Want To Buy A Laptop But Know Nothing - Custom Advice Please

Ok if you want battery and performance, you are going to be looking for a Centrino Laptop using the Pentium M chips( they will appear to be slow as they top out at about 2.1G but mulitply that by 1.5~1.6 and you'll get the real clock rate comparing to a Pentium 4). For the apps you'll most likely be using, 512MB should be enough for now (you can always get more later). If you want fast program launch/load, you'll want at least a 5400rpm HD. Screen size, battery life and weight doesn't really go hand in hand so expect about 5lbs for a 14" and 6.5 for a 15" or 15.4" wide. 17" will start at 7.5+. Keep an eye on Dell coupons and you may get something in your price range.

Do you plan to play games at all? If so, you'll need a dedicated graphics card, which will tend to cost more. If not, check this out:http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...208293&CatId=0

Well 80% of the worlds laptop are made by the same 4 manufacturer, be it Compaq Dell, HP, Acer, etc so I won't really favor one over another as long as it's a named brand with decent warranty service.

If you look around here, you'll probably find enough horror story on every brand to turn you off from them and they will most likely be about their newer products. Keep in mind that people that are happy tends not to brag about it everyday and you see more post about bad service on new product since it'll take the service center some time to get experienced with the newer products.

yeah, what he said ^^ Acer is a solid brand.

From what i can get from your first post, you'll want a "nice" sized laptop. Kinda standard. And what Wiz said in the beginning, the Pentium-M processors are hands down the best processors for laptops nowadays. I reccomend a centrino or sonoma combination. The difference between teh two is minimal, but sonoma is the "newer" version of centrino.

Pentium-M processors have lower clock speeds, but they perform on par with the highest end desktop processors. Also, they have excellent power consumption, and therefore solid battery life, in general. 3+ hours of battery life is almost standard now with all Pentium m notebooks.

Now, from what i can tell basically from your post, you'll just want the standard notebook. Probably something ranging from a screen size of 14" to 15.4". Minimum ram should be 512, as the minimum reccomended ram for Windows XP is 512 mb. However, personally, i feel that 512 is not enough, and reccomend 1 gb of ram. I don't do much on my computer, but with all my apps running all the time, 1gb will be a nice addition to my computer...

SInce you don't do heavy gaming, the integrated video card will suffice just fine for you. A dedicated GPU (another way to say video card) is a waste of power, as it will jsut eat up your battery life.

From all this, I reccomend the standard, straight out business notebook. These notebooks fit all of these requirements, and generally are used for straight purposes, without lacking teh power when you need it occasionally. They are still quite powerful notebooks.

My reccomendation for this is an IBM T42 or T43 (the difference is that the T42 is centrino, and the T43 is sonoma). These computers are HANDS DOWN the most reliable and one of the best performing groups of laptops there are. However, they are slightly out of your price range, as IBM's are notorious for being expensive.

The next best thing is to get a Dell. Yes, they have changed their look. They look a lot better now. You can either get the Dell I6000 15"(media notebook, can be quite cheap), or the Dell latitude D610 business notebook 14". I'm a fan of the business notebooks, so my choice is obvious.

If you go for a Dell, wait till you can find a Dell offer for like...50% or 40% off, OR if you find a Dell online coupon for $600-$750 off.
Still, I think the IBM's are worth the money they cost.

Acer has better quality, in general, than Dell or Hewlett Packard. I haven't looked up a review for the particular model I linked you to, but in general, they're decent computers (no kidding!) You might want to look at some of the other Centrino laptops on Tiger Direct, also, for comparison. I'd be looking for 512 MB of RAM, and at least a 1.6 Ghz Pentium M processor. What size hard drive you want and whether or not you want/need a DVD burner is up to you.

There's a coupon thread in the Dell forum that tells you what the latest deals are, so you don't have to look all over to find them. Good luck and God bless!

There are about six main processors you can choose from:

Pentium 4 or Pentium 4-M: Not recommended. The main drawback to the P-4 is the insane amount of power it consumes and heat it generates. They will deplete even a massive battery in about an hour, and provide no better performance than the competition.

Pentium-M (also known as "Centrino", "Dothan", or "Sonoma" -- these names all mean something specific, but they're also misused): This is the most common notebook processor available now. They get the best battery life of anything available (except maybe the Turion, see below), and higher-end models get pretty good performance (better on business apps, weaker on scientific computing, moderate on games). However, the higher-end Pentium-M's can get quite expensive.

Mobile Athlon 64: These processors get pretty good battery life, but are inexpensive and offer very, very good performance. Even the Athlon 64's of a year and a half ago offer better gaming performance than Intel's high-end Pentium-M. They also have a 64-bit architecture, which means that they offer performance benefits when run with a 64-bit operating system (many of which should be out in the future -- the only major one available now is Linux). These are very, very good for gaming and scientific computing, and quite good for anything else.

Turion 64: This is basically a low-power version of the Athlon 64. There aren't any Turion 64's out yet, but they'll be coming out soon; they'll have slightly less power than the MA64's but better battery life.

Mobile Athlon XP: This is AMD's old notebook processor, offering passable performance and good battery life.


I would recommend either a Mobile Athlon 64/Turion 64 (if you want more performance) or a lower-end Pentium M (if you want more battery).
If that's what you're doing, 512. You can always upgrade later, and memory upgrades are cheaper than buying it with the computer. The different kinds of memory are for different kinds of motherboards; the only time you really need to worry about them is if you're upgrading, so you can get the right one.
Not really. Anything that has the specs that you want is good. It depends on how big of a machine you want. Go to Circuit City/Best Buy and find a size that you like.

Widescreens aren't any more expensive these days, and I like mine.

If at all possible, look at a screen before buying it. Not all screens of the same size and resolution are the same.

Most notebooks only come with one battery size option. The main things that determines your battery life are 1) your processor (from best to worst: Pentium M, Turion, Athlon 64, Pentium 4), 2) your screen size (bigger is worse), and your battery size.

An Athlon 64 notebook should get you around 3 hours; a Pentium M notebook will get you from 2 to 5 hours, depending. If you have a specific model in mind, post here and we'll tell you the real battery life -- don't trust the manufacturer.

If you don't like waiting on things to load, hard drive speed matters.

4200 rpm (what I've got) is slow; 5400 is better; 7200 is best, but costs quite a bit more.

If you're not looking to play the latest games and want to save a bunch of money, try to get an older model. The only thing you need a really recent machine for is gaming.

I'm in college too

Hey I'm at medical school and wanted a good laptop for school.
I love my gateway 3520 from best buy, Light about 5.25 pounds, very good battery life about 4hrs without using CD rom, 14" wide screen, Centrino 1.6mghz
802.11 B/G 60 gig HD, DVD Burner, 512 ram 1199-1025 USD a great price.
Full review of this great baby under Gateway. I love this lappy and it has given me great service.

One more thing

Oh one more thing I think the size of the HD is important: 20 gigs is way too small, heck 60gigs is small. The biggest HD you can afford is what you should get. I don't buy into the speed thing much. If it is for school a faster HD doesn't matter too much. But If a big HD you can have large video files for school on the HD. As well as other things. A faster HD matters some for games and video but not so much in the mix, at least for me. Oh ram is very very important! More the better.

Dont go with the Sempron its budget crap form AMD.

With the Pentium M if you can afford to upgrad more, say the 1.7 or 1.8 or even 2.0 you'll thank yourself that you did in a year when your laptop still keeps up with all the new top of the line or you could get the 1.5 GHz now and upgrade when Intel cuts the prices on the P M's in the middle of July when they release the 2.26 GHz Sonoma.