Help Evan pick out a laptop

evanft

evanft

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So I'm in the market for a laptop. Here's what I'm looking for:

- Mostly going to be used for Office 2007 work, email, internet, and light gaming.

- Hard drive doesn't have to be too big. Most seem to come with at least 160 GB. That should be fine. I'll probably be using Daemon Tools to copy my games to it so I don't have to lug around a CD wallet, so it may actually be advantageous to have 250 GB. I won't be using it for music, as I don't have an MP3 player, but I could just buy an external hard drive if I ever did.

- A good brand with a solid reputation would be nice, but I probably wouldn't pay a big premium for it. As long as the warranty is decent enough, I should be fine. I'll just always be careful to back up my files.

- More RAM would be good, but I've heard that the problems people have with Vista and laptops has more to do with bloatware and not switching off many of Vista's uneccesary bells and whistles. Plus, I'm pretty sure that you need a 64-bit version of Vista to actually use more than 2.8 GB, and I doubt a laptop in my budget would be bundled with that and I'm not willing to pay for it.

- Would like to be able to do some light gaming. Nothing major like Crysis or anything, but I'd love to be able to play the Orange Box and have it look better than the 360 version, so maybe Half Life 2 could be used as a benchmark. I can't imagine that would require too much power, as I probably wouldn't be playing on the highest settings with HDR and what not. Most of the gaming I would be doing would be with older games I missed out on, like the Thief games, Deus Ex, Fallout 1 and 2, System Shock 2 (I'm assuming everything runs in Vista, of course, so let's avoid that whole discussion). I'll also be getting into Morrowind due to the massive number of mods, and perhaps Oblivion.


Budget: $500

I was taking a very hard look at that Acer laptop Newegg currently has on sale for like $466. It looks like it could mostly handle what I want and it's right in my budget. Any thoughts?
 
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At the $500 price point, you are going to be looking at systems that have on-board shared memory graphic processors which are pretty much going to suck at playing just about everything. You'll be able to play some of those games you mentioned but don't expect them to run well. I wouldn't plan on playing Oblivion at all.

I would suggest just sticking with consoles for gaming unless you want to spend a bit more on a PC.
 
I was reading the post and was wondering why it sounds so familiar, then I realized your post was at notebookreview.com fourm.

I don't have a suggestion for a laptop around $500. The one you found seems to be okay, but I'm not a techie. I'm currently trying to save up for the HP dv5t with the 512MB 9600 GT. It's $800+, depending on the configuration and coupons HP currently are running. They had a 30% off one last time, and now they have a $250 off coupon.
 
orange-laptop-768474.jpg
 
The Gateway M-6862 is a great laptop for a little over $500 if you get it on eBay with Live Search Cashback. There used to be tons of them since it was on clearance at Best Buy and all the hoarders snatched them up (thankfully Live Search Cashback made them very cheap for buyers). I was lucky enough to get one for around $480 a month back. It has a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, and a 512MB Radeon 2600 GPU. It'll knock the pants off of Half-Life 2.
 
I'd stay away from Acer. I've had two break within a year of owning them. Same problem with each, the charger was a piece of shit and the internal circuitry within the battery broke.
 
[quote name='Kendro']The Gateway M-6862 is a great laptop for a little over $500 if you get it on eBay with Live Search Cashback. There used to be tons of them since it was on clearance at Best Buy and all the hoarders snatched them up (thankfully Live Search Cashback made them very cheap for buyers). I was lucky enough to get one for around $480 a month back. It has a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, and a 512MB Radeon 2600 GPU. It'll knock the pants off of Half-Life 2.[/QUOTE]

What he said. I picked one up for a little over 500, it's been pretty good for me.
 
