Here's the deal: I need a laptop to research and write my MA thesis. I know what I want in the way of features, which are really quite minimal, but I am not very familiar with the track records of most makers. My desktop is a Dell and has worked flawlessly for previous work, so I had been leaning towards buying one of their Notebooks. Any suggestions as to particular brands to avoid or pursue would be muchly appreciated.
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Recommend me a laptop!
- Thread starter Anthbass
- Start date
I have a refurb Dell laptop and am very happy with it. I also work for an IT dept. of a small school district with about 75 - 100 Dell laptops as part of our inventory, the only major problem I've ever seen with 'em is on my personal one 
.
The LCD went out after a year. I haven't bothered fixing it just because I'm using the laptop the District has provided. We've switched from Dell to Lenovo, For what it's worth, I'm not real impressed with the change.
. The LCD went out after a year. I haven't bothered fixing it just because I'm using the laptop the District has provided. We've switched from Dell to Lenovo, For what it's worth, I'm not real impressed with the change.
Sorry, a Mac has already been suggested.
Aww, my bad...
Replace my Macbook pro suggestion with a a new TabletPC
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My brother just got a Dell latitude D620 and it is a really really nice computer. Its definatley portable, put can push out some computing power. I find the only thing wrong so far (4 months he's had it) is that he has a little bit of light leakage around the edges of the screen, but that is really no biggie unless you are really choosy about what you need.
Some good suggestions; yes, even from kserg. As in my original post, I'm not after up-to-the-minute technical capabilities, just a solid and user friendly computer. I suppose I should mention that I'm also not overly Mac friendly (not compatible with my SPSS software). I've been looking at the Gateway offerings recently. Whatcha think?
Stay away, far far far away...
Brands that are decent:
Dell (downside is their support)
Sony (Downside is their price)
Asus (No many people know about their laptops but they make lappies for macbook so essentially similar just different bios for windows/linux)
Toshiba (Decent stuff, used to be heavy but quality, now they are pretty decent IMO)
Brands to stay away from:
Gateway (STAY AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
HP/Compaq (many say they are ok, i hated working on them, never liked their stuff, but that might be personal)
Brands i know little about:
Acer...
IBM (They are decent, they probebly use IBM/Hitachi harddrives though and that is a NO-NO in my book.)
Before i build a new system for myself i was looking into laptops my two choices were Asus and macbook/macbook pro
Samsung (i've only seem one, but that one been working pretty decently...)
Asus has always been quality in hardware, i have not heard anything bad about macbooks, have not heard much about asus lappies and based on that i assume they are good...
As far as dell goes, i have 2 dell lappies (400mhz each), had them from the start when that was amazing speed that got geeks all wet. Not a single problem. My bro has one from work that looks like it was in a geek pillow fight where people replaced pillows with laptops but it still works...
Hope this helps more then my posts before.
-1 the non pro macbook is the way to go at the moment.
the non pro macbooks were updated this last tuesday and the middle of the road macbook is now equal to the base level macbook pro. hell it's even better in some ways (ex 8x superdrive as opposed to the 6x superdrive in the 15 inch pros.
the 700 dollar price difference isn't worth it right now, the only thing you get is the dedicated graphics card and the larger screen.
+1 for the new MacBooks. I have a first out Macbook Pro and the spec's on the latest Macbooks are now almost equal to this one.
Love mine, only 120Gb Hd and with Parallels I dumped my PC laptop and just carry the Mac. Now I'm out of disk space most of the time, so I'm going to move to a 250Gb drive in a couple of weeks.
Love mine, only 120Gb Hd and with Parallels I dumped my PC laptop and just carry the Mac. Now I'm out of disk space most of the time, so I'm going to move to a 250Gb drive in a couple of weeks.
Parallels is awesome if you have atleast a gb of ram, nothing like Alt Tabbing between OSx and Windoze
From what I'm hearing from multiple sources Gateway has REALLY improved over the past year or so.
Lenovo makes good laptops (this is formerly IBM...they were bought out by Lenovo and the laptops are now made under that name). They are consistently rated very highly by PC Magazine (who are pretty frank in their reviews).
Having said that though I think the Lenovos can tend to be a bit pricey. PC Mag rated the Dell E1505 very highly and I think those are under $800.
bc
All new Macs can run Windows... in some cases, better than many machines that were designed for it!
Get Parallels - then you can run Windows apps and OS X concurrently - the best of both worlds!
I second the suggestion of the new MacBooks - all the laptop you'll need, right there.
