New Laptop

[wnmnkh]

hahaha.... that's quite funny case IMO

[mxg]

So any suggestions ?

[Vexx]

Your Acer Inspire has decent looking features and attributes.... (yeah, its a bit ugly ).

This one caught my eye (especially because it comes with XP Pro rather than Vista Boat Anchor):http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...133&CatId=1897
Toshiba Satellite Pro A210-EZ2202X Notebook PC - AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-58 1.9GHz, 802.11b/g Wireless, 1GB DDR2, 80GB HDD, Dual Layer DVD RW, 15.4" WXGA, Windows XP Professional

I can't tell from the website if the memory is expandable, but I'd want to bump that up to 2GB after I got it... Also, the hard drive is pretty small though.... I'd be swapping it out ASAP.

edit: oh.. here's one that already fixes my complaints: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...134&CatId=1897

[Claies]

Originally Posted by Vexx

Your Acer Inspire has decent looking features and attributes.... (yeah, its a bit ugly ).

This one caught my eye (especially because it comes with XP Pro rather than Vista Boat Anchor):http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...133&CatId=1897
Toshiba Satellite Pro A210-EZ2202X Notebook PC - AMD Turion 64 X2 Dual-Core TL-58 1.9GHz, 802.11b/g Wireless, 1GB DDR2, 80GB HDD, Dual Layer DVD RW, 15.4" WXGA, Windows XP Professional

I can't tell from the website if the memory is expandable, but I'd want to bump that up to 2GB after I got it... Also, the hard drive is pretty small though.... I'd be swapping it out ASAP.

edit: oh.. here's one that already fixes my complaints: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...134&CatId=1897

In my experience, Toshiba Satellite laptops have terrible battery life (this thing I have here lasts about 2:30 when new...now it's just about half an hour). Please keep that in mind.

[Vexx]

Hmmm, actually thats been my experience with almost *every* brand of laptop. Most of them get their batteries from the same two or three wholesalers. How quickly they *suck* the batteries dry varies obviously, but the problem you're describing is a "material memory" issue. Rechargeables start sending signals they're fully charged when they're not. Deep discharge/recharge mitigates the problem -- but I've not seen any info on which laptops perform optimized charge cycling to make a recommendation on that basis.

[mxg]

Onice thanks, and yeah almost eevry laptop I ever had or used had poor battery life.

Also i get paid on Friday so I guess i can bump it up to about $1000 US, I was looking at this laptop: http://www.amazon.com/Pavilion-Artis...8315096&sr=1-1

Also for suggestions can it be now limited to amazon please.

Thanks

[wnmnkh]

Well, its graphic card is not fairly decent. But at least you can play WoW or CS:S with no problems.

[ashesatdusk]

In my experience, Toshiba Satellite laptops have terrible battery life (this thing I have here lasts about 2:30 when new...now it's just about half an hour). Please keep that in mind.

Its really kind of stupid to say Toshiba's this and HP is that, unless one is discussing a particular model, its very hard to describe the experience of a particular brand of laptop unless they have something distinct that pertains to all models of their notebooks. None of those companies really make laptops. They subcontract other companies to manufacturer laptops for them. Quanta is the biggest maker of laptops and they have 1/3rd of the market share, and have contracts with lenovo, HP/Compaq, Acer, Dell, Fujitsu, Sony, Toshiba, and apple (mac book pro). Having a fair amount of expertise with media productions units (particularly audio and video which its nearly impossible to find suitable laptops for) highend laptop's from one company operate very differently from lowend because they are likely a different base manufactured model. Possibly a different ODM. Lower cost notebook's tend to be sold at a loss, because there loaded with free trials that the manufacturer hopes you'll buy into to turn a profit. Architecturally there going to be stripped where ever possible.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AT anyrate.

1. If you want to run XP, Keep in mind notebook's shipped with Vista Ultimate, or Business have a XP Downgrade option. Check with the manufacturer. Fujitsu goes
as far as to include XP discs with their laptops. HP ignores the option. Even so if you already have a legitmate XP install disc. You can call microsoft's support and get them to activate XP.

