Laptop deals

Status
Not open for further replies.
Any particular brands to strongly consider or stay away from?

Not necessarily but there are models within brands that are not great choices. Lenovo and Acer come out on top in terms of many customer satisfaction surveys but there are award winners from Dell and HP as well.

You can check out notebookreviews.com: The Leading Notebook Computers Site on the Net for reviews, features, popularity, and user feedback on practically every model conceivable.
 
Whatever the brand...If you get one and it is going to have VISTA you need to try to get one with 2G of ram
 
Chris,

I've had or worked on a bunch of laptops. This is subjective, but here goes:

Stay away from:
Dell, Compaq, EMachines

Good are:
Toshiba, HP, Sony

There are other brands that I don't have first hand knowledge of. A good website for reviews of all sorts of products is Reviews from Epinions
 
Guys, thanks for the responses. Anyone have anything else they want to add?

I was in Best Buy and Circuit City the other day, and something occurred to me. This is the first time sine Windows Vista was release that the very cheapest computer offers the buyers with what they need to efficiently run the OS. This laptop was $499, and it had a 2 GHz processor (AMD Turion-64) and 1 GB RAM.

Truly the best investment you can make in your computer is the warranty. Since you are looking to buy a laptop, then you ought to buy the full protection/accidental warranty (if you drop it off a cliff, if spill water on it, etc). Of all the computer stores, Circuit City does the best job offering this for the best price. They also offer the protection independent of what the manufacturer's replacement warranty is.
 

I forgot to spell out that I am looking for something as cheap as possible that will get the job done for a few months or a year or so. XP pro would be fine.

You should be able to get something sub $400, maybe even sub $300.

New or refurbished? I've looked around on a few of the sites and the only laptops I've seen for that cheap are refurbs, but I've only just started looking.
 

That's a nice system. Everyone I know - including me - who has gotten Vista prefers XP. If you can find a machine with XP on it, I would suggest sticking with that for a while...

I would rather have XP too simply because I'm more familiar with it but I'm not going to pay more for it (the new machines I've seen with it tend to be more expensive). My wife's laptop has Vista so I am not totally opposed to it. But it does slow down the machine if you don't have enough RAM.
 

I forgot to spell out that I am looking for something as cheap as possible that will get the job done for a few months or a year or so. XP pro would be fine.

You should be able to get something sub $400, maybe even sub $300.

Most (if not all) of the ones I've seen at that price have Vista Home Basic. What are the main differences between that and Vista Home Premium? When Vista was released I heard that Premium was the one to get.
 
I know 2GB of memory are usually recommended for Vista, but what are the minimum specs I should look for in a machine with XP pro?
 
Anyone have any opinions on the Asus Eee?

It uses a variant of Linux. It looks interesting and the price is right, but I don't know that it's what I'm looking. You can put a different OS on it, but the main drawback to me would be the limited hard drive space.
 
My wife has one and loves it. But her hard drive space requirements are not high: she uses it for internet radio, e-mail and word processing. We got her an 8gb SD card with the computer, so that she wouldn't have to worry about space too much. What she wanted was portability and ease of use, and it has definitely delivered on that score.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top