I'm buying one to replace my PIII 933 tower. I already have a Mac G4 dual 1.25ghz tower, but I need something mobile for the "once in a while" trips and I'd like to have the PC platform as well to do my usual MP3 whoring and various other PC things I can't do on a Mac. It's clunky. I hate switching monitors and wearing out the cable when I wanna switch computers. Anyway, I'm wondering what brands out there are good to get a laptop from? Here are my choices and what I know of them.

Dell - Good reputation with good customer support. Sometimes they'll have good deals on laptops with freebies (CD-RW/DVD drive, free RAM, screen upgrades, and rebates varying every week). Their computers are reasonably priced. I think I can get a decent system for about $900 after shipping. A lot of people have these. The features aren't something to wow about and I've seen cheaper systems configured the way I want it.

Toshiba - My friend has used one for the past 4 years and that thing is still running and everything still works. The 2.0 (or 2.2ghz) Celeron machines run for about $1200 before rebates, which is decent for my price range. I heard from a sales rep at Best Buy that it's one of the best laptops you can get.

Hewlett-Packard - Okay, feature-wise, it has practically everything I need. CD-RW/DVD drive, a decent hard drive, AMD Athlon processor, ATI Radeon video, 15" , etc. However, despite being able to get them for about like...$900 after rebates, the hardware is iffy. I've heard of keyboard failures and stuff. I dunno if that's true, but it's happened to one friend of mine.

Gateway - $799 for a 2.2ghz Celeron, 15" screen, 40 gig drive, 6-1 media card reader, and a CD-RW/DVD drive. Sounds too good to be true. I heard Gateway's tech support and customer service sucks. The price is so tempting though.

Fujitsu - My friend has one. It has a neat blueish LCD on the end of it that can be used as a CD player when the laptop is off or something. It has decent features, but it's a heavy *** laptop. Prices are a tad over what I wanna spend, but if it's a great laptop, I'm willing to shell it out.

So basically, I'd like to say under $1000 for a laptop with a CD burner and decent hard drive space, 256MB of RAM, and a 15" screen. It's just a secondary computer so I can bring it with me when I go to long trips and I've got homework with designing on Photoshop, Illustrator, or whatever. For those of you guys who are more familiar with these brands and know of first hand or what have you about their reliability, can ya please help me out? I'd really appreciate it and I don't wanna end up buying a POS laptop that completely breaks or fails in a couple years or so or is prone to a lot of hardware issues.

Thanks.

 

buy cheap buy dell - and replace every 1.5 yrs (some cheapy dells are available for 700 ish!)

check http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/categories.cfm?catid=18
frequently for hot deals

i got my 600 m (5 lb laptop) for 1100 about 2 months ago on a hot deal - you'll need coupon codes and the like - sign up for dells coupon list. The best lightweight power laptop you can get is an IBM T-40 but its (in comparable specs) 3 grand!

specs:

1.3 ghz pentium-m (3.5 hr battery life)
30 gig hd
64 meg radeon 9000
integrated wifi / 1000mbps ethernet
24xcdrw/dvd drive
sxga+ (1400*1050 resolution)

if u have any questions feel free to ask

 

Don't buy DELL!!! I finished my freshman year in school, and of all the people that had computer problems, they all had several different model dell laptops that were brand new. 6 laptops, less than a year old, all dell, crap out completely for one reason or the other (bad lcd's, hard drive, mother board, etc. as well as bugs) and took a long time for dell to replace. I would say you won't go wrong with a thinkpad or a vaio.

 

i agree thinkpad>dell but vaio's are shady too...dell is great cauze u can get a warranty and they will send you new parts all the time - and remember in the laptop field all are built by one company basically.

my lcd is a hitachi, harddrive ibm, battery sony for instance...btw this is my only dell

another big deal is lattitudes>inspirions in terms of build quality traditionally (business line vs home comptuing)

 

My mom's old VAIO laptop was mad tite. too bad it got stolen. my friends Toshiba laptop was off the heazy too. HELLA small. my parents both have DELL laptops now. and yes. they DO break. i wouldnt buy one and neither would they. but their work thinks Dell is cool... so what can u do? my dad's old DELL laptop had the mouse buttons break off and the mouse cursors always go nutz.. even on their new laptops.

 

go thinkpad all the way

 

I have an HP...i had keyboard failure, and the onboard speakers kept playing when I plugged in headphones, but their support is fantastic.

Day 1. Call, they send a fedex pickup.
Day 3. Get laptop back completely fixed.

I've heard bad things about Dell, and Sony is too damn expensive.

 

www.sagernotebooks.com

or the toshiba satellite series are good as well..

 

Ya sure about Compaq though? I heard from the Best Buy rep that the techs gets those in for repairs quite often. I was also told that the build quality on the Sonys aren't that good.

Ohh..now there's an eMachines widescreen laptop with an integrated wireless lan. Athlon +2400. The weekly ad for tomorrow has it for $1049 after rebates.

It's here .

How's that one?

 

the only reason i even looked at this thread is because my T20 thinkpad just had its monitor fail....i was leaning towards Dell..inspiron 8500..but now i'm hesitant!! mmmm.........

 

Alright, I just bought the new laptop. I decided to go with the Toshiba Satellite for $799 after rebates from Circuit City. It's a pretty sweet laptop and I hope this'll last me for a good while. I was listening to some music on it earlier and the speakers don't distort cuz they're titanium. So far so good with it. The laptop itself doesn't feel cheap, even though the price was. Haha. Windows XP takes a while to get used to though. Prior to that, I'm usually on Windows 2K Pro. I just bought a $10 optical mouse at Big Lots too.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

My Girlfriend has a HP 2ghz P4 laptop for almost a year now and its been rock solid (Im sure some of it is from my tweaking tho) and her parents just bought her sister the 2.4ghz P4 model a few months ago for school, and its been working good so far.

I am planning on purchasing myself a new laptop here shortly, and I do believe that I will be getting a HP myself, due to the fact you can either get P4 or AMD, and they do have a lot of very nice features.

just my $.02