2. Since your doing primarily webdesign and photoshop. A 7200rpm Hard Drive or a laptop with an E-SATA port is going to be very useful if you can find one. Hard Drive performance will play a significant role in photoshop.

3. i'd look for a notebook with an something 600 in the graphics unit an ATI RADEON 2600 or NVIDIA 7600/8600 or NVIDIA 9500. If running Vista, ATI might be the better option. Not for performance. NVIDIA is the source of many a crashes in vista.

4. Lastly unless the model your getting has a significant clock speed advantage. an Intel core 2 duo is a better option than the AMD X2. Also because of chipset, though for webdesign thats not so significant.



Asus has notebooks with Vista in your price range. Anything with XP might be out of it. Asus is an ODM. They actually do manufacturer there own notebooks. (as well as the mac book standard and a few other companies).



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220303
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220277
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220192





This is probably out of your price range but would more or less be ideal other than the hard drive. Depends on how heavy a photoshop user you are. If your heavy I'd get an Express card for E-SATA possible even RAID and setup an external hard drive. $ 1249.95. You would also want to upgrade the ram which is cheap today (about 50$ for 2GB).



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834147615

[ashesatdusk]

I forgot about these guys

www.xoticpc.com

I'd go to Xotic PC's. They let you pick laptos by ODM and configure them as you want.
pick one with an NVIDIA 8600, 2GB of RAM, Core 2 DUO, and a 7200rpm hard drive and windows XP. Your set.I think it'll run around 1100.00

the force 3298 with Core 2 Duo @ 1.6Ghz 2GB of RAM a 120GB Seagate 7200rpm
and NVIDIA 8600GT w/Windows XP runs 1102$

Sager NP2092 which uses the same base notebook. With a 2.1Ghz Processor
NVIDIA 8600GT, 100GB 7200rpm Hard Disk, and Windows XP with a 9 Cell battery instead of 6 Cell is $ 1150.00'

I'd go with Option 2 if you can afford it. You'll be able to run most games fine on these.

[mxg]

Oh nie thanks for the hits, anyone got anything to show from amazon ? Because where I am at now amazon is the only place that accepts international credit cards.

[mxg]

Also Damn these people have some great stuff I'm not sure f they will take an international credit card though the laptop would be shipped within the U.S.

I also need to add to ashesatdusk post, concerning the usage of the photoshop programs. I use photoshop pretty heavily but the real killer is illustrator some of the stuff that i do get's so busy that Illustrator crashes, hell once I got a memory from my main Desktop PC that it cannot complete the optimization of a file because of lack of memory.
The Asus PC's however do seem to pack a pretty serious punch.

Originally Posted by ashesatdusk

I forgot about these guys

www.xoticpc.com

I'd go to Xotic PC's. They let you pick laptos by ODM and configure them as you want.
pick one with an NVIDIA 8600, 2GB of RAM, Core 2 DUO, and a 7200rpm hard drive and windows XP. Your set.I think it'll run around 1100.00

the force 3298 with Core 2 Duo @ 1.6Ghz 2GB of RAM a 120GB Seagate 7200rpm
and NVIDIA 8600GT w/Windows XP runs 1102$

Sager NP2092 which uses the same base notebook. With a 2.1Ghz Processor
NVIDIA 8600GT, 100GB 7200rpm Hard Disk, and Windows XP with a 9 Cell battery instead of 6 Cell is $ 1150.00'

I'd go with Option 2 if you can afford it. You'll be able to run most games fine on these.

[oompa loompa]

buying a new laptop, a field which i have absolutely no experience in ( been using PC's all my life).. as well as buying it in the US , a place which ive never been before. finally, it has to last a while, well cos, im a south asian student going to college ( thats why im buying it ) on scholarship, so, i dont really have the money to get a new one - so id like to get a good one now. ah yes, and i am a pretty big gamer XD

heres the deal - i have a budget of around 1600$ , out of which 500$ are my own savings ( all the more reason to make it a good laptop). - which company should i buy from ? and if you can recommend me a specific laptop, what are its specs?

