I would check at the warehouse supermarkets like Sams or Costco. Also if you know anyone that has a dell small business contract through work or anything you can try and order one through them, those come without any thing installed except the OS, they are usually cheaper and best of all, when you call customer support you get an American not Apu in india because their small business is state side. Just a thought though. Also keep remanufactured laptops in mind. Those are usually checked out more thoroughly than a new laptop after they are sent back and are just as good and cheaper. Try overstock.com or ecost.com they usually have some pretty good deals on machines. And yes one more option (im just full of them today) is to check at a local computer shop and see if they offer custom built laptops. They are usually pretty cheap, i think the one in the mall where i work here is like 1300 for a pretty impressive machine.

Just some thoughts.

Jake
 
Toshiba has made great strides in improving their repair time and now offer much quicker turn-around time if repairs are needed.
I'd recommend a Toshiba, 17 inch widescreen with the brightscreen screen. Various manufacturers call their bright screen other names but you'll recognize it, it looks like glass it's so smooth.
A Toshiba model with this 17 inch brightscreen, the internal wireless and a dvd burner, 512 mg ram, 80 gb HD, should be between 800 and 1000 US and would be a real winner for you.
Here in Canada, I bought a Toshiba like this for 1100 on sale at Staples and it's been perfect.
Drop a Dell and it breaks. Drop a Toshiba and it breaks. The Toshiba comes back quicker. Thomas Freidman, author of The World is Flat, mentions Toshiba combined with UPS to add a repair facility at the UPS nexus site, so UPS gets the broken Toshiba, ships it via UPS shipping routes to it's central site, Toshiba repairs the Toshiba there, then ships it back to the owner. Shipping and time are maximized. Slick.
Of course you can save a ton of repair time by just not dropping your laptop.
-John C.
 
Those laptops you linked to greg look good to me, they got ur gig of ram for CS2 and plenty of harddrive space and all the internet things you need for wireless or wired.
 
Greg

Google Dell Coupons and get a coupon for your laptop. I recently got $750 off of my last purchase. Or just go to CouponMountain.com and search....
 
Greg,
If you are going to college, many of the manufacturers offer an educational discount. You might check the college bookstore for these discounts.
 
Warning: LONG. :) hehe :howdy

Long-term viability: As has been said before, get the fastest thing you can afford, and as much memory as you can afford. I'd get 2 gigs right away if you want it to last. It's a bit of overkill now, but it won't be in a year or two. And most laptops don't have extra DIMM slots to just add later, you'll have to swap out if you want to upgrade.

Battery life: Get a processor package that's optimized for battery life, and get the big battery right off the bat. Intel has Centrino (actually I think there's a new name for the new generation... Core or somesuch), AMD has Turion. Lots of performance-oriented laptops use desktop processors in them, which suck up the juice like crazy. The Alienware I looked at had about a 45 minute battery life, at best. My Dell with the Centrino will do 2 solid hours of Doom 3. :D And quite a bit more if I'm just browsing or doing non-graphic-intensive stuff. Also get the biggest battery offered for whichever laptop you decide on. Dell, for instance, has a 6-cell and a 9-cell battery. Bite the bullet and pay whatever the upgrade charge is. You'll thank yourself later. :) General tip: Keep your screen brightness at the minimum you need to see what you're doing. If you're browsing/word processing and most of what you're looking at is black text on a white background, it's easy to see, and you can reduce the brightness significantly. This will save HUGE amounts of power. I can easily get an additional 30-45 minutes out of mine by reducing brightness to around half.

Wireless: If you go with a Dell, get one of the upgraded Intel cards. The Intel wireless client (software) is much more robust than the Windows client. You'll get far more information about what's going on with your wireless, why you may not be connected, etc. Also, I've found that mine is a very strong card, compared to most. I've been able to get weak, but still useable, signals in places where nobody else can seem to pick up a thing. Had a long break in Springfield, MO the other day, and I could get the wireless from the airport terminal sitting a few rows back in the plane at the gate. :)

Pricing: Since you are going to be a college student, you are eligible for Dell's EPP program. www.dell.com/eppbuy Click the drop-down list and select 'higher education students/faculty/staff'. You get an additional 6% or 12% discount (depending on length of warranty you choose) on top of whatever promotions they may currently be running. Create an account, so that Dell has your email address, and you'll also start getting coupons periodically with huge discounts. When I bought mine, I had a coupon from email for 33% off, plus they were running some free upgrade special (don't remember exactly what), plus they had a $200 mail-in-rebate on the 4-year warranty plan, PLUS I got my 12% epp discount on top of all that. All in all, I got the same exact laptop that I had priced out the day before on the consumer side of Dell's website at just over $2400 with only a 2-year warranty, for $1900 with the full 4-year plan including accidental damage coverage. If you don't need it right-this-minute, and you can just sit back and get the emails through the summer, then just see when they send out 'the big one' and jump on it. :) For Memorial Day, they sent out a 25% coupon. The one I used when I bought mine was 33%, and a couple months ago, I gave a 35% coupon code to a friend for his purchase. You also have to factor in whatever promotions they are running in addition to the coupon. Using a 25% coupon when they are running free dvd burner and free memory upgrade promotions may be better than the 33% coupon when no other promotions are going on. So like I said, if you've got some time, just create an account, get the emails, and lie in wait until the best deal comes along.

Just found this... good way to create an account, and you might win something :) hehe http://dell.eprize.net/atgwin/

Since I know you're looking, I'll PM you any future coupon codes that I get, in case you don't get the same ones. :)
 
At my old job, I was in charge of the computers. The first thing I did was to switch everyone over to Dell desktops since I couldn't build a comparable PC for less. In that time I bought a few Dell laptops during various promotions that they had.

The Dell laptops weren't too bad. They came with good features and the selection was pretty varied. You could usually find a machine to meet your needs. We had Toshiba laptops for the previous years and they survived nicely over three plus years of travel and abuse.

My personal laptop I used was a custom unit from a local computer store. It was made by Asus and was wonderful. It was over two years old when I left and it was still my favorite laptop in the office. The screen had wicked good resolution on the 15 inch screen. The built in CD-RW worked well and the built-in wireless was nice. It was a Centrino machine, so it had the Mobile Pentum chip, Intel chipset and Intel wireless card. Battery life was easily 3-4 hours. It was thin, lightweight and pretty sharp looking.

Last summer, I bought an HP dv4040 laptop during an Office Depot clearance sale. For about $700, i ended up with a nice widescreen display, 1 GB RAM, 100 GB hard drive, Pentium-M 1.7 GHz CPU and DVD-RW drive. Wireless was built in. The wife uses it as her computer (her old Dell was four years old) and I use it when I travel. It is a very solid machine and has excellent (3+ hours) battery life.

My advice is to research the actual chips and components. The CPU will be your big concern for battery life and usefulness. 2 GB of memory would be nice. Based on configuration, upgrading memory later isn't always cheap.

Most computers come with wireless network cards built-in along with regular ethernet port and modems. DVD-Burners are pretty common too. I think an 80-120 GB drive would be more than enough unless you have a lot of music or photos stored. In that case, you could always store excess songs/data one DVD or a USB hard drive.

If you want a Dell, check out sites like www.slickdeals.com for sales and specials. You can usually get a good deal that way.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top