I’m thinking of buying a new laptop, and I’m horribly out of touch with the state of laptop computing. I need to buy something fairly massive, since I may want to use it to work at home. So I’m looking at something with a 1 Gig processor, lots of memory, etc. etc.
However, seeing as I’m buying a kick-ass system, I also want it to be able to play cool games. I gather that a 3D video card and some sort of nifty sound card are in order. But, I’m clueless as to what’s considered good nowadays, and also what is available in a laptop as opposed to desktop system.
I currently have a Winbooks, which I’m more or less happy with. The drawbacks are that the speakers on it are pretty shitty. This is something that I’ve found rather hard to quantify when looking at new systems - even Winbook admits that it’s speakers are shitty, and swears to me that they’ve improved them, but the reviews I read of the newest Winbooks say that the new improved speakers aren’t too good, either.
So how 'bout it? Anyone out there have a nifty game machine? What do you have?
I can give you the results of a comparison I recently did to select my new laptop. Since most laptops are pretty similar in speed and features, I used DVD playing as my benchmark, since one cool thing I like to do with a laptop is watch movies while travelling. I checked out 3 models (IBM Thinkpad, Toshiba Tecra, & Dell Latitude). Playing a DVD movie, the Thinkpad lasted about 2 minutes before the battery died. The Latitude lasted maybe 10 minutes. The Tecra lasted 75 minutes. The only drawback was that the Tecra weighed more than the others, but to me that was worth it.
The new Titanium G4 PowerBook…mmmm I have dreams about it at night. You should check it out. If you are not worried about price, and aren;t afraid of Macs… this is one powerful laptop. Probably the most powerful on the market. The Sony Vaio is really good too, but also pricey.
I second Flymaster’s recommendation. I have a Dell Inspiron 8000, which I bought back in January. I picked the 15" 1600x1200 screen with 32 MB of video RAM (so it’ll do 32-bit color at full resolution). The display is better than any CRT I’ve ever used – resolution is something like 133 dpi, and even small text shows up clearly.
The built-in speakers aren’t so hot, but I’ve never seen a laptop that had good ones – that’s why they have jacks for headphones/external speakers.
You can get it with DVD, CD, or CDRW (actually you can get any two of these, since there are fixed and removeable media slots). There are also ZIP/LS120 drives available, and hard drives up to 32GB.
This is one powerful machine – I’ve been using it as my primary software development machine, running Win2K Advanced Server, IIS5, SQL 7.0, and lots of other stuff, with no problems.
The following are the sites I use for reviews of the various PC component/system options available: anandtech sharkyextreme toms hardware
Sorry about that last link
You might want to check out the Toshiba Satellite 2805 if you’re going to use it for gaming. AFAIK, it’s the only notebook that uses the GeForce2 for it’s video, so it’s pretty darn robust. Good stuff, IMHO.
Wow! Thanks for all the answers. I’ll definitely look into that Toshiba, and the Dell. The Dell Inspirion was actually already on my short list, as I get a discount through my work if I buy a Dell.