Hey guys, I'm looking for a good, fast, yet inexpensive laptop. I don't wanna spend more than $500 on one since I'm saving for Civic still. Might not get a laptop because I have a desktop but yeah.. I'm probably going to get one at bestbuy because of their protection/replacement plan I think Office Depot has that to though. Anyways what brands should I stay away from? My brother didn't have to good of luck with his Toshiba but he doesn't exactly treat stuff as good as I do. I want one with a CD-RW and DVD-R(w) drive and 80gb harddrive would be big enough because I've got a 250gb external and a 120gb in my PC. My pc is an Emachines T2895 and it's almost just as good now as I think 4 or 5 years ago when I got it.
My mom has a Compaq and it's got an AMD processor. She got it in march of this year so it's pretty new and it cost more than my Emachines did. It's slowed down a bunch since she's got it and she has spyware and virus programs. That leads me away from an AMD processor. My computer has a Intell Celeron 2.8ghz processor and I'm happy with it's speed. I'd like to get a laptop that's some what quick so it doesn't seem like I'm on a dinosaur compared to my computer but I don't know if it's possible with my price range.
I thought about this one here...
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....;skuId=8404158

All the reviews are great and it's not expensive. I like vista from my little experience on it. I'd probably upgrade it to the 2gb max ram. Opinions on anything I've said would be great.

 

After lots of research, we just got this exact laptoplast Fridayfor my wife. It was like $750 with the one year parts and accidental replacement plan. Like you said, it's received excellent reviews, plusCompaq has apretty goodtrack recordfrom my experience.The Intel Pentium dual coreis a good reliable processor andloaded with 1GB of ram it runs Vistawith ease.My wife mainly needs hers for school so not a lot of gaming and such will be running on it. Wireless picks up really well and though it's too soon to really say, we haven't had any problems with it. It comes with a whole bunch of unnecessary programs that I took off there andI put AVG for free on there for virus protection, a few other spyware programs and we'll just see how everything turns out with it.

Working in IT I've seen a lot of problems with Toshiba and I don't like working on them at all. Acer is crap so please avoid that. I've had worse luck than you with Emachines, I've had to doctor on and re-build quite a few. [8D]Gateway isprobably the worst from my experiences. I prefer Dell myself,then Compaq andHP. They've been fairly good to me. Of course it seems everyone's experiencesdiffer somewhat.

Actually AMD Athlon processors outperform Intel Pentium in just about every performance test (heavy PC gaming included) so I'm not sure why your mom's PC slowed down so much. Just because you have anti-virus and spyware doesn't mean your PC is untouchable. There are many factors to take into consideration besides the processor. While the Athlon runswell, the AMD Turion is a different story.

Evreryone may not agree, but that's my 2 cents. A lot more could be said, trying to keep it short. Good luck bro!

 

Uh.. what? AMD hasn't outperformed Intel in years. And when they were doing (slightly) better than Intel, it was only marginally. The thing people liked about AMD processors was that they were cheap and really easy to overclock. So you could buy the cheapest AMD processor and overclock to be a lot better than a camparitive Intel chip and even get it to run around the same speed as the higher end AMD ones.

Ever since the Athlon 64 chips came out a few years ago AMD has been losing ground and lately (the last year or more) Intel has been completely blowing them away. The Core 2 (Duo, Extreme, etc) chips are simply the best you can get right now.

They hayday for Athlon was about 3-4 years ago when the Athlon XP chips were really popular.

This isn't just my opinion either, the numbers don't lie: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/16/cpu_charts_2007/

 

I concur.

Personally, I got a Toshiba laptop in May and I like it a lot. I paif just a tad over $500 for it and it has better specs then the Compaq you posted. Plus it's a centrino. Therefore the battery holds charge longer.

 

BTW when it comes to laptops you have to be really wary. Some companies can make really good laptops in certain models but overall be terrible. Toshiba is a perfect example. The Toshiba Satellite models are really nice but most of the rest aren't worth a bean.

There's a few things you need to take into consideration when purchasing a laptop really. Build quality should probably be #1, even over what's inside the machine. If it has a cheap plastic case with lots of flex around the LCD screen thats a recipe for disaster. If you can see rippling in the screen when you press on the the case that=bad. The less rippling the better. If something falls on top of it or you accidentally drop it it could cause the LCD screen to break if it has a lot of flex.

#2 would be the internals. You wanna make sure the stuff inside has good spec but you also gotta think of stuff like battery life and whatnot. The mobile Intel chips have always out performed AMD chips in laptops. AMD is absolutely the worst you can get for a laptop. You also wanna think about stuff like wifi (does it have b/g/n?), weight (is it portable or heavy?), and size (this goes along with weight, if it's heavy itll probably be big, but not always). Take your time and try to find something you really want.. you can't really change or do much to a laptop.

#3 would be service warrantees and stuff. These are always really good with laptops. I used to work on computers all the time and even I am kind of wary about cracking open a laptop and working on it. Plus if the service people screw something up on your laptop themselves they'll usually replace it with an even better model!

Also, be sure to search around online for whatever model you decide on specifically about battery issues. There has been a major rash of laptop batteries exploding and laptops just plain bursting into flames lately. If I was buying a laptop I'd research the laptop, and this issue specifically, heavily and make sure there hadn't been reports of it (or at least not a lot of them...).

Oh and the one you linked to isnt an Intel Core 2 processor, just to clarify. The ones listed as "Dual-Core" are different, older and a lot worse than the Core 2 line. Those ones also aren't mobile-specific processors either, they're desktop processors they slapped into laptops. They get a lot hotter and drain the batteries a lot faster than the ones geared specifically for mobiles. Might be worth it to buy one a little more expensive or take your time and look for a great deal on something of high quality. I don't know anything about the Compaq you posted, I'm not a laptop whiz. If I had to choose a brand from the ones I've seen at Best Buy tho I'd probably go with a Toshiba Satellite or a Sony Vaio (the ones with the metal cases are really nice).

Edit - I forgot to mention that Wal-Mart sells Dell laptops for a pretty decent price. Might wanna look into those, Dell laptops have been great lately.

 

Theres not really such a thing as a new cheap good fast laptop these days....technology is getting better as we speak and the best stuff right now wont be the best anymore in a month. What I would do is sell some sh*t you dont need if you dont have the money, save it, and buy a good laptop that will last you. Dell has been making huge head-way for awhile. Ive had my XPS 600 fully loaded desktop for comin on 2 years now, its real fancy .


P.S - NEVER get a gateway

 

Costco has a bottom of the barrel laptop for $600 and its actually loaded pretty good.