Need a new laptop

MdSalih

The Boss
Joined
2 Dec 2001
Messages
1,730
Need to get myself a new portable machine - mostly for uni life. Will be planning to use it for programming/gaming/write-ups the usual etc. - will be my main computer for the next year or so, so needs to be fairly powerful.

Been looking at the Sony Vaio Laptops - and really liking them, well designed aesthetically and techincally. However I'm not too fond of the price tags :p

Basic Specs I'm looking for are:

Pentium-M 1.6 or higher (heard Pent-M's are really good ?)
512 MB RAM (Preferably 1024MB)
Roughly 80GB Hard Drive
Around 15" monitor
Decent GFX card with at least 128 dedicated memory
Wifi (naturally) and bluetooth built in.
And the usual other fixtures and fittings i.e. Firewire/Modem/Network/USB 2

Looking to grab a machine like this somewhere in the UK (or shipped to UK)- Not too sure about many places which do good deals on laptops.

Anyone have any idea of some places which would do a good deal for a system similar to that?

MdSalih
 
I'd recommend an iBook, but I don't think you'd go for it :p .... so *does the Dell dance*.

I've always found Vaio's to be way overpriced, you really do pay for the brand name with Sony stuff.
 
Not sure how you want to pay for one first, but if you spend over £1,501.00 on Finance (i.e. on credit) then maybe you'd want to look at SonyStyle.co.uk coz they can offer you 24 months 0% interest which you can pay off in 24 equal amounts. :)

On the machine side, I only know of the S-series that offers bluetooth and wifi together, but they only come in 13.3" screens as far as I recall.

As Speedy and others have mentioned, Vaio's are overpriced, but that's not stopping me from getting my next laptop as a Vaio. :p
I really love the design of those babies. Was looking to get the S3XP/S4XP at one point 'til I heard that Windows Longhorn/VISTA is due to come out within the next one or two years. I'm now definitely going to wait for the new OS to be pre-installed before I get my next laptop.
 
try looking at the sager laptops they're excellent for gaming, some guy in my class had one it looks pretty cool, but the prices are high on them i think :S
 
MdSalih said:
Need to get myself a new portable machine - mostly for uni life. Will be planning to use it for programming/gaming/write-ups the usual etc. - will be my main computer for the next year or so, so needs to be fairly powerful.

Been looking at the Sony Vaio Laptops - and really liking them, well designed aesthetically and techincally. However I'm not too fond of the price tags :p

Basic Specs I'm looking for are:

Pentium-M 1.6 or higher (heard Pent-M's are really good ?)
512 MB RAM (Preferably 1024MB)
Roughly 80GB Hard Drive
Around 15" monitor
Decent GFX card with at least 128 dedicated memory
Wifi (naturally) and bluetooth built in.
And the usual other fixtures and fittings i.e. Firewire/Modem/Network/USB 2

Looking to grab a machine like this somewhere in the UK (or shipped to UK)- Not too sure about many places which do good deals on laptops.

Anyone have any idea of some places which would do a good deal for a system similar to that?

MdSalih

Latitude 810 or Inspiron 6000D would be good options.
 
yup first one is an hp compaq, stay away from them, and for anyone that will start to flame about that dont, because my dads company only deals with them so i have about 10 years experiance with compaq, and its utter crap
 
Yup, compaq is well known for it's crapness.. but all the same, thats a pretty good offer.

The dell deals - once customised to anything vagely to what i know goes well over budget :(

MdSalih
 
MdSalih said:
The dell deals - once customised to anything vagely to what i know goes well over budget :(
Yeah, I thought that would end up being a problem, at least with the D810. If only you were here in the US...you'd be able to use all those crazy coupon code deals. :ermm:
 
This might or might not apply to laptops. But we used to have a fair number of Compaqs (the Proliant server boxes) and Gateways in the networking lab. They've since been upgraded with Dells largely.

Anyhow, as to Compaq and Gateway, perhaps Compaq is a bit better then Gateway, but they still had some issues. The other thing (and this is where laptops might not apply unless one really wants to try servicing one); they tended to do non-conventional things which made hardware replacement nuts. For instance, when a floppy drive went bad on one and we needed to get Novell installed on it for a class lab, they didn't have a seperate floppy connector. It came off the IDE cable, and what's more their floppy had a square plug in some pins (that on a normal floppy aren't plugged. The whole thing was setup so the cable wouldn't fit into a standard floppy drive.

Now where it might effect one, only they would have the parts to service it.

As to the Gateways, cheap arse keyboards that didn't last more then 6 months, a roomate of mine kept getting a dud CD drive (with his Gateway) which got replaced with another dud. Incidently he borrowed my game CDs, which didn't come back as I lent them out...how I got the scoop on the stupid drive.

In the lab, we had several (in this case the Gateways) that had so many issues the teacher was talking about painting it black and putting it out on interstate 40 1 night :laugh: He mentioned it a lot.

After a coupla labs full of those boxes, they wouldn't be my first choice for recommendation, if that means anything in the laptop arena.
 
I've heard that HP's business line (which includes the NX8220 mentioned above) tends to be significantly better than their "home user" line of machines. I can't personally vouch for them since I haven't owned any, but the NX8220 does have a nice screen resolution and good specs. The Acer looks pretty good too, and I haven't heard too many horror stories about Acer as a brand in general.
 
NetRyder said:
Yeah, I thought that would end up being a problem, at least with the D810. If only you were here in the US...you'd be able to use all those crazy coupon code deals. :ermm:

if only :-(

MdSalih
 
You can still use the coupons.

They just won't apply or save you anything

:cool:
 
Second that :p - I've been looking for a used laptop for quite some time!

Like vultures!
 
We just got a bunch of new HP/Compaq business machines at work. I got to listen to the IT guy bitch about how many they have had to replace already. MB failures are damaging the HD and RAM.
 
Sazar said:
You can still use the coupons.

They just won't apply or save you anything

:cool:
Heh. See if you can hook him up with a good deal. :D
 

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