I’m buying myself a laptop as a graduation present - but I’m doing it with Amazon rewards points (and by cashing in a number of gift cards and things.) That means I have to buy it via Amazon. I won’t be using any actual money to pay for it, for a variety of reasons (mostly because I’ll be taking a lot of time off work to prep for the bar exam and because my wife will yell at me.)
So, my budget is about $350; maybe $400. I realize that isn’t going to buy me the latest and greatest, and that’s fine. I currently have a Toshiba Satellite that’s about seven years old and I’ve been very happy with it, other than the ridiculous amount of preinstalled bloatware. Hence, I’ll probably pay a slight premium for another Toshiba.
I don’t play games until they’re like $10 on Steam, so it’s not as though I need some sort of uber-gaming rig. I don’t want a Chromebook; I need to be able to use pretty much the full panoply of MS Office programs without any formatting issues. I don’t really care about size or weight. I’m not going to be toting the thing around the world. Battery life is definitely a
One thing I particularly don’t understand is multi-core processors; I bought my last laptop before those were commonly available and I have very little idea how to compare them.
This Gateway (whoah, they still exist?) seems like a particularly good deal but I don’t know anything about AMD laptop processors. Feel free to point out what’s wrong with it so I have a better idea of what to look for.
I got a $280 HP laptop kit from Best Buy, and this is probably the best laptop I’ve ever had. It comes with a case, flash drive, and mouse, but if you return all the extras and just buy the laptop, it’s like 260. It comes with 4 gig RAM and 750 gig HD, but I paid $40 to make it 8 gig (windows 7/8 can handle unlimited ram.)
No, it came bundled with case, flash drive and mouse.
Oh, if I wanted to spend $400, I could have gotten a touchscreen laptop or a hybrid touchscreen that can be detached from the keyboard and used as a tablet.
Yes, pretty much. Incidentally, I’m not particularly concerned about touch capability (which AIUI means Win 8.) Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see it as much more than a substitute for a mouse based on my experiences with phones and tablets.
I dunno, says it has a 1.6 Ghz processor. Mighty slow by modern standards, and by a lot of older standards too. I wonder if it can even play some of those $10 steam games.
Yeah. I can use them for anything listed on Amazon except digital downloads. I have a Prime account so usually it’s cheaper to buy directly from Amazon because of the free shipping, but the third party seller has it cheaper even with shipping cost.
Yeah, I saw that. I don’t really care about the audio because I’ll be running it through external speakers any time I’m using sound and I don’t really listen to music anywhere but the car.
It’s got Intel integrated graphics, not a real graphics card. That’s fine for general computer use but double check what the requirements are for your games.