Hi everyone, hope you can help yet another person "on the fence" about what laptop to buy.
I'm willing to spend up to $3k, want a 15" or possibly 17" screen. The only thing sort of out of the ordinary I need the laptop for is to store and play and edit all of my music, which is about 800GB, many of which are WAV files. The music will be stored on external drives, most likely 2 500GB drives. Ideally, I'd like to be able to connect the PC to my audio system via RCA cables and also connect powered speakers. What are my options with audio cards, or do they all come built into the motherboard? Other than that, I basically just run Office and surf the internet.
Other wants... great overall speed including on the internet; excellent video though I don't have any special needs; portability is not a huge concern, but I would like to be able to put the notebook in a backpack and ride my bike when I do need to be portable. Lastly, I want excellent support.
I narrowed my choices to 2 or 3. The Lenovo T60 or Alienware Area-51. I know very little about Alienware but the fact that they are now owned by Dell scares me. As mentioned, I'm extremely cocnerned about getting good support and Dell no longer offers that. However, I have no idea how much Dell is involved. I previously had an IBM and was quite pleased, particularly with the support.
Another thought is switching to Mac. However, this scares the heck out of me... I've always been a PC user. My concerns with Mac is the learning curve, will it support the sundry music programs I have, what do I do about Office 2007 for Windows which I recently bought, etc. Are there any other concerns I should have about switching to mac?
Many thanks for any suggestions, glenn
I'm willing to spend up to $3k, want a 15" or possibly 17" screen. The only thing sort of out of the ordinary I need the laptop for is to store and play and edit all of my music, which is about 800GB, many of which are WAV files. The music will be stored on external drives, most likely 2 500GB drives. Ideally, I'd like to be able to connect the PC to my audio system via RCA cables and also connect powered speakers. What are my options with audio cards, or do they all come built into the motherboard? Other than that, I basically just run Office and surf the internet.
Other wants... great overall speed including on the internet; excellent video though I don't have any special needs; portability is not a huge concern, but I would like to be able to put the notebook in a backpack and ride my bike when I do need to be portable. Lastly, I want excellent support.
I narrowed my choices to 2 or 3. The Lenovo T60 or Alienware Area-51. I know very little about Alienware but the fact that they are now owned by Dell scares me. As mentioned, I'm extremely cocnerned about getting good support and Dell no longer offers that. However, I have no idea how much Dell is involved. I previously had an IBM and was quite pleased, particularly with the support.
Another thought is switching to Mac. However, this scares the heck out of me... I've always been a PC user. My concerns with Mac is the learning curve, will it support the sundry music programs I have, what do I do about Office 2007 for Windows which I recently bought, etc. Are there any other concerns I should have about switching to mac?
Many thanks for any suggestions, glenn