32-bit Vista is not limited to 2.8 GB of RAM. The Dell Inspiron 1525 I'm writing this on has 4 GB with 3573 MB availalble to Windows. The rest is consumed by memory mapped I/O, including the portion taken by the Intel integrated video. It also has a 320 GB hard drive and some other higher end features but the price came in a little over $900. (My employer picked up half the cost since I use it on the job frequently. I'm fact, I'm on the clock right now in the aftermath of YouTube Live.)

Even if 4 GB is too much money initially, make sure you can upgrade later. The cost is pretty minor for the improvement in peformance. A lot of lower priced 2 GB (don't bother with less in Vista) machines are configured with a 1 GB SO-DIMM in each of two slots. This means you have to remove both to fully upgrade the memory instead of just adding one 2 GB SO-DIMM to an empty slot.

Check out the Dell Outlet Store. You can often get a price break allowing for a higher feature set than normal. It's luck of the draw. Some have minor cosmetic issues or were returned for some stupid reason but cannot be sold as new.
 
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I'll look into the 6862. I just told eBay to alert me if a deal pops up for one.
 
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I'm gonna call local BB's to see if maybe, just maybe someone has it in stock.

[quote name='manthing']FYI:

Office 2007 is Hyper-AIDS[/quote]

I'm an engineering student. The new equation editor is absolutely indispensable.
 
ive got a toshiba laptop that does the job quite nicely. hell i can even play halflife 2 on it ( with minimal slowdown). its a heavy sumbitch though.
 
[quote name='evanft']I'll look into the 6862. I just told eBay to alert me if a deal pops up for one.[/QUOTE]

ahaha, if you do indeed buy off ebay, remember to get live search cashback!
 
I think that the Dell Vostro can do your job just fine, but I'm not sure how the prices are nowadays. Other than that, I would highly recommend Acer or ThinkPads.
 
I was gonna go for an HP with the 40% cashback, but that appears all but dead, and the only real difference with the 6862 was going to be the nVidia vs. ATI card, and they're supposed very similar, so I just bought a brand new 6862 for about $550 after CB. It was a little more than I was hoping to pay (I saw completed ones for $700 or less, which could have saved me another $50-$70), but still a lot less than what a comparable notebook normally goes for.
 
[quote name='evanft']I'm an engineering student. The new equation editor is absolutely indispensable.[/QUOTE]

I'm an engineering major also and couldn't disagree more. For the very rare occasion in which I actually need to type an equation, OOoLaTeX and OpenOffice reign supreme. I have Office 2007 on my computer and never use it for anything other than OneNote, OpenOffice is much better.
 
[quote name='Koggit']I'm an engineering major also and couldn't disagree more. For the very rare occasion in which I actually need to type an equation, OOoLaTeX and OpenOffice reign supreme. I have Office 2007 on my computer and never use it for anything other than OneNote, OpenOffice is much better.[/QUOTE]

.....wot? I've had/will have 9 papers requiring heavy use of equations this semester.
 
Seriously? In what?

I have lab reports that require equations but they're pretty rare (4 this quarter) and I usually just hand write the equations
 
[quote name='Koggit']Seriously? In what?

I have lab reports that require equations but they're pretty rare (4 this quarter) and I usually just hand write the equations[/quote]

Well, I have two lab reports in both vibrations and heat transfer, and each of those have prelabs, a design project in vibrations, a design project in controls, and a controls take home exam. That's 9 (one of the prelabs didn't use equations). Every professor requires typed equations, and oftentimes some level of calculations.
 
[quote name='evanft']Well, I have two lab reports in both vibrations and heat transfer, and each of those have prelabs, a design project in vibrations, a design project in controls, and a controls take home exam. That's 9 (one of the prelabs didn't use equations). Every professor requires typed equations, and oftentimes some level of calculations.[/QUOTE]

Mechanical Engineer eh?
 
[quote name='evanft'].....wot? I've had/will have 9 papers requiring heavy use of equations this semester.[/QUOTE]

Then step your game up and learn to use LaTeX.

I can't imagine writing equations any other way.
 
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