**Need university laptop suggestion** (getting a little desperate here...) - Page 2

I'd check out the IBM laptops, i have friend who has one and its a business/real work hass. Has some pretty good professional features on it too (and good battery life). I can't remeber the exact laptop he has but he was able to play CS Source on it. So, that should be enough to run cad. But if you don't care about the screen as much or professional features and looks, Z71v or z70v.

i wouldnt worry about a workstation graphics card. they are extremely powerful and run huge CAD operations great for sure, but they are overkill for college use (let alone expensive). i ran Pro/E Wildfire on my current lappy which has a 2 year old integrated graphics card sharing 64 megs of ram, and it ran it just fine for the level of stuff we did. i tried to get it to slow down and had to a revolve of about 4 dozen elipses and some other stuff to get it to slow down (only slowed down in sketch mode, 3D render was still smooth). i would say that any GPU with dedicated graphics would do fine for college, by the time you get to truely serious CAD, there will be much better stuff out there and you will probably be looking for a new laptop by that time anyway

i would wait for the z70v refresh. good GPU, lightweight, good screen, and even looks good.

2,000 canadian = 1,600 US FYI since some of you are suggesting laptops over that price.

you can get a pretty well loaded z71v or sager 3880 for that price. maybe look at some of the old centrino's with the 9700 if you want really budget

agreed
the old centrino's with fast nice low latency ddr memory should perform very close to the new centrino's.. + the old 1's will give you a little bit more battery life and less heat.. and the radeon m9700 performs equiv to an x600

Might wanna check out this link :

Alright it looks like you are looking for something similar to what I was looking for and we have the exact same budget 1600 though I don't care if I go over 1600 with warranties. Also some information that would be good to know is that Centrino is a package not a processor. It contains a pentium M processor, an intel chipset and their wireless networking module. Now Centrino might not be the best choice for you, why? Because in the intel chipset is a graphics control. Probably integrated intel extreme graphics on the motherboard. Here is a link to a comparison between pentium m and centrino
http://www.atheros.com/pt/Centrino_v...whitepaper.pdf

For photoshop, cad and illustrator you might want bette graphics capabilities than the intel integrated graphics and for performance purposes it is better to have a graphics card with dedicated memory than shared memory that pulls from your ram. You may notice the effects when running complicated filters in photoshop. Also if you get a laptop backpack it would not have to be less than 6lbs. The weight will be a limiting feature on the laptop you are looking for... less than 6lbs and having possible capabilities to be a desktop replacement that limits what you can get also. With a backpack even 15 pounds is light, but I would say if a backpack isn't your thing look for 8 pounds and under and keep in mind to check the weight WITH the battery because many companies don't include that in the weight and when yuo want 4+ hours of battery life and high performance for photoshop you will probably need a 12cell. So that is just something to think about, I hope that helps and if anything is incorrect let me know.

Here are two laptops I am looking at:
Toshiba M30X
Intel® Pentium® M 725 Processor (1.60GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 400MHz FSB)
1024MB PC2700 DDR333 SDRAM (512MBx2)
15.4" Diagonal Wide-screen XGA Display (1280 x 800)
ATI® Mobility Radeon™ 9700 graphics w/64MB of VRAM
40GB HDD (4200rpm)
DVD/CD-RW Multifunction drive
Atheros Wireless LAN (802.11a/b/g)
Li-Ion Battery (8 Cell, 4300mAh)
PRICE: 1475.10 (before tax and 9.99 shipping)
A bit pricey but toshibas are good machines you could possibly sacrifice ram if you want to upgrade the hard drive, I think for working in photoshop it would be good to run off an external hard drive, 7200 -10,000 rpms because most laptops are less than 5400rpm and that will make saving large files tedious. I plan on having an external hard drive so I gave this 40gigs.

Compaq R4000
AMD Athlon(TM) 64 4000+ (2.4GHz/1MB l2 Cache)
15.4" WXGA Widescreen (1280x800) w/ brightview
128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory(TM) (128mb dedicated mem)
1.0GB DDR SDRAM (2x512MB)
40 GB 4200 RPM Hard Drive
DVD/CD-RW Combo Drive
54g(TM) Integ. Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN & Bluetooth
price $1,343.00
100 instant rebate
mail-in rebate -$50.00
price $1,193.00
Only problem with this is does the AMD athlon 64 run as cool and quietly as the pentium M. This has 128mb of dedicated memory more than enough to do photoshop or the sims. The same 1gig or ram and 40gig hard drive. You could upgrade the hard drive , downgrade the wireless card if you don't want blue tooth or prefer to get a different card. This one is much cheaper, I have heard mixed reviews about compaq but they are good looking notebooks and if you get a warranty AND an accidental damage care plan you should be fine.

