7 replies to this topic

[maineman]

Our House "work hourse' laptop plug-in died. On or near the motherboard. A perfectly adeuqate off-the-shelf HP, New in 2003. 15 inch, Windows XP, played DVDs, (and copied). It was fat and heavy, but always worked. NO, none, nada, zilch problems.Could bring it to the medical office and run everything when office computer maintenance took place. Kids watched movies in the car and airplane. 7 year old bangs away a few games is already surfing stuffed-animal vitrual room sites. Anyway, fixiing the plug will take 80 to 800 dollars (depending on whether it needs a new motherboard). It will 2-4 weeks to get the estimate. I took it Best Buy's "Geek Squad". they seem nice and recently turned aruond anothe office comp problem within a week, at a fair price. So I thought I'd look for a new laptop . We take digital stills. Rarely movies. Hardly ever. Watch DVDs on car/plane trips. Read a LOT on the web, check email.Take it to bed and read NY times, etc... I word process a lot for all my articles. Dizzying array of choices out there today: Looking at Intel Core 2 duo. FSB 667 2 GIG 120 to 160 HD. upgrade to extra graphics, like 256 15 inch wxga HD screens. Here's questions: Need Bluetooth? How much, what? Need to "upgrade" the standard Wif Fi? DO I need N-wifii? Ist Lite scribe really used/helpful? Are the built in web cams good enought for SKYPE? And what's up with TV cards. Is anyone hooking up thier laptops to the TV? Are you recording shows? Some of the H-P laptops in the 1500 dollar range have all this and have some neat "remote controls" and other liltte do dads. The SONYs in that lne are comparable, Close. A MacBook Pro at 15 inches with 2 and 120 HD costs 2500. A thousand bucks more. And, as far as I can tell, no TV turner. Probably a lot of ideas out therre. Any advice? Bad experiences? PS. Does any bodyr really use PVR to record TV shows? Is it easy? thanks, mm

[sjj]

Best of luck. Just been through the drill like most eveyone else. I always look for all the do-dads offered and always end up paying half as much for a good basic model and adding my own RAM. I've real happy buying year old technology twice as often

[Curt]

Just a 2 cent addition: A laptop that's broke but loaded with features is worse than the old anchor IMHO. The number 1 feature for me is: reliability (ruggedness) and service when it does break. A great piece of advice; when you buy your new gun slinger, also buy a spare replacement disk and external carrier. Buy a disaster recovery application and weekly backup your laptop to the idendical disk drive in an external carrier. My favorite imaging application is: acronis true image. acronis.com. You don't want to be white faced blood draining feeling when your laptop doesn't boot and it's a crashed hard drive. I wish for a few more features but I bought a Dell latitude series (business grade) with a 4 yr extended warranty. I'm not fond of sony laptops due to way too much bloatware, time bombware. Find blogs/boards that discuss laptops and find what they say about your choices!!!! Good luck, curt

[TTHQ Staff]

I have one word for bluetooth on laptops. buggy.

[maineman]

Thanks. It is way more confusing than it needs to be. Must be some marketing strategy..."confuse and conquer" or something like that. I read the CNET reviews, but I can't help feeling they are a little biased. They "kind of" like everything. In speed, battery power and transfer rate tests it seems the Mac book or the Mac Book pro win hands down. But you pay quite a bit more for that. I've decided to place a ring of burining coals in the snow in the back yard and draw the ancient celtic rune for "laptop" and wait for a sign from Olaf, the wise. mm

[qqqqtrdr]

Laptops are confusing. It is tough to beat Lenovo Thinkpads in terms of quality and durability. This is why it is preferred by most fortune 500 companies. Thinkpads lack widescreen speakers, but have two ways to move cursors and have stability control. Buying a year old laptop for half price is the way to go. New laptops have Vista, but are not really powerful enough to do Vista justice. If you care about highend graphics, try alienware. They make some killer laptops, but you pay for speed. I own a IBM Thinkpad 41. They run about $350 used and does a good job for occasional use. Barry

[OEXCHAOS]

I have to say that I'm beginning to like vista on the low end acer. I'm looking for more ram, but it's still pretty nice and pretty stable. Mark

[arbman]

I have used dell and toshiba laptops, they are pretty reliable, I didn't buy the most expensive with the biggest screen, not only they are pricy, but also heavy. Instead, I went with the medium models with a variety of good options. I don't upgrade every year (but about every 2-3 yrs), so I paid for them probably a bit the premium price. Dell has a better service, Toshiba seems to offer a bit more extras or better packages. My laptops have about 3-4 USB plugs on them, that's probably one of the more useful stuff and they also have the new generation pc-card connections in case you want fast external peripherals. A friend of mine was very pleased with an ASUS laptop recently, they are a primary motherboard manufacturer who started to also sell the fully built laptops. All of the laptops now come with the newer core duo 2 and geforce graphics chips, so I am not sure that's an issue really. I used the bluetooth with my cell phone until I found out that I could also plug it with an USB cable so that I can also charge it with a faster connection. I use wireless G-network with my cell phone all the time where available (about 700kbps download, 300-400kbps download). So, I don't use the bluetooth device anymore. My car can connect with the bluetooth device in my laptop, I don't know what's the real use for this though and I don't know where else I would use the bluetooth device and you can always buy an external bluetooth device (like an ASUS) that connects to the USB ports (20-30bucks) if you really need it... - kisa