fatbrit

You might look at SSDs if you want to pay for the light weight and slimline design. The obvious answer is to cross to a Mac.....but there are PC alternatives.

Bob

Your better off hooking the laptop up to a monitor then, much cheaper for the money...get quite a decent slim flatscreen lcd for not much money and still be quids in...

meauxna

OK, I am following with interest... I haven't felt the need for a laptop since I am stuck to my desk so much, but it's crossed my mind that I might be missing out. Am starting to feel the urge for an upgrade but have only looked at desktops for now.
DH loves to shop for this stuff and has found a quad-core 1.8gh HP Pavillion w/4gigs of RAM for $325 IIRC.
Comments, encouragement? Send me to the Lab to read?

BritishGuy36

Well as we don't know your current spec, we can't advise on what level of 'upgrade euphoria' you should expect.

Is the machine in question Intel? I suspect not at that price....I suspect it's AMD. Not bad in itself, but with recent price drops I am unable to recommend anything but an Intel Core2 processor, they are far superior. Is it a Windows 7 model?

fatbrit

That Friday (or Monday) is only 3 weeks away!

ian-mstm

The university I work for has a contract with Dell. One part of that contract is Dell's guarantee that every computer received is built to enterprise class specifications (considered more rigorous than home user requirements). Exact specifications with no deviations. It allows the IT staff to blow out a single image without worrying about incompatibility issues. It's a real time saver. Another part of that contract, is that faculty and staff can purchase a Dell computer at a fairly good discount price!

Sheila's D500 is now 7 years old and still going strong. My D610 is 6 years old and is a total workhorse! Can you get a similar computer for less money? Sure!

Prior to 2002, the university used to have a contract with Gateway but GW's after sales service was shit. Dell's after sales service is great - something which spurred the university's shift to Dell.

Ian

fatbrit

Is this something to do with warp speed? Sounds like a marketing non-term to me.

Lucky me gets to do FIL's Dell. Anything for a quiet life, eh? It's 4 or 5 years old and out of warranty. I've changed the HDD, the power supply and the DVD drive. The last was probably his fault -- think he double stacked the disks one too many times. But the other two were just worn out. Replaced them all with bog standard parts from Frys electronics.

Not saying Dell are any better or worse than other brands -- I've swapped out as many Pavilion power supplies. As I say, I don't get the Dell thing.

meauxna

I know, I'm the suck.. I'll wait til DH gets back with the digits. The main part of me just wants to stick with what I know, I'm just worried I don't look cool enough in the coffeeshops without a laptop.

Bob

It's just the spec on stuff they put in tends to be proper parts rather than rebadged bits for the home user, and the customer service does get pretty good with on site visits and replacements if anything goes wrong....but then you pay for that up front. But when time is more important, it's pretty good deal for large organisations.

As for M - Spec depends on what it actually is, 4gb of ram ain't bad, but if it's slow rubbish it's not much better than having less and only really useful if your running Vista, if it's XP or 7 it's not a huge boost and really, probably over kill and not something to worry about.

CPU is key, I personally think AMD aren't bad, especially on the notebook front and cooling, some of those intels will melt your nads off, then again so can some AMD's. Quad core really is a waste of power, especially on a laptop anyway, kills your battery and you won't use more than 2 cores 90% of the time anyway, AMD do a chip with 3 cores which makes more sense....but it'll certainly future proof you for a few years I guess, which is great in a desktop, less so on a laptop as it's more likely to be dropped in the loo and break before that becomes a positive.

My only experience with HP laptops were shite touchpads that were horrid and broke and really bad battery life, but then I've not played around with one in a couple of years so perhaps they've improved.

For laptops, I like Toshiba over all, IBM, Acer (some hate them, but I like them), Samsung, Asus and even Dells do good ones. Avertec are great on a budget for college students as you get a lot for little money and they'll work great for a couple years before blowing up, so enough to clear uni.

Bob

then mug one of those pretenious gits....they'll be too meak to complain

fatbrit

I blow their socks off with my Guardian Weekly.

The Horticulturalist

I have a Dell Latitude D520, it must be more than 5 years old now and it's still chugging along quite nicely. We had an IBM thinkpad before that, it was a cumbersome brute of a thing and soooooooooo slow.

fatbrit

That was all the porn you had loaded on it!

The Horticulturalist

cranston

I think the fact that Acer is now the worlds number 2 pc maker and Dell has slipped to number 3 when 5 years ago it was number 1 tells you a lot about Dell's products.