Topic awaiting preservation: Com'on, let's go Shopping!

I'm in the market for a new laptop. I been scrounging up the pennies for as long as I can remember and the time has finally come.

Basicly, I'm looking for a computer with a really big Hard Drive, yet small and lightweight enough for me to carry it around everywhere (since I don't have a car- think 'in a book bag'). I will be dual-booting between Win2K (Photoshop, IE testing, and the occasional game *cough* Half-Life 2 *cough*) and RedHat8.0 (for everything else) which means at least 10-20Gb. I'm hoping to buy it without an OS installed. I'm looking at 40Gb, but if it has a CD Burner I can probably stay at 10-20. It obviously must have a good record of good compatibility with Linux (no Compaq or HP).

I'n terms of processor I don't ask for much. I'm happy with a PII. I'd love to have one of those AMD Mobile Athlon processors- but that pretty much falls in the same bin as 'I'd like a Ferrari'.

I break out at about $1,000, but I'm pretty confident I can get a good machine for way less than that.

Here are two that I'm looking at...
http://www.jcomlaptops.com/Dell%20LatitudeCPi400BuyPage.htm -I have to call about the HD
http://www.dfsdirectsales.com/dfsdirect/lookup_system.asp?st=Y8H67 -hafta call about winmodems and stuff

If you know of or find something good, let me know!


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[This message has been edited by Petskull (edited 07-02-2003).]

Well the first (and probably the second) won't run HL2, or pretty much any modern game requiring 3D accelaration.

If you want to play games on it you're going to need to get a laptop with either the Nvidia Geforce Go series or the ATI Radeon Mobility series



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

I got a P4 2.4 gig Toshiba Sattelite, 15" screen, 40 gig HD, DVD/CDr, Windows XP Home, at Best Buy for $1050.00. It was a closeout sale though. But you can probably still find something like it around on the internet

Thanks for the links, bit. And TP gave me this one, too. I also spent the morning looking at some VAIOs....

...but, truthfully, I don't really need that much power (I need a lot of RAM!)- I'm a code-head... all I really need to run are text editors and Photoshop and 3DSMax occasionally... HalfLife2 just came to mind as I was typing... I can run that on the desktop...

...I was also thinking I might need good battery efficiency... looking into it..

Stay Tuned..

[This message has been edited by Petskull (edited 07-02-2003).]

nothing beats the pentium m, battery run-time wise, at the moment.

Especially not the P4 Mobile and the Athlon XP Mobile... they suck quite a bit of power.

'pentium m'?

what laptops come with this? anything 'Centrino'?


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I've sold a lot of laptops. Nine times out of ten the customer will come in and say I want a laptop, I want to spend $1000. Unless it's one of my big clients like a partner from a big law firm (biggest tightwads I know) I'll say I'm sorry I can't help you, go to Best Buy. It's easy enough to find a laptop for 1k but I've never sold one and had the client be really pleased with what they got for their money and thats not good for me or them. On the other hand from time to time I get a customer that wants a laptop and has a more realistic budget like $2500. Those are the folks that just love their new toy once they get it.

Now I understand that not everyone can spend $2500 for a laptop, myself included. So my advice to you is this: Either buy a used laptop that will aloow you to run PS, send e-mail and browse the net... thats doesn't take much of a system... perhaps 800mhz processor of your choice, 128MB RAM, 10GB hard drive and a NIC. Or take your $1000 and buy a Nice desktop that will play Half Life 2 and do anything else you want.

This is just my honest advice so please don't take it the wrong way and if you do end up with a thousand dollar laptop I hope your luck is better than most of the people I know with them and it turns out to kick butt.

If you want low cost and good battery use, you might look at laptops with a VIA C3 cpu. This Lindows machine for instance.

What about a refurbished laptop?

__________________________________________
"Art has to be forgotten. Beauty must be realized."
Piet Mondriaan

see, I already *have* a desktop... that's my point- I want a laptop that runs with me when I'm forced to go take a bus..

... so I got to thinking, "what do I do when I'm around?"

I patch code I've written, or write new code, new designs in PS, might like to play with 3DSMax (one of the coolest games)...

Besides PS and ^occasionally^ 3DSMax, I don't do anything with my laptop that's not type and debug code, or maybe write an article for a newsgroup... I don't need a HeavyBox (tm), I need a notebook that edits text.

The most oft-used apps on this computer are EditPad Classic and Mozilla (betcha can't guess why!)... when I'm coding apps, I run Dev-Cpp... My favorite game (and it's runtimes are few and far between) is the old classic 'Red Alert'

So, you see.... my concerns are nowhere *near* "Can this laptop run my programs"... they're more like, "Will I get tired carrying this in my bookbag?", "Can I leave this on for a long time while I ponder this snippet of code?", and "Will I run out of space downloading crap from the 'net?"

Methinks the laptop I'm looking for is in the neighborhood of about $500-$700... but I might splurge for a burner to keep the used disk space down..

ps. nice site, Rins- thanks!

[This message has been edited by Petskull (edited 07-03-2003).]

two cool articles I found:
Guide to cheap laptops
Let's talk about the concept of 'Name Brand' as it applies to laptop computers.


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yes, anything centrino will have a pentium m (and a wlan module... which are handy),
but there are laptops that are not 'centrino' (ie. don't have an *intel* wlan module, they might have a different one),
but still got a Pentium M in them.
A pentium M runs at about a 1000ghz less than a usual p4, is still faster, and uses a lot(!) less power.

Now, If I wanted to get a laptop for coding, and I'd carry it in a bookbag, I'd buy a real keyboard for it. All laptop keyboards are worse than a really good
'usual sized' external keyboard.

then, I'd get the biggest and best display I could find for my money.


oh, and winmodems + linux -> usually no go.

...and the winner is...

Wow, this has to be a 180 on what I said I wanted, but I saw what it had for the price and got hypnotized


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
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Nice machine

__________________________________________
"Art has to be forgotten. Beauty must be realized."
Piet Mondriaan

...it should arrive Sunday or Monday (probably Monday).. I'm planning to type up the specs, my initial impressions, document the instalation of RedHat and all that good stuff..

Stay Tuned...


Code - CGI - links - DHTML - Javascript - Perl - programming - Magic - http://www.twistedport.com
ICQ: 67751342

well, it's got a half-way decent graphics adapter ;-)

I got a Dell Inspion 8200: Pentium 4, 512 ram (1024megs soon), Mobilty Radeon 9000, 2 swappable 60 gig hard disks, 2.4 mghz, 15.1 plasma display, XP Professional. It can handle absolutly any game I throw at it superbly, and Sudio Max, Lightwave etc.

But er...it cost a bit more than $1000..

http://www.refurbished-laptops-and-cheap-laptop-reviews.com/ <-- there'd be no mis conceptions about what that site was about now would there?