I’m in the unenviable position of needing a laptop quickly.
My current one is crapping out on me, and I no longer trust it with my data. I’ve managed to back up everything successfully, but it was close. Multiple blue screens, glacial processing speeds, disappearing desktop…all kinds of nastiness, basically.
I’ve been expecting this. The machine is more than 6 years old, but the timing of this is problematic.
I’ll need a new laptop for my work at least by Monday, and I’d frankly prefer to have it this weekend, and tonight, if possible. I have to work tomorrow (fairly intense data analysis), and I’m going to need it.
Soooooo, I won’t have the luxury of building one out online and ordering it.
I guess I’m going to have to go to a brick-and-mortar store and shell out for an off-the shelf one.
So, whaddya think? I was thinking about spending about $1000, give or take a bit.
You don’t give much information as to what kind of work you want to do on this laptop. That said, I’ve always found Asus to be a good bang for the buck, and they’re sold at Best Buy and the like. Can’t recommend any specific models without more detail, though.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 that is giving me great performance and is rated highly. It’s basically a re-badged IBM. I also have an ASUS notebook, and I think their laptops are rated well. You should do a search for reviews online.
I have a three year old Dell 1540. Ive replaced the hard drive once and need a new battery. I do not store large amounts of data. It got me through three years of school and kept my kids in email and Club Penguin. It has been used mostly for Internet (research, Facebook, email among other things) and keeping a ton of notes in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint presentations/PDFs of same.
I don’t know what kind of help that is but there ya go - you can probably pick one up tonight at a chain store. It’s still trucking along fine and might be better if I treated it better.
I bought a Toshiba after an Asus. The Toshiba (for my needs) is far better, and just gives me a more “solid” feel.
This is as technical as I get- I would still buy either, but prefer the Toshiba.
(I would add that I had a problem with the keyboard of the Asus a few months after I bought it. The service was excellent and the keyboard replaced very quickly).
What size would you like? If you want a number pad on the side, your looking a a few 15" and most 17". Crunching many numbers? Think Intel i5 or more probably i7. At leaset 6 gig of ram. Try for 8 gig to future proof.
Ogre, sounds like you need a corporate style laptop. Do you need a TPM chip in order to run Bitlocker or some other encryption system to protect your data? Not many PCs have a TPM chip so that would help make your choice if you need that.
Lenovo is a work horse with a really strong case that stands up to traveling abuse. Toshiba also make pretty serious laptops. For a grand, you can get something really nice.
You can visit http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/buy/pcs.aspx and put in your parameters and narrow down your fit. If there is a microsoft store near you, that’s a good place to visit.
Thanks very much for the suggestions, folks. I ended up with a sweet little ASUS machine. I got it at Best Buy for $829. It has an i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, a 750GB hard drive, and a 14" screen (I actually wanted a smaller screen.) Plenty of horsepower at a decent price.