[Sephi]

What kind of games are you playing or intend to play? A "big gamer" can be anything from someone who plays SC all day to someone who is playing Crisis on the highest settings. If your one of the last, your 1600 budget won't cut it. So what is important is what kind of games your playing/going to play. After knowing that, i can estimate if 1600 is enough or not

[Zero Shinohara]

If you'll be using your laptop for gaming, you should definitely look for one with a dedicated graphics card. Within that budget, however, you won't be ditching out 30 FPS in Crysis no matter which card you pick.

Since I don't know of any new laptops that ship with XP anymore and you'll most likely be sticking with Vista for a while, 2 gigs of ram is the bare minimum you should look for. Also, a good dual-core processor is within your reach at that price. My lappy' runs on an AMD Turion 64x2 @ 2.2, which I believe is close to being the top of the line for that particular processor. However, cache is a big problem, and if you can find a nice Intel C2D with similar speeds, more power to you, literally. And do think about HD capacity as well. The majority of laptops that I've seen rarely go over 250 gigs, but also consider the hard drive speed.

IMO, there're two types of laptops: Super mobile and not-so mobile. Weight and screen size play a huge factor here, so if you'll be carrying your laptop around to and from school as you said, you should probably consider something with a screen size of less than 15 inches. I find the 17-inchers quite bulky and most of my friends at school say it's a pain to carry theirs around. Heck, I recently met a guy who brought his 20-inch laptop to school almost everyday. No idea of how many disk hernias he had, but to each his own.

A quick look throug Newegg got me really interested in this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220307

And I've always heard good things about ASUS laptops. 4 gigs of ram and a 2.5ghz new Core Two Duo coupled with a 3650 sounds pretty good too. $1300 doesn't sound bad either.

Good luck.

[oompa loompa]

Originally Posted by Sephi

What kind of games are you playing or intend to play? A "big gamer" can be anything from someone who plays SC all day to someone who is playing Crisis on the highest settings. If your one of the last, your 1600 budget won't cut it. So what is important is what kind of games your playing/going to play. After knowing that, i can estimate if 1600 is enough or not

haha, lets say both? i play my share of old rts, as well as new games, that 1600 can be pushed up to around 1750 if need be.. just means ill have to work for an extra month -_- - thats another thing, i decided to do some work right after i graduated, and am getting paid 10k rupees a month (quite a lot here.. though i guess a little less than 250$) and am probably deciding to invest it in a laptop ( for some reason i dont feel inclined to spend my hard earned money like my pocket money XD) - since a lot of it is my own investment itd suck if its a bad choice.

[Sephi]

Also wanting to play Crisis on the highest setting would be impossible for laptops. Even the customized alienware with SLI setup won't be able to run Crisis on highest settings from what i have heard. But i can offer you this alternative.

1000$ for PC for your gaming needs. Though i don't think 1000 would cut it to play Crisis on highest settings even on a PC. You would have to invest more. But crisis is really demanding, but for this price you can probably configure a pc that can play crisis on medium/high settings. And the current games aren't nearly as crazy as crisis resource wise. But it is a nice way to be future proof for awhile i guess. But with 1000$ you can easily build a pc that will outperform most notebooks out there, and have a good gaming experience.

If you want to be able to play Crisis on highest settings i think budget wise you could compare it to buying a Bugatti(for the true game fanatics) and a Mercedez Benz(your good rig that can do most games well).

and

600$ Laptop so you can drag it to college. And you can still play your oldskool SC games on it. You can put 100-200 from the 600 towards the pc to. A notebook for word isn't that expensive even new one

[oompa loompa]

Originally Posted by Zero Shinohara

A quick look throug Newegg got me really interested in this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834220307

And I've always heard good things about ASUS laptops. 4 gigs of ram and a 2.5ghz new Core Two Duo coupled with a 3650 sounds pretty good too. $1300 doesn't sound bad either.