Also one more note keep in mind if you want microsoft office suite I happen to have that already so that saves me between 70-150 dollars depending on how much that costs from different companies. I hope this helps you decide what is right for you

Links to the toshiba http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...7&ccid=1291021

And the compaq http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/sh...computer_store

Tech_girl, you've gotten a lot of good advice here. As the old saying goes, "If you can distinguish between good and bad advice, then you don't need advice!"

So here's my advice. You say you want a three year warranty. Statistically, companies win this game, so the odds are stacked against you. They are so profitable for some that one big box retailer here in the USA (hint) magically didn't have a notebook I wanted in stock after I turned down the extended warranty. The stockout was noticed after they agreed to match their web site price.

On the other hand, Dells and IBM's have great reputations in the business world because a) not many computers fail in general, and b) these firms take very good care of their corporate clients - i.e., if an employee's ThinkPad fails, there's a spare on the shelf in IT, and the employee doesn't miss a beat because all of his/her files are, or should be, on the server. Plus these usually are leased, not owned. One forum recently was abuzz over a Dell exec saying that Dell was reducing effort on its "unprofitable" consumer business and focusing on its corporate accounts. I've lived in both worlds with Dell and found them to be responsive.

None of that means anything when your notebook craps out the night before a term paper is due. My son bought an IBM (at the time) ThinkPad T42 - machines with a stellar reputation - and just got it replaced under the one year warranty after it's FOURTH major failure. But it took a while and a lot of phone calls. The new one behaves completely differently from the old one. So warranty or not, if something doesn't seem right, make them prove to you that it's "NORMAL" while you're still in warranty.

My daughter, on the other hand, is going away in the fall and she wants light weight, word processing, IM's and mp3s. She's buying an iBook 12". I'm looking for something like you are, to replace a three year old Dell Inspiron that is being handed down to someone else in our company. I looked at the HP dv1000 (nice), the Thinkpad T42 (nicer), the new Dell Latitude D610 (nicer yet) , before settling on an Asus Z70V. If the three year warranty is critical to you at your price point, I'd check out the Latitude, which is not a bad machine for what you want to do. It's got the right weight, the screens are excellent, ergonomics are ok, power is sufficient, and the Dell business class (Latitiude) notebooks are more durable than their consumer (Inspiron) lines. I've heard of coupons for up to $400 or $500 off Latitudes; right now they have a 15% deal going. You may also want to consider a refurb from their outlet; our fledgling firm has purchased four systems from their outlet, and all have been bulletproof. In the 70's and 80's, "no one ever got fired for buying IBM"; today that saying probably applies to Dell.

So why am I buying an Asus? It has more of what the Dell offers, plus better performance, for less money, and the three year warranty isn't as important to me. Remember infant mortality - most electronics components will fail in the first few hundred hours or so.

Some parting advice:

I price shopped online for the Z70V and went to istnc.com because they had instant chat. We discussed my requirements and THEY talked ME down several hundred dollars, so you may get closer than you think to your price point on a Z70V (not the refresh). I'm not saying others couldn't or wouldn't do the same, just that istnc DID.

Consider doing your own RAM. It's probably the one upgrade that everyone can do. If you can change a battery in a smoke detector, you can add RAM. Use pricegrabber.com and get the best price for Kingston, Corsair, or Crucial - it'll probably be Kingston. They are among the most reliable brands, and it'll save you some money towards your price point. You shouldn't need more than 1 GB and more can actually slow down your machine.

If you need MS Office, be sure to get the Student and Teacher Edition (as low as $119 USD on sale). Even better is that the 2003 version gives you 3 licenses, so maybe Mom and Dad will give you a little more help on this.

Check with your university, as suggested. Many, but not all, have discounts ranging from 10 to 40%. Usually, the more specific the requirements (and the more limited the choices) the greater the discount.

Remember that even the greatest computer in the world gets gunked up over time, so I would recommend that each summer you check your data backup, (you DO back up, don't you?), reformat the hard drive, and reinstall your OS and all of your software. It's time consuming, but simpler and in the long run less risky thanthings like editing the registry (for ham handed geeks like me), and the time spent in reloading will be recovered during the school year with speed and reliability. In other words, doing that kind of maintenance may help you get by longer with a lesser machine and keep you at your price point.

