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Shopping for a laptop

btfarm

btfarm

America First!
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Looking for suggestions. I want to replace our old desktop with a laptop that has similar capabilities. I'm not a gamer but if I want to move a couple of hundred songs, books or a few movies from 1 device to another, I don't want to wait 15-20 minutes. Storage size isn't a huge issue because I put most everything on an 8gb stick and/or a 1tb portable. Not sure if I'll benefit from a touchscreen feature. I wouldn't want to be too much old school though because I'd want to have this for several years. I'm thinking a $500 target top would be reasonable but maybe I wouldn't need that much.
All suggestions welcome. I believe I smay be able to get a pretty good deal around black friday online from amazon.
 
With the influx of touch screen tablets, you can score some deals on the 'traditional' laptop PC. Trouble is I'm too far out of the loop to make a good suggestion. :dunno:
 
Toshiba is a good brand. HP business class is ok. Get Windows 7. If you get Windows 8 and have a problem most good techs will either charge you more tell you to go elsewhere as they have better things to do than to deal with Microsoft's Hide and Go seek edition. Windows 8 is so bad they told Steve Ballmer to hit the door and it is going to take him nearly a year to be able to find it. :mad2:

If all else fails go to HP's website and look for a business class laptop that is available with Windows 7 Ultimate. Consumer stuff may all be Windows 8 and thus garbage as you are better off with a phone. Least a phone will make a call eventually.

I recommend spending the extra money on a 128 or 256MB SSD drive for the laptop. (Solid State Disk) Not only are they faster like a 400 HP Duramax vs. a V-6 gasser -They are not fragile like the mechanical drives that get beat up and fail in a laptop. Intel and Crucial are top of the line. Cheaper SSD drives and specifically OCZ branded stuff is pure s#it. (50 of 50 OCZ drives failed on us in under 1 year of use.) Buy the SATA SSD separately from the laptop then just make the recovery DVD's swap the SSD drive in and run a restore/recovery. Cheaper than getting one unknown pre-installed from the major vendors.

Make sure you get at least a 1 year warranty... You really don't want to get the cheaper 90 day warranty units. Better if you get a 3 year warranty unit.

I run a $400 Intel I3 Toshiba special with a 128MB SSD Crucial drive for around $500. The slowest part/bottleneck in a PC is the mechanical drive. With a fast SSD HDD the cheap laptop gets out of it's own way. I would go so far as to call it fast. Only a better CPU and more ram would make it faster.
 
I'm in agreement on W7 without a doubt. I like the idea of an SSD but looks like that will add a considerable cost I don't have a budget for. As to installing the drive myself, not so sure about going that route with zero experience. I lean towards Toshiba as well but with SSD I'm seeing $700+ up to 2 grand. Hard to justify with limited use. My main browser use is Chromebook and S3 phone and some tablet stuff. Big laptop is for management.
On edit: I see the SSD drive is about 100 bucks. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CCEH51Y/?tag=jhuntlink-20
 
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I definitely agree with Windows 7. Check places like TigerDirect, a buddy of mine just got a nice HP with Win 7 from there at a really good deal.
 
Toshiba makes a decent product but I still can't bring myself to buy their products. After they sold the technology for the propellers on our submarines to the Soviets in the 80's I blacklisted them and still avoid them. I've been happy with HP and Dell and one of my laptops is an Acer that I got from Costco and it hasn't skipped a beat. I've drug the Acer all over the world (it's loaded to the hilt with music and videos). On the other hand, I bought an Acer on sale at a department store (for my wife because she needed a laptop with a numeric keypad and large screen for classes she teaches) and the hard drive took a dump about two months after the warranty went away. We have an office supply store here that has a repair department and if you buy the new hard drive from them they'll install it for free and get you back up and running, so that worked out fine. Costco's claim that they spec. their purchases with better components might just be accurate. I've been watching SSD's and they're coming down a bit while adding storage, so will probably make that jump shortly.
 
Dell consumer is India support and very bad. Business with the Pro American staffed Support is decent. (Extra Cost option.) Not sure what American company hasn't sold us or our jobs out for something. Even IBM was following the money in WWII. Most of it is made in Communist China anyway. Some Business class Dell's are Ireland or Mexico. Intel chips are made in the USA with final assembly elsewhere.

Gateway is in bad shape so watch what you step in. They made their customers eat a bad battery design as they couldn't afford to recall the laptops. It would cook the batteries and no one made replacements.

Sony PC's I flat hate and their support is arrogant at best.

Maybe a desktop is the way to go vs a laptop? Cheaper and easier to fix.
 
Right now I'm in the following mode of shopping.
W7 OS
14-15" screen
6gb Min RAM (not sure 4gb isn't enough but I'm being told I REALLY should go 8gb)
SSD (definately not OCZ per everybody)
500gb memory
Other specs open to suggestion
Leaning Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, maybe ASUS. No Dell consumer or Sony
 
Lenovo ThinkPad gets my vote. I'm partial to business laptops and the options you can configure them with.
 
256 GB SSD (as larger is expensive) and 6-8 GB Ram. Lenovo ThinkPad is China owned - nothing like going to the source without the middleman... But they are decent. Not dealt with their support enough to comment. Put the extra data on at least 2 external HDD's as one is always dropping dead for one reason or another. So data in at least two or 3 places...
 
BTW, I have a Panasonic Toughbook with Windows 7 that I bought at an auction and it's fantastic, though a bit heavy and bulky. It had been a state police computer (New Hampshire, I think it said) that was in a van that was set up for jump scales and wasn't used much. Pretty much lived in the padded case. I'd never pay the $4800.00 this setup listed for but wanted something cheap to load Alex Peper's OBD-2 software on so I could do diagnostics on Duramax's. I bid $75.00 on propertyroom.com and got it so if you don't find something in a black Friday sale that might be another option to check.
 
Pulling the trigger on this deal. Will bump up the RAM to 8gb and install an SSD. Then go to W8.1 and it'll be a great tool for under $550

Sent from my SCH-I535
 
btfarm said:
Pulling the trigger on this deal. Will bump up the RAM to 8gb and install an SSD. Then go to W8.1 and it'll be a great tool for under $550

Sent from my SCH-I535
Click to expand...



Sent from my SCH-I535

Edit: Sold out... Didn't get the order done in time... :mad2:
 

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Sounds like a great plan to me. It's amazing how much computer you're getting for that price! My first home computer was a Tandy 100SX back in late 86. Used two 5 1/4 floppies and ran MS-DOS. It was twice what your end cost was by the time I bought a color monitor and a color graphics card to run the monitor and that was 1986 dollars. After about a year I stuck a 20 meg hard drive card in it and thought I had died and went to heaven - didn't think I'd ever fill it. Couldn't even open a web page with 20 meg now. I really like the idea of the SSD too. The only thing I haven't been able to figure out is how well you can wipe files from it. Right now I use ccleaner and do a secure wipe when I have stuff I don't want recoverable, like my tax info after I finish my taxes. The secure wipe does a DoD level clean where it does multiple overwrites to the space so that it has been overwritten enough times that even the NSA can't recover it. I haven't found anyone familiar enough with SSDs to be able to tell me if the same things works on them, though it would seem it would. Just want to know for sure.
 
I missed the deal online but a new one will come along soon. Of that I'm sure. I did see the same one at 8gb already for $125 more so may go that route.
 
Pulled the trigger on THIS cyber monday deal today. $373 savings on my doorstep. Only thing missing is the SSD and that would be easy to take care of.
 
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