Help -Jrabbit buy his first PC laptop!

[-Jrabbit]

OK, it's finally happening. It has become clear that in the next stage of my life, I will be needing a PC laptop. I love my Apples, but this is business. And what better place than Poly to troll for advice.

I'm looking for a best-deal scenario -- not the superpower slicer/dicer model, but rather the killer value proposition. Need to know whether I should be looking for prebundled software or doing that separate. What companies are notiously strong and weak on aftersale support. that sort of thing.

Requirements:

Portable. Centrino preferred (good experiences) but will consider anything stable and recommended, that won't be outmoded in a matter of months.

Is 512 MB RAM enough? Is 256 MB sufficient? What's up with processor speeds these days?

Gonna hook to the Web via wireless to my cable modem. Hints and tips welcome.

Everything seems to have built-in wifi. This sounds cool, but does anyone actually use it? Should I just disregard this, or are there key features I should be watching for?

Must be able to burn data discs. Playing DVDs would be nice, esp when I travel.

I wanna run winXP. Home version should be sufficient from what I know. Any known issues?

Other software: standard stuff. MS Office suite a must, plus PhotoShop, maybe some basic graphical and sitebuilding tools. I'lll be loading some games, but unlikely to be doing anything very intense in that regard.

Recommended brands? In my corporate life, I was always on a ThinkPad and had good luck with them, but from my new perspective, they look overpriced. Sony Vaio looks sexy but seems similarly pricey. Should I be looking at Dell? HP? Gateway? Other?

I assume I can share my USB printer with the Mac -- it's an Epson CX6400.

what processors should I be targeting/avoiding?

what websites offer dependable advice?

Laptop + software -- what should I expect to spend?

Thx for any help yoy can offer.

[Q Classic]

https://www.ibuypower.com

https://www.ibm.com

https://www.toshiba.com

If you get centrino, make sure it's centrino/sonoma. that includes built-in wireless. the sonoma part just means that it's the new, updated centrino version; centrino includes both the wireless and the processor. often times, places will just have the pentium m processor, and some other wireless card--that is NOT centrino.

512 is enough, better than 256, if you're going to want to make it last. honestly, you can never go wrong with too much ram, though there's a point where it becomes an excessive cost for your purposes. such as: while it's not wrong, per se, for your laptop to have 2gb of ram, most people will never need that much. it's doubtful you will.

i would still suggest 512+, instead of 256.

most laptops these days will have cd-rw/dvd combo drives.

i'd avoid dell laptops, mostly because the newer, lighter ones tend to have heat dissipation issues. i've never liked gateway or hp, partly because both of them seem to take shortcuts in their design and manufacture.

the software will set you back quite a bit. while xp will come pre-installed on your laptop, and office just might, photoshop will not. that's 200 at least, right there.

depending on what your laptop will be doing, you could get away with spending as little as 1000 on it.

[Q Classic]

we should have a goddamn sticky thread, what with all the requests about laptops.

[-Jrabbit]

Thx Q Cubed.

Interesting. Went to ComUSA today, was told HP was the way to go. Vaio also favorably mentioned. Of course, the salesdude was pushing for 1024GB RAM and 100GB drive as basic necessities for a biz machine.

Was also told that prebundled Office is a thing of the past, that I could expect "probably Norton, not much else" along with "some version of XP."

He said to expect to pay $1000-1400 for hardware, another $1000 for software, plus a few hundred to get my 3 machines (the new laptop and 2 Macs) networked into my comcast cable modem. Is this out of line?

[Asher]

Please don't listen to CompUSA salespeople. They're totally unqualified.

[Pekka]

HP is not the way to go. Go with IBM. Hell, you're better off with Apple than HP. That, and Toshiba seems to be what people recommend even though I won't recommend you Toshiba laptops. No way.

[Agathon]

Why not just buy a copy of Virtual PC?

[duke o' york]

Mine's a Dell Inspiron 5150, with extra memory and DVD rewrite drive. Oh, and Civ 2 looks great on it, because that's all that matters really.

[-Jrabbit]

Originally posted by Agathon
Why not just buy a copy of Virtual PC?

Because I'm going freelance and most potential clients want to have confidence when exchanging files.

It's just how things are done in the business world. When I show up for a client meeting, packing an iBook could create issues. I don't need that.

[-Jrabbit]

Originally posted by Asher
Please don't listen to CompUSA salespeople. They're totally unqualified.

Well, you gotta go somewhere to touch the machines, and once you do that, you gotta deal with the sales dude.

Your opinion on the questions posed would be most welcome, Asher. I already know CompUSA's reputation. What I don't know is where I should go.

[Q Classic]

Honestly, I don't think you need to go anywhere. IBM and IBuyPower are both inet shops, and they're just fine and dandy.

[Urban Ranger]

Do not get the Sony Vaio notebooks. They are overpriced, problematic heaps of junk.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Q Cubed
Honestly, I don't think you need to go anywhere. IBM and IBuyPower are both inet shops, and they're just fine and dandy.

Perhaps -jrabbit wants to get his hands on the machines to get a feel...

[Q Classic]

Well, go someplace to get a feel for them, but for chrissakes, don't buy them there.

[Urban Ranger]

Re: Help -Jrabbit buy his first PC laptop!

Originally posted by -Jrabbit
Other software: standard stuff. MS Office suite a must, plus PhotoShop, maybe some basic graphical and sitebuilding tools. I'lll be loading some games, but unlikely to be doing anything very intense in that regard.

Maybe you could take a look at OpenOffice.org, which is a free open source replacement for MS Office. The price is sweet (free), and it does most of what you want to do. It doesn't have the full capabilities of, say, Office 2000, but I don't think 99% of the users will ever require that. In fact, I suspect OpenOffice.org has more features than the average user will ever need already. The PDF generator is very awesome.

The new beta version, which is quite stable, has an Access replacement. Though if you don't need a lightweight database the stable version is probably all you need.

As for PhotoShop, you could try GIMP out to see if you like it. It's also free. While it is nowhere up to the power of PhotoShop, again I have been using it and it can probably do most of the things you need to do. Cinepaint is in the same league.

For building websites there are some excellent FOSS tools around. Browse around Sourceforge to see if there is anything you like.