I'm looking in to buying a laptop for university. All I really need to use it for is text-editing, so, what I want is a big screen (needs to be higher than 1024x768) and long battery life, I don't care about graphics or storage much, though ram is a big deal. I'm also looking for a >1 year warranty and good resistance to damage.
Oh, and I'm ordering it in Canada, preferably looking for a price under $1500.
Any suggestions on who I should go with?
high battery life and large displays generally don't go together. Your screen is the #2 power consumer (right after the harddisk).
For text editing a screen of 800x600 is plenty large enough btw, that's what my laptop has and it works well.
A 400MHz CPU should be enough as well, with 256MB RAM.
As pretty much any laptop on the market today will exceed that you've plenty of choice
My advise: stick with the major brands: Toshiba and HP/Compaq will serve you well.
IBM are now made in China, not that much faith in them anymore (plus I boycot Chinese products).
Go for either of those brands and get the highest spec machine you can afford, remembering you will not be able to upgrade much later on except sometimes (at inflated prices) your RAM.
What OS are going to use?
I recently upgraded my laptop from 512 to 1256 MB RAM and I notice a huge difference, in particular when playing Heroes of Might and Magic 5, but also that Windows in general is more responsive.
Last edited by Sang-drax : Tomorrow at 02:21 AM. Reason: Time travelling
for what he wants (text editor only) even 256 would be enough with XP and Linux.
For heavier applications at least 512 is advised for XP and Linux, at least 256 for anything else (like Win2K).
I noticed a huge difference too upgrading my laptop from 64MB to 192MB when running Win2K, but that was of course 6 years ago
MacBook Pro!
edit:
oh, and go buy it from your schools book store, you'l get ~10% discount.
I also need to buy a new laptop for school (it's actually required).
I really don't see the appeal of MACS. I'm borrowing my girlfriend's iBook G4. As far as I'm concerned they're nice systems, pretty stable, but overpriced and ultimately not worth it.
I'm probably going to just buy a cheap dell for 500 bucks (interestingly enough my requirements are nearly similar to yours, we must be sisters).
I'm not immature, I'm refined in the opposite direction.
Of course, either that or our minds are psychically linked.(interestingly enough my requirements are nearly similar to yours, we must be sisters).
