Suggest me a new laptop
I'm in the neighborhood for a new PC. I decided I'd like the ability for said PC to be easily portable, so I'd like to get a laptop. With that said, there are certain features I'm looking for specifically. If anyone can throw down some suggestions I'd really appreciate it.
I'll be using this laptop a lot at home, so I'd much prefer something with a docking station available. The dock itself should definitely have DVI as an option, i'd rather not have to swap cables from my 360 to laptop manually. Something in the 13.3" range would be great too, I don't need a large screen. A decent graphics chipset would be nice, but not exactly necessary. Price I'd like to keep less than $2000, preferably in the $1500 range. I was looking at this Sony as it has just about every exact spec I want but the price/feature list is somewhat sparse I think.
If that meets your requirements, then go for it. I personally have a Dell XPS m140(now out of manufacture) that I've had for a year. It's a great little machine, does everything I need it to. I've heard good stuff about the Vaio line from a couple family members that have them, so I can't say anything bad about those. Shame that there's nothing on Newegg yet
wordsmythe wrote:
Podunk on Jessica Alba wrote:
I have a Dell Inspiron that I game on (it's two years old, 17" widescreen monitor). It runs WoW, Half-Life 2 and BF2 acceptably. My wife has a more recent model with a 15" screen. They've been good computers for us, and you can configure it however you like in order to get what matters to you, leave the rest, and hopefully find a price in your range.
I hear that video card is more important than processor. I'd make sure to get 2 gigs of ram and a 7200rpm HD.
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
Here is a super cheap gaming laptop at newegg..
Theres a 20+ Page thread on it at Hardforums.. certainly interesting given its low price and GPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834280004
While its large.. if your looking for a dedicated gaming laptop this seems like a good choice... especially the full keyboard.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
Down in the Park with a friend called Five.
http://wumusicgroup.com/
Man, I hate the 5400rpm HD and only 1 gig of RAM, but the price is unbelievable.
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
Thankfully memory is cheap.. and it has 2! HD slots so dropping a larger 7200 RPM Hard drive is cake..
you can even get some Raid 0/1 action going..
I may get one just to goof around on it.
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
Down in the Park with a friend called Five.
http://wumusicgroup.com/
Have you checked out any of those crazy SLI laptops? Seems like they would set fire to whatever they come in contact with.
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
See, that whole fire in the lap thing is precisely why I wouldn't want one. Bad enough that bout of exploding laptops, but one on fire? No thanks
wordsmythe wrote:
Podunk on Jessica Alba wrote:
Somewhere else I mentioned that I bought a TV tray for this exact reason, since I like to laptop game from my couch.
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
. . . MacBook?
My Zune Profile
I've had a number of VAIOs over the years, and they've all served me extremely well. They're very well engineered, and definitely worth the slightly higher price tag.
I'm eyeing the SZ series myself, and will probably get one of them later this year. Right now I'm waiting for the Vista driver issue to shake itself out.
Right now i'm eyeing an Asus G1. I would love to get a Macbook as well, then I could use all MacOS, Linux and Windows on one box but the lack of any decent graphics chipset is a deal-breaker. I'll mainly be using Linux on this, maybe booting into WindowsXP for games if I can't get them to run under Wine.
I'm more of a sausage smoker myself. - Yoyoson
XBox Live - PSN: SneakinAround - Last.fm - Flickr
If one could get a MacBook as powerful as a Windows laptop, I would consider one, but I'm forced to say that my computer buying decisions are driven by gaming, so I'll be all Windows for the foreseeable future.
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
Err, the Macbook Pro has an x1600, which is one of the best videocards that you can get in a 15" or smaller laptop, due to cooling. Seems like that qualifies as "decent" to me.
The issue is less the video card and more the availability of games on Mac.
wordsmythe wrote:
Podunk on Jessica Alba wrote:
Macs run Windows, these days. Strange but true.
Mystic Violet wrote:
I'm aware of that, but speaking for myself, I'm not buying a Mac to run Windows. Cripes, I don't buy PCs to run Windows.
wordsmythe wrote:
Podunk on Jessica Alba wrote:
I was talking about the Macbook, not Macbook Pro.
I mainly use Linux so i'd prefer an Nvidia chipset as well, not ATi. I also don't really like the Mackbook Pro design, but I think that may just be me not liking the size of the unit itself. I went ahead and ordered that Asus G1 from Newegg with Next Day, should arrive tomorrow! It'll be really nice to have a PC that isn't a flaming POS for a few months. 
I'm more of a sausage smoker myself. - Yoyoson
XBox Live - PSN: SneakinAround - Last.fm - Flickr
Sweet, let us know how it works out for you, bro!
Quote:
- Legion, taking "keeping it in the family" to a whole new level.
