I am in the market for a laptop, prob 2. I want a 17in (or bigger?), fast proc, win7, plenty of RAM and HD space. I mainly want to use it to rip DVDs to mpeg4 fast, internet, etc; the thinner the laptop, the better. Built in TV tuner is a plus. For the 2nd laptop, I am interested in a thin/lite (12in preferable) ultra portable with built in DVD -/+ RW drive, excellent wireless card in terms of wireless distance and speed (has “N” been finalized yet?) and excellent battery life. From my sig, I currently own 2 dells (9300 and 700m) but they are kind of old. Are there better laptop makers out or should I consider ones by dell again?

I use to be a Dell man myself. I then went to Sony, however I am not to particularly fond of their new line. NBF recently did a review on the X ultra thin series. I would suggest looking at that. As for your power house, NBF (Particularly Powerpack) has recently turned me onto Sager/Clevo. If you love Dell then you would know they bought out Alienware. Alienware is the more powerful elite line from Dell basically.

From what I've read Alienware pretty much buys the laptops from Sager/Clevo and rebrands it. You can save yourself some money and get a super powerful laptop by looking at those.

Actually, Alienware has been staying away from Clevo of late. They tend to use Arima for their ODM work at present, as I recall.

Sager NP 9280 and any notebook? Any question on the 9280 go here, link. Netbook? Best Buy?

what about this HP dv8t 18" Laptop for the first one and Dell Inspiron 11z Intel Celeron 11.6" Laptop for the second one?

That is quite a difference between a powerful 18" and the so-so 11" notebooks. It depends very much on what your needs and preference are; and of course what you are willing to part with as $$$ goes.

cheers ...

Yeah maybe I should have included that I don’t want to spend a small fortune on either laptop. The big laptop will mostly be used at my house for ripping/burning DVDs, internet, video editing and encoding, etc. I prefer the 360 on the big screen for gaming. Thus I don’t need a powerful video card but strong processor and fast hard drive speed. The small laptop will be used mostly when I am out and about, and travelling. Thus I want it to have a strong wifi card and good battery life. I prefer having a full fledge laptop (with internal DVD burner), e.g. no netbook. I read earlier this year that intel was supposed to release new low voltage procs for ultra portable laptops. Any updates on this? How is the quality of Toshiba laptops? I noticed a few friends have had hardware issues with them.

In regards to the chip. I think you are refering to the Intel Atom. They are in most Netbooks. They do give an very good battery life, but I do not think you will be doing heavy data flow (Gaming/Computations/Rendering/Ripping) with them.

As for Toshiba, this is a matter of opinion. In my opinion I have always throught them to be over priced and not alot of bang for the buck. The one person I know that has a Toshiba Satellite hates it. We have redone the laptop at least a dozen times with fresh OS installs and it comes to a crawl after month or two. Again that is just my experience and my opinion.

Big Computer:
What you are looking for you can get from HP/DELL/Sony for just about the same prices and configuration. Personally if you are going to do video editing and encoding I do encourage you to get a stronger graphics card than a weaker one as this will help with rendering.
I would probably go with the Sony AW series for this

Little Computer:
If you don't want a netbook and still want something nice. Go with like the HP ENVY 13.

No, its not the atom. It’s a new low voltage chip intel announced earlier this year. They may phase out the atom with this chip since it has more power and uses little voltage.

Regarding video encoding, I thought the video card is not used but the processor and hard drive are most important. Yes, rendering will be faster with a video card. I don’t plan to do too much editing and I don’t want to spend $400+ for a good card. The mac laptops don’t use expensive vid cards and are used to edit video..right? Is USB3 available on laptops yet? I mentioned to someone at work that win7 does not really add any new feature over XP..just a prettier paint job. Am I wrong saying that? I know its time for me to upgrade tho, since my laptops are running pretty slow now. I may go with a 13in laptop. I noticed that yahoo mail does not display correctly on the the 700m. It is missing the scroll bars, making it difficult to access email. 12in laptops are nice since I can comfortably watch movies on an a plane.

Regarding Toshiba, I always liked the qosmio line with the integrated tv/capture card. But it was pretty pricey.

I don't know anything that is phasing out the atom as of yet. I know that they are releasing a new version of the atom with one of the new code names. When I get home I'll look at my favorites and post the link to Intel's site.

Most of the new macbooks pros ship with NVidia cards. What you do say about video encoding is true, in regards to a large hard drive and a strong processor, but one thing that most people overlook is that onboard video cards share the same memory as your computer when you start to use clipping, image cleanup (IE Red eye removal) etc that gets loaded into memory and processed by the video card. This will make your processor work slightly harder. Granted running an I7 you may not notice it but it does effect performance. Investing the money on a video card will end up helping your system run smoother and faster. You will not have so many swaps to the hard drive from memory with a dedicated card. Please do not think that this means that you need to go out and get a liquid cooled dual SLI rig to do little john's home video, but at the same time if you are working with a large video or large images (300megs or higher from experience) you will notice the difference of doing it within 3 minutes and 1 minute.

I can not answer USB 3.0 with certainty. I would like to say I have seen laptops say they have it, but since I don't have any proof to back me up either way I can't honestly answer this.

You are dead wrong about W7. They have changed the kernel. Yes it is prettier than XP. Yes it does use more resources than XP. But there is alot of difference between the way it handles resources and programs than XP. I would say the difference between W7 and XP is similar to the difference between Windows 3 and XP.

I would suggest if you have a thumbdrive to check out Thunderbird. It can be set up to interface with Yahoo mail and pretty much will run perfectly in 90% of the resolutions out there. It gives an outlook feel to yahoo mail.

I was checking dells site. Looks like only one 17in laptop comes with tv tuner, the overpriced alienware laptop. However several netbooks come with the tuner. I liked how in the past dell allowed you to customize the DTR, esp the inspirons, but that does not seem to be the case nowadays.

There are some aftermarket USB driven TV Tuners that are like 25.00 if you would like to still buy a nice laptop and add it in later.

I do prefer the external TV tuners myself. It is better suited in case of software update in the future.

cheers ...