Hello all !

I have... a new job... better hours... more pay... better benefits... and a management position!

One of my first official acts as the MIS Administrator is to get a new laptop for myself. I would like a machine with Windows XP Pro, 4GB RAM, 150+GB 7200 RPM hard drive, 17" LCD display and perhaps some other accessories.

I know many of you have laptops and have developed opinions, likes and dislikes about them. Please share with me so that I can make a decision.

Thank you in advance!

Gandaar

I like a WUXGA screen personally for gaming and workspace (get a good GPU though and maybe some reading glasses =). WSXGA will serve you well too though if needed.

Consider a built-in "N" wireless adapter for future-proofing (beats buying a whole new add-in card when "N" is widespread and you want the faster intranet file-sharing benefits - not an expensive add-on with many laptop manufacturers).

I would have mixed feelings about getting an expensive high-def optical drive in a laptop atm, you might be better off with a standard DVD-RW drive (with Lightscribe.. it's cool).

Just a few personal preferences.

Well, not sure if you care about the brand or not, but I personally like the Lenova Thinkpads (old IBM hw). I've had good luck and good service with a T30, X35, a T40, and am using a T42 now. Looking to upgrade it soon...

Dell's I had bad luck with their support, though I hear they've gotten better lately.

'grats on the job :)

They aren't a great bargain, but I've loved the quality of the Sony laptops I've owned and supported over the past decade or so.

With the announcement that Wally-World made concerning HD-DVD, I may wait a bit and see what shakes out. I don't necessarily need a high-def DVD, but it would be nice. Mainly I'm wanting something with a large screen that I can work on for several hours at a time and not strain my eyes too much... and of course it has to support games.

I'm not going to get crazy with price, but I don't mind spending $$$$ on a good laptop. I guess the main issue I am seeing right now is that most laptops seem to be limited to an upper end of 150-160GB hard drives. I realize space / weight is at a premium, but a little larger hard drive would be nice.

I'm not crazy about Dell's service record either... most of the computers in the plant are Dells... something I am going to be changing. Already called them on two separate incidents and it took them forever to resolve the issue. Granted they were out here within the specified time, but it took a lot longer than I thought it should to fix the problem. After all... how long does it take to swap out a hard drive on a desktop? Took them two days and three trips back to their office... I was not impressed.

I don't want to get into that sort of situation with a laptop.

I know that every manufacturer has their claims about performance, but how does that relate to the real world? What kind of performance issues are you running into?

Thanks in advance....

Gratz on the promo Gan!

Cheers,

I've had great experience with Dell's support over the last year. Granted I don't have them do onsite repairs, I do them all myself, but they overnight ship any warranty failure for me to replace. They've been for the most part very responsive to email questions, and have been prompt with any quotes I've asked them for.

We use Dell where I'm at, and we generally don't have that many customer service issues.....
That having been said, my personal laptop is a Toshiba that I am very happy (other than the Vista O/S) with.

Conga Rats on the Promo, Gandaar. You hiring for a do-bee tech out that way? When are you gonna open the firewall at work so the EQ servers can me reached within the N/W? :)

I'll be hiring a couple of interns (read that as part-time slave wages) in the near future, but a full-time tech later on. As far as EQ... well... we run a piece of software called Spector360... logs everything done on the local machine. Now I can probably get away with having Yahoo messenger and streaming music playing... but somehow I think EQ might be pushing it a bit.

Has anyone had experience with some of the "off-brand" laptops? There's a PC Club close by and they have their own "brand" of laptop that is reasonably priced even when loaded with nice features. It looks a lot like a Sony laptop... but I don't want to jump into something I'm going to regret later. Any thoughts?

Thanks

Toshiba, we love ours.

You may want to take a quick look at apple as well. A friend has bought into Apple recently after being a avid Windows geek for years. The ablility to run any version of Windows within the Apple kernal has sold him on the technology.

Cheers,

With a laptop, do your best to get non-integrated video. Avoid "shared" memory, for two reasons: First, obviously its robbing your system of memory it could be using for other things. Second, it works on your system bus, rather than a video bus... so it will actually be slowing your system down to display anything, even if its not graphically intensive.

And, as I noted in another thread, if you're getting 4GB of ram, get XP 64 bit.

As to which brand laptop to get... I got my mom an HP with a 17" screen... came with a ton of extras, was cheap, looks and runs great. Some people have qualms with HP, though. I don't have a personal laptop, I use the one work provided me, which is... so so.

I echo the comments about sony laptops they are awesome i have one that is almost 10 years old and still kicking.


I use HP and Alienware at work. I ordered an alienware because it was the only one i found that had a 9 pin serial port in it so i did not have to worry about usb 9 pin or pcmia serial card for configing routers and switches. I had a VooDoo PC which was custom built for me but cost a shit ton and was worth it. I have now fallen inlove with my hp tablet it is a tc 4400 it may have a small screen but somethign about a laptop that can last me 12 hours with the small extended battery is sexy. Sager notebooks makes all the base models for alienware and voodoo pc they are usually $500-$1000.00 cheaper and the same thing minus cool cases that you get from them.

The weekend before I got my current job, I was a passenger in a truck that my brother was driving up in the sierras. The first storm of the season was blowing in, and we were trying to beat the snow by racing our way up windy roads to kirkwood ski resort. We failed, and found ourselves on the 89 right before it got closed due to snow. It was near midnight, visibility was near zero, we had a sheer cliff to our right, and a mountain wall on our left, and we had to keep up with the brake lights ahead of us or we'd be snowblind.

Then the brake lights in front of us swerved to the left because Caltrans had parked sidways across our lane. They were just setting up the road block on the other side, having just responded to a skidout in front of us....

...which we then proceeded to do ourselves dodging the caltrans vehicle. We lost control, spun through the curve dodging the previous spunout vehicles, fell off the cliff edge (it was 60 degrees now, not sheer), cartwheeled sideways, and smashed into a rock outcropping which saved us from diving into the river at the bottom of the gorge. I had just taken off my shoes as it was getting hot in the cab, and the shoes had ejected along with every other unbuckled thing in the cab.

The back window had blown out, there was a big dent in the roof barely missing smooshing my brother, and he thought he heard leakage, so we had to get out and away from the truck as fast as possible into the 4 inches of snow that covered everything. Fortunately we were both mobile and had only scratches and internal bruises. Did I mention I was in my socks? The caltrans driver called down "we were trying to slow people down for this curve". "You succeeded" grimmaced my brother.

We climbed up the 80 ft of 60 degree rock and brush filled embankment through the snow (which was doing it's best to make me unable to feel my unshod feet) towards the now waiting police officer, and my brother says, "hey, isn't that your laptop on this rock?"

Sure enough, my laptop had ejected into the snow from that crash while we had been cartwheeling and was now sitting in it's case on a rock not 5 ft from the side of the road. We picked it up, got driven by the policeman to the nearest motel, and, after we both cleaned up, fired up the computer, which acted as if nothing had happened.

And that's why I have to recommend ACER laptops.

Uh... holy shit Maniacles. Glad you were ok!

Best ACER review ever.

Yeah, somehow we both walked away from that, not sure how. I had a little internal bleeding, got a big bruise from it, but that was it. Got it checked out and they told me it would handle itself, and it did. Seatbelts ftw.

Seatbelts ftw.

No joke about that either!

Glad you were okay....ACER sounds like a good one to me.