Xbox Live: Fedaykin98
I traded my crappy, horribly underclocked Macbook Pro in for an Asus A8JS (see http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/32246) and paid only $1470... it has a Geforce 7700 and is the fastest 14.4" laptop money can buy or 15" actually. Its also the same video card as the Asus G1, but the G1 is bigger and about $400 dollars more. Its so much faster than my Macbook Pro that it makes me cry thinking I paid almost $500 more for it.
I just bought myself a Dell XPS M1210. What I did was buy it refrubished off of Dell's outlet, for $1,300. Then I swapped out the memory and the hard drive that I bought both from NewEgg. Total cost: $1500
12.1 inch widescreen
2.0ghz Intel Duo Core 2
2 gig 667 DDR2 Ram
80gb 7200rpm hard drive
7400 Nvidia Go video card, can handle LOTRO like a champ.
8 cell battery for 5-6 hours depending on what I'm doing, plus an additional 8 cell battery for backup.
Built in webcam and broadband adapter, just needs the sim card.
Vista Home Premium, which sucks.
I'm very happy with my purchase.
Elysium wrote:
XBL: elliottxW
Alright folks, I got this boy today..err...yesterday and so far so good. Initially I figured I would use Linux mostly, but then I thought about playing games, having to reboot into Windows, etc. SO I did an install of XP which didn't work as a lot of drivers for pretty much everything in the unit weren't there. After a bit of mumbling I broke down and reinstalled Vista (which took somewhere in the neighborhood of an hour and a half to install.) Things are working pretty well so far. I've hooked up my 320GB music drive to a USB enclosure I bought along with the laptop and haven't had a problem yet.
The display is very nice, no dead/bright/stuck pixels at all. The keyboard is pretty solid, the trackpad works well enough though the mouse buttons are kinda stiff. I'm slightly disappointed with the performance of the Geforce GO 7700, granted, i've only really tried out Source games (CS and HL2) and they have the same problem I remember them having with my old setup: No matter what you set the graphics options to, you'll never get a steady framerate.
Quite literally everything on this machine blows my old PC away. I can actually watch HD video now! and watch flash/youtube/gametrailers videos without stutters! I've been using this entirely stationary, hooked up to my Dell 2407, MX518 mouse (the laptop actually came with a rebranded version of it) and my generic $20 laptop-style keyboard. Overall, i'm pretty pleased with my purchase.
I'm more of a sausage smoker myself. - Yoyoson
XBox Live - PSN: SneakinAround - Last.fm - Flickr
I'm thinking of grabbing one of the regular Macbooks probably towards the end of this summer. I plan on using my student discount before I graduate. The one thing holding me back is the 64mb video card, but then again I don't plan on gaming on it.
Oh and check this thing out.
"The pen is mightier than the flaming bag of poop" - Bart Simpson
Xbox Live | Steam | Rockband Profile
Macbook (non-Pro) is integrated video, but more than sufficient all but demanding 3d.
Quake3 runs a treat on it, for instance. Defcon, pretty much most "not excessive 3d" games.
Mystic Violet wrote:
I'm less disappointed about the 7700 Go than I was initially. Source games do run pretty inconsistantly, but I can still squeeze a playable game out at 1680x1050. Most other games run fine. Simcity 4 looks fantastic at 1920x1200 as does Painkiller. Most other games I have tried (Company of Heroes Demo, Oblivion) run well enough at 1280x720. I'm kinda disappointed I can't run all my games at the naitive res of my Dell 2407 (1920x1200) but not too surprised.
Using Vista has been mostly pleasent so far. It took for a little searching to figure out how to properly install Simcity 4 and have it work, theres occassional and what seem to be completely random slowdown issues when doing simple tasks like browsing files. Things I really like are the breadcrumb-style adress bar, integrated quick folder searching, giant icon/thumbnail support, start menu searching, better control panel organization and file indexing for quicker/better searches. Obviously the graphical smoothness is also a welcome addition. I do miss some basic KDE/Gnome things like multiple desktops, multiple taskbars, better organizing of the main "start" menus and tabbed file browsing. Of course I wish they would have finished WinFS, added in an Expose rip-off and also made configuring wireless networks a bit easier to do.
A few other bizzare features of this laptop that I didn't read about before purchasing it: Theres a very small blue OLED display above the F4 and F5 keys. It only works with some custom Asus software which has pretty limited options, either displaying the time/date or display useless scrolling text messages. I'm sure there may be some programs out there made to use this display for something slightly more useful, but I haven't searched around for anything. There are also two green flashers one the sides of the display, one per side. Basically, anytime something uses DirectX, they flash. Ummm....yeah. This is obviously a problem when running Vista because they kind of just don't stop blinking for about 5 minutes and then shut off. They too are controlled by a random piece of Asus software, so they're easily disabled by simply not running the software.
If anyone (GameGuru?) has any Vista software suggestions for an Expose clone or any other cool UI software, i'd appriciate a link.
I'm more of a sausage smoker myself. - Yoyoson
XBox Live - PSN: SneakinAround - Last.fm - Flickr