Buying a laptop for the 1st time.

#15

College student here. Wondering can anyone give me advice on what kind of laptop i should buy.

Price- Less than 1000 if possible

Intended Use-College work(although i am not bothered about MS office, i can get it cheap in college.) Downloading and storing music. Storing games and programs, eg PokerStars, Championship Manager etc. I presume i will need a large amount of memory. Can anyone tell me how much??

Mobility-Not the most essential thing. It will be at home most of the time, save for twice a week when i bring it on the train.

Links-I was hoping someone could give me advice on the best place to buy. I was considering HP or Dell. Not sure about what model though.

Tv-out- I dont know what this is!:o


I am guessing memory is important, as i have a tendency to save a lot of stuff and have a number of things running at the same time.

Also, i would need something that would have a fast wireless connection.

If anyone could provide me with some help, i would be grateful.
Thanks.

Creamy Goodness

well here's a few things...

tv-out means you can connect your laptop to your tv and use your tv as a second monitor, handy for watching dvd's or other video files.

you should look for something with a 100gig hard drive and at least 1gig of RAM.

wireless cards at the moment go to 54mbps. now that does not mean you'll get 54mbps connection speed 100% of the time, 54mbps is their theoretical top speed which will never be reached. also the speed of the connection will depend hugely on what service provider you are connecting to and their max speed, i.e. you connect to a 3mbit connection, you cannot get more than 3mbit.

as to what laptop to get, i'd have a look at acer aswell as HP and in my experience stay away from dell as i found their customer support appauling.

eamon234

If I were you I'd go for a mid range Dell - recommended specs - Go for a Pentium or Athlon chip - stay away from Celeron or Sempron at least 512mb of internal memory and at least 80gig hard drive. All new laptops are pretty well specced now so you should be getting all the bells and whistles (wireless, bluetooth etc.) I'd recommend the Inspiron 6400 off hand (Dual Core!)

#15

Thanks for the replies.
Is there any reason why i should stay away from celeron and sempron?

ethernet

Do Celeron processors require as much power as their Pentium counterparts? Even if they're less power-hungry, they hardly compare with Centrino processors in this regard.

I'm guessing eamon234 advises against the Celeron and Sempron to keep your options open if you were to do a software upgrade, perhaps to another OS, in a few years. You don't want your laptop to be out-of-date and redundant in a few years' time.

Celeron and Sempron processors wouldn't be suited to much work with multimedia. You would be better off with something else IMHO.

thebman

#15 wrote:

Thanks for the replies.
Is there any reason why i should stay away from celeron and sempron?

Celeron's lack cache when compared to the proper Intel processors. They are budget processors that work if all your doing is running one task at any time and it isn't processor intensive.

I wouldn't recommend them to anyone with a half decent budget even if they were just using it for normal use. Its nice to have a responsive system.

Get a Centrino Core Duo or something like that. I prefer Intel processors in laptops. I'd pick nVidia over ATI because driver support is much better on their graphics cards. If your not doing much graphics work or running games then an integrated Intel might do you but if you can get an ATI or nVidia take it over an integrated graphics card.

Integrated graphics cards generally have bad performance.

I'd recommend a Dell (Latitude if you can) or check out the outlet store for a cheap refurbished model. If buying Inspiron, I'd recommend a decent warranty. Build quality isn't the best on some of them.

Ruu_Old

If you are buying a Dell then get the most basic memory they offer with the lappy and get it cheaper elsewhere, their memory is a rip!