I am considering purchasing a laptop for only college related purposes. I am usually die-hard custom build my own computers, but with a laptop I think I'm going to just purchase one from a store. I was wondering if anyone has already gone through this process and found a nice, reliable and fairly nice laptop? I am wanting to avoid Dell, just because I hate Dells with a passion. Sony is nice, but seems to be on the more expensive side, and might be more then what I'm looking for. Any models up for suggestions? Thanks
-S2k
ID:276581
 Dec 2 2005, 9:20 pm
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i guess it depends on how much money you are willing to spend and what you'll be using it for. if it's just for college stuff (writing papers, surfing the net, email) and money is no object, then one of the cool 17" PowerBooks from Apple will do you up a treat.
on the PC side, i'm a bit partial to Toshiba. regardless of the make/model, try not to get anything with the wifi card built-in just incase you want to run linux (not all built-in stuff is recognized just yet), plus if your external wifi card breaks, its easier to replace than shipping the whole machine out for repair. also do a little comparison shopping to see who's got the longest battery life and most energy efficient processors- most decent new laptops should run around 3-4 hours minumum on a single charge. if you want to run fullscreen Quake/Half-Life-type games, a good internal graphics card is a must. CD-burner is a minimum must, or a DVD burner if you can splurge. oh, and as much RAM as you can stuff into it - the more you have, the better your system will behave as well as using the hard-disk less (which also saves power). | |
If you don't mind having a heavy laptop you generally get more for your money with Toshiba.
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I got mine from Dell on eBay through its dell_financial_services user name. 1.8Ghz, 512MB RAM, 40GB HD, WinXP Pro OS, $560. It also has a CD-RW/DVD drive.
It's used of course, but it works as good as new as far as I can tell. Looks new too, except for a few barely noticable marks.
It did come with a bit of a mix-up in the CD/DVD and floppy drives though. As I have said elsewhere, it came with internal floppy drive and external CD/DVD drive along with a cable to connect it, but the cable had a tag saying it was only for use with the floppy drive, even though it fit the CD drive; and indeed it didn't work with the CD drive. All I had to do was remove the floppy, insert the CD drive (I prefer it with the CD/DVD drive being the internal one anyway) and use the floppy externally instead.
Aside from the drive mixup, the only problem I have is that it won't read two of my CDs, which are games I would really like to use. I have to use the older computer just for playing Starcraft. =/