help.,.i want to buy a new laptop but don't know the basic requirements...
anyone here to gimme a piece of advice?
for your information i want to use for my studies..
what's the best specs around here that suites me?
my budget here is 800 dollars.
help.,.i want to buy a new laptop but don't know the basic requirements...
anyone here to gimme a piece of advice?
for your information i want to use for my studies..
what's the best specs around here that suites me?
my budget here is 800 dollars.
Tell us what you want to use it for and we'll tell you what you need. For most people's usage, $800 is an acceptable budget. The only thing you'd really have to sacrifice in that range is high-end 3D graphics processing.
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If you want it for studies, you probably want a somewhat light laptop. No more than 3 kg, less is better.
No graphics card is really necessary for you. Though a discrete gpu is always handy since it doesn't need to leech off the system memory.
1 to 2 GB of ram is always good, depending on what kind of studies you do - for example, image processing requires more ram (of course, if you need to work with 3D stuff, then you need a beefy gpu).
The faster the cpu, the faster you get work done. The best mobile cpu out there (price per performance) is Intel Core 2 Duo.
Look at a price comparison site. Enter your desired requirements for the laptop and try to pick the cheapest laptop you can find.
I'd disagree. Discrete Graphics vs Integrated Graphics is always a question of graphical power and memory vs battery life. In almost all examples of white-books that offer an integrated solution and a dedicated solution (such as the PM965 vs the GM965). The integrated solution often gets 5% extra battery life with even the weakest of dedicated cards. That can be very important if you're going to travel with your laptop often. Secondly, as long as you're getting DDR2 RAM... it's so cheap these days that upgrading is almost always an acceptable solution. I don't know why people would run a Vista machine with less than 3GB these days.
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Well, I don't think it's that big of a deal whether you get discrete vs. integrated.
One thing you should do, however, is replace the hard drive in the notebook with a Travelstar. They rotate at 7200 rpm but consume just as much power as a 5400 rpm drive. Plus it's much, much faster. Makes your laptop a better piece of equipment.
Another thing to take into account - all new laptops ship with Vista. If you have an XP cd lying around, you can of course wipe it and install XP. But if you don't, then you can get around this by getting a laptop with Vista Business. Many companies actually sell you (or give you one) an XP CD so you can downgrade.
Anothing thing worth mentioning is that many laptops these days ship with BIOS flashed that are designed for the specific operating system installed. I know for a fact that all MSI and many ASUS notebooks require that a different version of the BIOS be flashes if you're switching from Vista to XP or visa versa. Otherwise, you may have issues with ACPI or AHCI. This now comes down to how comfortable the OP is with performing a BIOS flash.
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What do you mean by "studies"?
If it's just internet browsing and word processing and things of that sort, any machine on the market now would do fine .
You should then put your focus to battery life and weight (and cost obviously).
I strongly suggest AGAINST dedicated graphics, because it consumes more battery life, and makes your machine more expensive (as well as bigger/heavier most of the time). A Core 2 Duo CPU is good. Uses little power and generates little heat and is lightning fast . Only downside being slightly more expensive than AMD parts. I have a laptop that I carry around to university that's 2kg/12". I think it's right on the border of acceptable weight. Feels heavy after a while. You probably don't want to go heavier than that. Also, I don't know about your school, but mine has lots of lecture halls with tiny "desklets", and anything bigger than a 12" on those would feel insecure.
Except any half decent IBM laptop will cost >$1000, and you can get the same stuff with other brands for <$800. Whether the brand is worth that much is up to you, but definitely no IMHO.go with a ibm laptop that what i use.
Wrong, you can get the same amount of RAM, CPU speed and HDD space and so on. What you CAN'T get is the same high strength titanium composite case, best keyboard around (Note, i didn't say notebook keyboard), an accelerometer to keep the needle of the HDD during free fall and tons of other stuff. The build quality is just soooo much better then ANY other brand out there, a Thinkpad will generally outlast the galaxy it was manufactured in.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Bleh... you're talking about the ThinkPad? I don't see why people make such a big deal about it... they issue ThinkPads out in work and I personally prefer the keyboard on my own notebook than the ThinkPad's. It may have a more desktop like layout but I can't stand the short arrow keys and the height of the whole thing just doesn't feel right on a laptop.
Secondly... the durability features are only useful if you are careless with your laptop. I've have several laptops over the span of about 8 years now and I use them constantly however I've yet to drop a laptop from any kind of height and I've never had a component fail on me with the exception of a Hitatchi hard drive that I once purchased for a laptop. To me spending the extra money for a ThinkPad only for the purpose of its durability is a waste of money if you're careful. It's like buying flood insurance in Arizona.
On a side note: I don't think the OP has looked at this thread since s/he created it. So we're really just talking amongst ourselves here.
Last edited by SlyMaelstrom; 10-20-2008 at 12:04 AM.
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I've been using mine at school, all my classmates uses one of those Targus notebook-bags, next to their other bags. My T30 is 14,1", it's not much bigger than my math book, and i can just stuff it in my backpack with my other stuff, and never have to think twice about whether it will cope. You say you have one laptop at home, and one a work, so how often do you really travel with it? I'm not surprised you don't find the added durabillity useful, if you are using a ThinkPad as a desktop replacement.
As for the keyboard, it's widely recognized as being the best laptop keyboard ever, personally, i don't know of any desktop keyboard that is better, but ofcourse, it's a subjective matter.
How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
I'm on an airplane with both I'd say once every few months. I bring the work laptop from home to work every day. The home laptop I travel with by car maybe 3-4 times a week. For years I was bringing a notebook to and from classes a few times a day. I don't know... I just don't drop things when I have possession of them. Never dropped a laptop, never dropped a hand-held console... I've dropped my phone a few times. My current phone I dropped once in the 10 months that I've had it and my previous phone I dropped about 4-5 times in 3 years. Those were all pocket transactions, though.
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IBM no longer makes laptops. Lenovo has taken over.
I have very good experiences with Lenovo. Their products are very solid, and yes, you can get decent laptops for <$800.
All the buzzt!
CornedBee
"There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad code."
- Flon's Law
how bout table pc...i like the idea of writing to screen and 'reading' it like abook...something like that ...