Good luck.

that actually looks really good, and ive heard a lot of good things about ASUS.. do you think theres any point in shipping it to india? i was planning to actually buy it in the US, but ive realized that may cause problems

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by Zero Shinohara

Since I don't know of any new laptops that ship with XP anymore

They're still out there; they're just getting harder to find:

http://www.dell.com/content/products...=19&l=en&s=dhs

The business class laptops like Vostro and Dimension come with XP as well. However there's a graphic on Dell's site which claims they'll no longer sell XP after June 18th.

[Zero Shinohara]

@SeijiSensei:

Actually I even found one at Newegg that still sported XP too, so I guess it was my mistake.

@oompa loompa:

Newegg won't ship outside of the US, so that's a bummer for ya. If you'll be coming here for vacations or something of that, I really recommend buying it here and then bringing it with you on the plane. I don't know how India's laws on imports are and how much you'll be paying in taxes, but in Brazil's case it's 60% of what you paid, and that's ridiculous. If you bring it to the airport with you, however, the rates decrease, don't ask me how much though.

And on the subject of playing Crysis well with a $1000 budget, it can be done, you just need to know what to look for. Heck, you can play it actually very well with a $1000 budget and even run it at an acceptable resolution. Q6600 + 2 Gigs of DDR2800/1066 + an older SLI Motherboard (680 or 750 would be my choices ) and a pair of 8800 GT's should make you into a happy camper, Crysis-wise.

But forget about laptops. The super-high end ones might have a chance of getting you into the Medium-High settings at 30 average FPS, but it's hard to expect more.

[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Zero Shinohara

And do think about HD capacity as well. The majority of laptops that I've seen rarely go over 250 gigs, but also consider the hard drive speed.

Primary HD capacity isn't a huge issue, in my opinion. It's much more expensive to upgrade a laptop HD than it is to just buy an external drive that is much larger. I'd say make sure that the main HD has enough space to hold all of your programs and your important data (work documents, important pictures and important music - not your entire collection!), and also make sure that your computer is capable of either e-SATA or Firewire connectivity. Using externals will be painless then.

HD speed is a factor, but you also need to balance it out. Faster HDs would be expected to eat through battery a bit quicker and to generate more heat than slower HDs, but I'm not sure how big a difference it makes in real-world situations. If you have an e-SATA connection and an external hooked up that way it's quite possible that you could game off of the external, as well.

Originally Posted by Sephi

1000$ for PC for your gaming needs. Though i don't think 1000 would cut it to play Crisis on highest settings even on a PC. You would have to invest more. But crisis is really demanding, but for this price you can probably configure a pc that can play crisis on medium/high settings. And the current games aren't nearly as crazy as crisis resource wise. But it is a nice way to be future proof for awhile i guess. But with 1000$ you can easily build a pc that will outperform most notebooks out there, and have a good gaming experience.

If you want to be able to play Crisis on highest settings i think budget wise you could compare it to buying a Bugatti(for the true game fanatics) and a Mercedez Benz(your good rig that can do most games well).

and

600$ Laptop so you can drag it to college. And you can still play your oldskool SC games on it. You can put 100-200 from the 600 towards the pc to. A notebook for word isn't that expensive even new one

This is an interesting idea. I did this for my first two years of college (having a desktop PC and a weak laptop for mobility purposes). If you're a student who has to go through airports, it's a pain in the butt, and an expensive one at that. A desktop computer has so many components to worry about bringing and/or storing.

It's quite possible to pull it off such that you could be gaming heavily, but I'd suggest thinking a bit differently about it. Instead of heavily gaming on the computer, consider getting a console and doing most of your gaming on that. Switch to less demanding games on the PC. And of course, depending on what course of study you're in and what school you're going to, you may find that you don't have the time or the desire to game anymore, and you'll wish that your system configuration were geared toward something a bit different.