OK, I need a new computer. I need something versital and portable, so I guess I need a laptop. Now, are Dell and Gateway offering the best deals now days? I need it for the normal college student functions (downloading music, games, papers, burning CD’s, etc.). I want a computer that won’t crap out on my in two years.
Also, are there ways to make a computer stay functional longer. The computer we have now is barely even workable. We’ve taken it to get fixed several times but it just won’t work for us. It’s about four years old now, which, I guess, is pretty old for a computer. What kind of precautions should I take when I get my next computer?
I’m a big fan of the Dell laptops, they aren’t the prettiest but they have been quite reliable in my experience.
If you want to play games on your laptop make sure you get a good video card. Right now I think the best in mobile gpu’s is the NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go, also don’t skimp on the ram, whether playing games, burning cds, or simply multi-tasking too little memory will really create a bottleneck. 256MB is excellent, but more is even better (anything above 512 is overkill for your needs though).
As for how to make you comp last longer, here are my tips:
When you shutdown improperly (aka freeze) never cancel the automatic scandisk when you reboot
Run defrag in safemode once every 3 months or as needed
Use zone alarm or another software firewall to protect against infection
If the system starts to feel exceptionally sluggish backup your data and reformat. If you need them you can find step-by-step instructions here
If you’re after a PC notebook, it seems that the market is dominated by branded clones; there are a few manufacturers who depart from this (Sony, IBM etc), but by and large, there are about four or five designs to choose from, but there’s quite a range of choice about what will be inside the box. If you’re going to buy one of these clones it can be very confusing comparing them; I thought I could tabulate their specifications and do some sort of clever analysis that way, but in the end I just picked one that I thought had good spec and price then checked around to make sure that I couldn’t either get the same spec for less or greater spec for the same.
I bought from RockDirect.co.uk, but I’m not sure if they sell internationally.
You do (as AHunter3 says) need to decide exactly what you want out of it (and what you might want out of it in a years time), post back with more info and let’s see if we can help.
One way is to not get a laptop. Things don’t go bad any more often on them (at least, not so far as I know), but when they do go bad, they’re much more difficult to upgrade/replace. For the same reason, if you get a desktop, you might not necessarily want the smallest case you can get. If you’re going to be doing any maintenance on it yourself, you’ll want a little room to work in there.
Most folks, though, will decide to upgrade their computer long before the old one ceases to be functional. Everyone looks at me funny when I tell them I still have a 5-7 year old computer.
I just want to point out that “papers” is now THIRD on the list of things a “normal college student” does these days with a computer. “Downloading music” is first. That’s awesome. When I started school (waaaaaaay back in 1997) most of the people in my orientation class didn’t even have email addresses.
