Help with choosing a laptop

Greybeard · #1 July 29th, 2005, 09:46 AM

My daughter needs a laptop for graduate school. A friend of her's recommended a Dell Inspiron (9300 I think). My girls have had Sony's in the past and they were awful. Any suggestions or comments? Thanks.

El_Phil · #2 July 29th, 2005, 09:52 AM

I you want an actual laptop you definetly want a proper mobile processor. Whilst a standard P4 laptop might be cheaper than a P4 Mobile one, it will be alot noiser, hotter and have far less battery life. Now I was getting a desktop replacement so I didn't mind those problems as it was so much cheaper.

Suicide Junkie · #3 July 29th, 2005, 10:21 AM

I got a Thinkpad 760 used for $50.
Came in very handy for 3rd and 4th year university. (Computer Science)

Its loaded with a Pentium-166, and 36 megs of ram

Upgraded it to a 2gig harddrive recently.
More than enough for taking notes, playing SE4 and keeping up with the forum

You will need something beefier to play SE5 on, though.

rdouglass · #4 July 29th, 2005, 01:54 PM

I've been purchasing Toshiba's for my company. Got around 10 or 12 in the past 3 years and have had no problems whatsoever with them. They've been rock-solid.

Altho it's hard to beat Dell's pricing - very agrresive.

El_Phil · #5 July 29th, 2005, 02:49 PM

Without a doubt IBM thinkpads are the best laptops I've ever used. Quiet, loads of battery life and a track pad that's actually useable. Wondeful machines apart from the fact they cost an arm, two legs and a spleen.

The only reason not to go with a Dell is that you will never get any tech/customer support out of them. Ever. They even closed their custom support forum a few weeks ago. If you don't think you'll wany any customer service from them, (and if you think you wont get a dodgy machine out of them) then go for it.

luke_slovakian · #6 July 29th, 2005, 03:24 PM

I read about laptops because im gonna buy one for school and what alot of ppl say is dell is good but overpriced...which it is for the ram and some other things. But toshiba is great but it doesnt come as many acceserios on the site as dell has:-p. But if you want dell i would buy lowest ram and buy a stick for it which will be cheaper than have the ram upgrade from them along w/ some things cant remember

Greybeard · #7 July 31st, 2005, 08:14 AM

Thanks for all of the advise. Although there isn't a clear concensus, I'm definitely going to check the used computer store in the neighborhood. And, will try to steer her clear of Dell.

BTW, I haven't been able to interested any of my girls in playing SEIV...

Kamog · #8 July 31st, 2005, 02:31 PM

I like IBM Thinkpads. Reliable, solid machines. I like them better than Sony, Compaq, NEC, Toshiba, or Dell. Next time I buy a laptop it will be IBM. I still have my old Apple Powerbook 180. Very good machine when it came out but it's long outdated now. I've seen the new Apple laptops with the large screen and those are beautiful but expensive.

Thermodyne · #9 July 31st, 2005, 05:14 PM

Be very careful with a used laptop purchase. Laptops are very expensive to repair once they go out of warranty. Also, despite what you�ve heard above, Dell�s are not over priced or poorly built. Just stay away from the low end units. We purchase 10 to 15 Latitudes a month and have had only 2 out of over 200 need repairs. Sure the support is a PITA, but that goes with the territory no mater where you get it from. Apples are good laptops, but many universities don�t support them on the LAN. And with a Windows laptop you can purchase MS software dirt cheap with the student discounts at most universities. Dell and IBM are the two main line systems and Sager is prolly the premo. Compaq and Toshiba used to be real good, but have fallen to the realm of white box of late. Sony is nice hardware, but takes some getting used to. A newcomer to the top end is ASUS; they are building some real nice systems. What ever brand you pick, you want a Pentium M of at least 1.7 GHz, 512megs of ram (1Gig would be better) and do not buy integrated video. And be sure to get a tether so that you can lock it down. Word is that the lifespan of an unattended laptop at school is measured in minutes.

Will · #10 July 29th, 2005, 09:36 PM

I'm a convert to Apple laptops. They're a bit more expensive, but they're reliable, the battery life is decent (I get about three and a half hours off a full charge if I just turn the backlight down on my PowerBook), and Apple's support is second to none. The only other company that will come close in support is IBM.

The ThinkPad laptops are also very nice, but most of them are rather clunky. The only exception is the (IIRC) X-series, but I've only personally used the T- and R-series.

Dells I think are underpowered and overpriced, and their support really sucks. Being a computer science student, I get requests to "fix" those laptops the most.

I've seen some nice laptops around from Toshiba, but haven't personally worked much with them.

One of my friends just got an Acer laptop for under $500. It works just fine, as long as you don't try to do more than one thing at a time. Which means, don't try to write a paper and read research database results at the same time... so not the greatest for school work.