Good luck!

Thats great advice, I recommend reformatting and backing up every year also it will definitely improve performance in the long run.

reframwhatever makes a good point with service. buying from dell or IBM, or anything from Best Buy is best avoided. why? service. some computers are built well, and some arent, but most will need to be serviced at least once in their lifetime, and college is especially rough on computers. if you buy from a major brand and you end up needing service, you will most likely have to mail your computer in, and they keep it for a few weeks (my roomate had to return his laptop to best buy to mail of to toshiba, its gone for 3 weeks, and he just needed to replace the hard drive). places like pctorque, powernotebooks, discountlaptops, and ISTNC have very quick turnaround times. i believe pctorque guaruntees they'll have your computer out the door no more than 3 days after they get it from you, so it would probably be gone a week at most.

take time to read the warranty from wherever you buy from, and look for turnaround time. also check out ressellerratings.com, to see what people have to say about their experieces with various resellers

Comments on service -

I'm not a Dell stockholder or anything, but . . .

I was pressed into service as the IT guy in our small company about three years ago. We haven't had corporate standards on notebooks - user gets a price point. We have had five Dell notebooks, three Toshibas, one Compaq, and an HP. All of this excludes gray hairs induced by Windoze ME, a crime against humanity if ever there was one.

The HP and Compaq are less than a year old, and have had no problems.

The Toshibas' reliability vary inversely with age - i.e., the newer ones are a POS.

Two Dells are 3+ years (Latitudes) and haven't hiccupped once with two hard-on computer owners.

Two Inspirons had to go back for depot repair a total of four times and each time they were back the next day. Once I dropped it off at Emery at 7 pm and it was back at 10:30 the next morning! Two Dell desktops had on-site sevice and once the repair was delayed by an extra day because the tech didn't have the part.

My son's ThinkPad T42 lemon went back twice before being replaced and both times it was gone three days. He wasn't too happy about that during the school year. Fortunately for him, he had an external HDD, so everything was available to him, although he had to use community computers. Something else to think about as a Plan B in college.

So I must give Dell exceptional marks for turnaround on repairs. I keep suggesting the Latitude D610 as an option for college kids because of Dell discounting, the Latitudes seem to be made of stronger stuff and fail less, and a THREE YEAR WARRANTY IS INCLUDED. Plus Dell is claimed to pay better attention to "business" customers. On the other hand, I also remember being in a big hurry to get rid of my '66 Rambler upon graduation. There was nothing wrong with it - er, it was mechanically and structurally sound - but I wanted the sizzle, the flash, the speed of a newer beast. Three months later I was borrowing the Rumbler from Dad.

The D610's of the world are like eight year old Civic DX's - reliable but boring. Everyone wants an Acura RSX .

So I agree about resellers - they're far more personal - but my experience puts Dell at an equivalent level.

Checking with your school is quite important. I was dead set on a Sony S until I received my school's prices. It turns out that mine gives a massive discount (total came out to over 1400 dollars off a fully loaded T43P), and the school has an onsite IBM certified maintenance center with a 1 day turn around on repairs.

i cant comment on dell business line, as i have no experience with them, though i have heard they arent as bad as the inspiron line. the home/office inspiron regular line i can say is bad, and customer service, for lack of a stronger word, sucks. some people experience no problems, but a lot of my friends have had very bad experiences with them. my roomate has had 3 hard drive replacements, a keyboard replacement, and a mobo replacement. he experienced good customer service untill the last two hard drive replacements, when dell has been "uncooperative." another friend had a mobo failure and had to fight with dell for a few months get it fixed. recently her cdrom drive failed and is having problems getting dell to replace it. im not singleing out dell, all of the big major manufacturers are guilty, i could give more horror stories about my soon to be replaced compaq. im just giving some examples and picking on dell cause they make it easy to pick on them.

some people say that these are just limited horror stories, some people say that dell is hit or miss, or that they do more good then bad. my point is that you cant afford to be out of a computer for a month or more, or be one of the people that do end up getting bad service, especially if you have a paper due in a week, or a million other assignments. it is best in my opinion to go somewhere else that offers incredible service,

I checked with my school and they offer some fairly good deals. They have a D610 with pretty good specs and 3 year warranty + Complete Care for $1279. It sure beats trying to configure a D610 in the Business section.

I'm currently waiting to see if a better deal comes up for a 700m.

I have seen/used a Sony T, which is close to the S. Both are very, very nice laptops with a lightweight chassis and a gorgeous display.