Thread: Laptop

Better brands IMHO are Toshiba, Asus, IBM/Lenovo, HP. I personally avoid Ac3R and D3ll whatever you buy get an extended warranty and plenty of memory.
People often say buy the cheapest and get a good warranty but remember when its being fixed you cant use it I have seen this take close to months out of the first 12 months of thier life.

Originally Posted by Bushie

My eldest daughter is looking at a laptop for tech next year, what are the better brands around to give us a starting point.


Martyn

How old is she? My advice would be to buy second hand if all you need is MS Office and email. Once the excitment dies away you can look at something flash.

Go with what she knows and depending on what she is studying a particular brand or Operating System may suit better. I.E I use a Macintosh for somethings and I think they are the best system for everything except gaming but I use a Microsoft windows system for other things like games but it doesn't sound like she needs games.

As one other said The more memory the better... get a minimum of 1 gig ram and more if you can spare the cash and a good size hard drive. As for processor.... it is difficult. If it is general word processing it doesn't need to be fast but any basic graphic design or imagery usage and you'll be looking at the possibility of what they call dual core system (they don't really cost much more so don't worry)

battery life is also important (usually). and if she is on a train/bus she may like a dvd player for a long trip to quell some boredom but that's a usual inclusion now anyway.

I agree about Toshiba and ASUS but 3 friends recently had big probs with over heating with Toshiba's and the prob with that is it can cook your hard ware hence lose everything.

Good brands are without a doubt

macintosh,
phillips (expensive),
ASUS,
Toshiba (with teething problems i think but nothing which can't be dealt with), IBM's are the bees knees and
Sony vaios (big premium but great machine)

Originally Posted by Bushie

My eldest daughter is looking at a laptop for tech next year, what are the better brands around to give us a starting point.


Martyn

I just got new "ASUS Mobilite", Celeron 1.8 dual core wireless DVD burner and all the stuff accept for bluetooth & 1GB ram. I got it on special for $750 with no operating system (i already had XP PRO), iam very impressed with the performance so far (only had it a week).

I got mine through Colonial Soft Computers in Brisbane, you could probably contact them to see if they can give you a contact for where you are.
Geoff or Krystal
PH 07 38513119

Get her an apple, you wont regret it

http://www.apple.com/au/macbook/macbook.html

If for some crazy reason you want to run Windows applications then you can do, but there are plenty of better apps out there for the mac which will open and save word documents and things like that.

The best thing about it ? you don't need a computer on par with Nasa's command centre to run Vista. Software is dirt cheap and its just better, for $1600 you will have a more powerful notebook than most of the others out on the market.

I'd go cheap, forget about the extended warrantee and spend the extra money on a good external back up.

If she's taking it to uni every day it's going to cop a huge beating and likely to be pinched, too.

Extended warrantee is great, if you're spending a couple of thousand. If you buy a $600 laptop, and there seem to be plenty of them around, the extended warrantee is going to cost a signifcant percentage of the hardware.

In eighteen months a cheap laptop or an expensive laptop are probably going to be toast, if you go the cheapie you've still got money to replace/upgrade.

Not much point going second hand when new is so cheap.

Remember that it's the data that is important, not the hardware.

Cheers
Simon

Just get a mac. No viruses...spyware... and most things work **really** well.

Originally Posted by duncanw

Get her an apple, you wont regret it

Apple - MacBook

If for some crazy reason you want to run Windows applications then you can do, but there are plenty of better apps out there for the mac which will open and save word documents and things like that.

The best thing about it ? you don't need a computer on par with Nasa's command centre to run Vista. Software is dirt cheap and its just better, for $1600 you will have a more powerful notebook than most of the others out on the market.

That's for sure!