My roommate is planning to buy a laptop and has asked me to help him out with it. I assured him that my trusty sources at straightdope could only come up with the best suggestions.
So fellow dopers what laptop would you buy if you had $1500 at your disposal? Caveat - Only windows based systems.
Bonus question: What place do you recommend buying the said laptop from?
Thanks in advance.
I’m extremely happy with my Dell for work and my HP for personal use. That said you need to get one suited to your purposes. The Dell is a D600, a modestly priced road warrior machine. It’s light, compact, has excellent battery life and a decent size screen. The DVD drive is removable so I can replace it with a second hard drive and choose which to boot from so I can use my customer’s VPN.
For personal use light weight and battery life were less of a concern. I got a widescreen (1280x800) HP zv5120. Battery life sucks and it’s heavy but I can live with that. It’s faster than my Dell and once I get the memory upgraded I may end up doing all my photo editing with it.
I just got a Toshiba machine for $1050, which I love. It is a bit heavy, but I don’t travel all that much with it. It has a big screen, it runs 2.8 GHz, and has been wonderful so far. If you will travel with it a lot, a smaller and lighter one might do better. The reviews said that the battery life is not all that great, because of high speed (though you can throttle it back) but on planes it outlasted my attention span.
Don’t buy Compaq. I’ve had two, both crap. Never again.
Look at the service contract available and get a laptop from a stable company that has a good service contract with short turn around. If they can stay in business with a three day turnaround for laptops, they have a good stable product.
Avoid Sony. They are pricey and the turnaround when they break can be measured in weeks or months.
Thanks for the wonderful advice so far guys. I will be reviewing the Dell and Compaq laptops soon. As for Sony, I currently have a Vaio and am not really happy with it, so I think it is out of question.
Does anyone have anything to say about IBM Thinkpads? Some of my friends have it and all of them say that it is a very reliable piece of equipment although much is left to be desired in the looks department.
I must say Compaq laptops used to be crap. I have no data on how they are now.
I have had my T40 for over a year without any trouble (knocks on wood). One group here ordered about 30 R40s 6 months ago. I know only of one that failed and it was picked up, fixed, and returned in about a week.
About a year ago, I bought the cheapest new laptop I could find - a Dell Inspiron 1100, and have had no problems with it what-so-ever.
A good place to look at computers and accessories is www.pricewatch.com
Plus, it’s hit or miss on availability, but you may want to check out if Dell or other companies have any good deals on remanufactured jobs.
Be very careful about refurbished products. My MIL bought a refurbished Dell, the thing never worked right from the start, the company she bought it from vanished, and Dell refused to support it, at least not without paying through the nose for per call support. I think the company she bought it from was not a legitimate partner with Dell.
I’ve had an R40 for about a year. It’s been rock solid.