New Laptop

[chrispadfield]

Where did you get that from? online it is coming out at about $1,500 for what you speced there. I do like the look of the compaq offering though, the very high res montior is great, as is having bluetooth easily added - the hard drive pricing sucks though but everything else is pretty good; unfortunatly though a custom laptop has a ship date of 20th March

[heynurse]

I bought a gateway 450 XL, It's been a great machine. I actually bought it off of a referall of a friend who is a purchasing agent for a large corp. He said that they buy about 50-100 laptops a year for their employees, and the 450 was the most reliable laptop that they've had. He said that usually when they buy bulk laptops several people send them back for various reasons, but with the 450's he has had no returns and nothing but staff approval. I found that to be all the information I needed to make my decision. I would reccomend it.

I like the centrino processor and the fact that it's got wifi built in. hope that helps!

[rylin]

Just remembered a site i was checking recently
They usually post their stuff on ebay as well, so if you're lucky you might end up getting the stuff cheaper

http://www.internetishop.com/catelist_LTComp.asp

[ManagerJosh]

Those whitebook centrino notebooks are relatively expensive compared to others I've seen, Oscar.

BTW, I met Steve and Thomas in person

[Shining Arcanine]

I've seen cheap ones (less than $1000) but the Dell 600M looks like a winner.

[Dean C]

Most laptops have terrible graphics cards. If you want it then alienware have really nice graphics card so I've heard - perfect for gaming !

[chrispadfield]

Gaming is really not important to me at all, i just want a powerful machine to run all the work stuff at once; my current laptop (PIII 800) with 256MB ram is beginning to lag pretty heavily.

[raxafarian]

Where did you get that from? online it is coming out at about $1,500 for what you speced there. I do like the look of the compaq offering though, the very high res montior is great, as is having bluetooth easily added - the hard drive pricing sucks though but everything else is pretty good; unfortunatly though a custom laptop has a ship date of 20th March

I got it at bj's wholesale. It has the lower res. panel. I've seen the compaqs at compusa with the higher res panels.

[JustAskJulie]

I just ordered a new laptop yesterday (which should be here Thursday).

Sony Vaio Z1VA, I have about the same requirements that you mentioned. The only thing it doesn't have is XP Pro (XP Home comes pre-installed).

[ManagerJosh]

After looking over sooo many whitebox notebooks, I think I would never EVER buy from Dell, Compaq, Gateway, Sony and so forth.

I'd rather spend the time and build my own notebook and/or get it built by people in the whitebook sector.

[George L]

I was avoding the centrio laptops, i was under the impression they are designed for light weight and high battery life, two things i don't need .. is that true?

centrinos are faster than P4 clock for clock

P-M 1.3ghz centrino is around the same speed according to benchmarks as a P4 2.4ghz desktop system

personally i would only look at centrinos P-M 1.4-1.7ghz since if i was ever to get a laptop it would have to have great battery life > 4hrs and be light weight <2kg

there's also the new AMD64 3000+ mobile laptops that are out would be equivalent to ~P4 3.3ghz desktop system and probably have around 3-4hr battery life....

either would be faster than your existing P3 lappy

[psx-dude]

In the past I would never recommend this laptop, but they're available at any best buy and they seem sturdy enough: http://www.emachines.com/products/pr...Machines_M6807

64-bit athlon, 512mb ram, 60gb hd, dvd burner, 54g built-in, 1549.

Otherwise, I would recommend the Dell 8600, simple because it has the largest screen i've seen: 1920x1200 (or something of that sort) with a 15.4" widescreen.

[Chaotic Reality]

a lot of people are /very/ happy with emachine laptops.

J.

[chrispadfield]

a lot of people are /very/ happy with emachine laptops.

J.

That machine is almost perfect for what I want, but I have been realising how important a high resolution is. My current laptop is a very small sony laptop with 10.4 inch screen, but the resolution is still 1024 x 768, this monitor with a 15 inch screen is only a little bit more at 1200 x 800; I was sort of expecting a bigger increase in resolution really.

[Hooper]

Laptop for Chris

Chr

I need to get a new laptop (from the US) and havn't nevered ordered a laptop out here don't know the brands as well ... so ...

What would you recommend. I already have an ultra-portable so weight/battery life are not a relevant issue, it will be pluggined in 99% of time. I am interested in:

- max resolution (and screen size)
- power
- XP Professional needed
- Preferably with an Office 2003 bundle
- Hard drive size
- I guess being able to play the odd game
- DVD-RW

Looking to pay $1,500 to $2,000. Any suggestions?

Hi Chris,

I asked the same question not so long ago in here and Kier had some suggestions for me to look into. I ended up with a real nice machine that I am happy with. It's an HP with all the bells and whistles. I can recommend the HP laptop. Although this machine does come installed with XP home addition, I was able to compile a new kernel on a slackware distro that turned out to be quite fantastic.

Might want to take a look at the HP site to come up with a model that would suit your need. The only item that I can think of that you should pay attention to is the amount of ram included with the machine (512M minimum). Updating ram is quite simple, but do yourself a favor and be sure to have the needed memory up front. Saves money in the long run.

Added: I wanted to make mention that if XP pro is needed, there is an upgrade option available to you with the HP laptops. There is quite a bit of software pre-loaded but cannot remember what all it was. Do not get a laptop with less than a 40G HD is another recommendation. The Toshiba DVD-RW is nice with the HP and they also have the latest ATI onboard video which does wonders . Not a real 3D gaming platform, but works well with your average 2D games.... Even in Linux.

I believe that you would find this machine within the price range you are looking to spend as well. This may neeb be an AMD vs Intel to match the price though. I believe I paid something like $1,800.00 for this one when I purchased it. This included an optional extended warrantee which I always recommend for a laptop.

Hooper