Laptop Hunting

[Neballer]

Now that I am a full time employee at my job, they're going to buy me a laptop.
Problem is I don't know where to start. All I now is that it needs to be a PC and it needs to be pancaking bad-ass.

Any Ideas.

[Toxic Culture]

I'd recommend buying a cheap PC then setting fire to it... then get a apple powerbook- definitely the most 'bad-ass' laptop you can get

[Neballer]

Thank you Toxic for your most original, and eye opening advice - now if you'll let me get back to what I was doing...

http://www.angelsoftheweek.com/carp/BD/beat.gif

[reuber1]

Nebs, I've had a Toshiba Satellite for about 3 years, and despite a much needed RAM upgrade (I went from 512 MB to 1.5 GB recently), it's held up rather well.

The more RAM the better, as you can never have enough (well, in a laptop you can get capped at a low amount.).

I'm not a graphics card hound so I really couldn't tell you what to look for there.

[Neballer]

I have heard good things about Toshibas - my friend's dad built him one that he's had for awhile now. His dad works for C-gate if that means anything.

[longboy]

Tag. Another designer here looking at a PC laptop. Only restrictions my company has, is that it can be ordered from CDW.com and most likely will be a Lenovo/IBM flavor.

[MyST]

What's the budget?

At work they got some Dell portable Workstations for the CAD/CAM dept.

I looked around on the net and nothing within a reasonable price could come close.
A non-gaming video card to start with and pretty powerful.
Look online and it's the M90 Precision Portable Workstation.

hope this helps.

[Neballer]

just under $2000 I think.

Thanks MyST

[MyST]

The M6300 Enhanced with an extra gig of RAM (for a total of 2) comes in at $1999.
It comes with XP Professional, which is good.
It only has an 80gig hard drive, but then I would suggest you ask your boss for an external hard drive anyways.

Newegg.com has great deals on computer stuff, but I haven't looked there.

Like I said, the good thing about the Dell is the worstation-type graphics card that is made for CAD/3D.

Good luck.

[DesignerScott]

Here's my honest suggestion as a designer.
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/cdetupdate.to?seg=HHO&poid=367610&cartAction=Add&coid=-30603&selcmpcodpipcrt=&qtycrt=0&lincrt=0&hasXSells=true&hasXSells=true&parentPage=cdet&selxslpoidtab1pip=&selxslpoidtab2pip=&fromTab=tabcfg&COMP_CPU=CPU-0190&COMP_Operating+System=OS-0077&COMP_Office+Software=APP-0025&COMP_Memory=MEM-0061&COMP_LCD=LCD-0023&COMP_Graphics+Controller=GFX-0032&COMP_HDD=HDD-0042&COMP_Optical+Media=SBAY-0027&COMP_Mini-PCI%2FWiFi=COM1-0026&COMP_Bluetooth=COM2-0005&COMP_Expansion+Bay=IDENT-0002&COMP_Battery=BAT-0001&COMP_Standard+Warranty=WARR-0001

[MyST]

DS... wouldn't the 12" screen be small to work with?

[DesignerScott]

Not for me personally. The high resolution allows more to be displayed and also helps with the tablet side of things. If you do need more space you can hook it up to an external monitor at home and work. Might bother some people, but I like the portability and small icons and text don't bother me. I actually prefer the high pixel per inch ratio better that way, it seems more like print to me.

[Mynock]

Finished with school Nebs?

[Neballer]

sure is.
and it will be an 80 degree Minnesota day in February before I go back again :D

[Akanik]

Thought I would piggyback on this thread, forgive me.

I'm a student looking for a PC laptop as well. I was going to purchase the HP DV6500Z with a 128mb dedicated graphics card, but I've read that the screen has poor contrast.

This brings me to my laptop concern:

Anyone know any laptops that don't look like bricks, for under $1000 that have screens that will be sufficient for design work? I'm not worried about having a multimedia powerhouse, just enough to run flash/photoshop and indesign applications. I'll likely get 2 gigs of ram and a dual core 2ghz processor.

But yeah, the screen is worrying me. If the contrast or color is bad, then the whole computer is worthless to me. The quality of the screen is one of the only reasons I'm considering buying a MAC. They have nice screens, but are also smaller, less equipped and much more expensive.

Thanks in advance, I'm dying here!

[Craig B]

Nebs, even though I'm a Mac person, my brother worked for Microsoft for about 15 years and he swears by the reliability of Toshiba laptops. It's all he's ever had and he's also a hard core programmer and gamer and they always seem to work well for him. That's my 2 cents.

[mojoprime]

akanik, actually the mac laptops are quite competitive, when you look at the processor in them and compare to equivalent windows machines.

but that argument is so dead and bloated, it's not worth having.

have you looked at the dell machines? if you gotta have a PC, it might be worth going through their college store.

[Akanik]

I've checked the standard offerings from HP, Dell, Gateway, Toshiba, but they all have something that makes me angry. They won't offer a 7400 rpm hard drive selection, list the speed of their ram, they won't give you the option of having a dedicated graphics card (or won't even list if it is dedicated or integrated at all). Things that are pretty freaking important.

HP was stylish and straight forward, but the screen issue is sucky.

$1,100 Macbook (almost $1,300 with 2 gig ram)
2.0 ghz core2duo, 80gig HD (5400), 1gig ram 13inch display

$888 HP DV6500Z gets (under $1k with 2 gig ram)
Same processor, same ram, same HD and a 2" larger display
with dedicated 128mb nvidia graphics 8400m gs

So is a better, smaller screen and a new OS worth $220 more?

I was really trying to clock in under $1,000 instead of spending more than I anticipated on less hardware (save monitor consideration). Plus I don't like the idea of a 13 inch screen. I've seen the mac books and they are small.

Damn you HP for chincing on the screen of an otherwise great laptop.

=(

[mojoprime]

actually, that would be 7200rpm. and I'm seeing AMD chips for that HP, not the Core2Duo from Intel. a minor thing that's probably rendered moot by the better graphics card in the HP vs. the integrated graphics on the MacBook. but the C2D has 4x the cache too, so...

but it all comes down to choice. do you already have windows software? stick with the windows machine. is it an Ok machine? looks like it, but no stock laptop -- and make no mistake, no matter how you're customizing it this is still a consumer machine -- is going to be a desktop replacement machine. not for under $1000. so don't expect to render 3D or to do cartwheels while you're running Q4 or half-life or whatever.

and harddrives are getting cheaper to buy. almost worth it to get the cheapo one it comes with and then replace it yourself.