The Site > Old Forums > Road Warriors, Notebooks & Distance > What brand Laptop to get?

reply to Monolith

Re: What brand Laptop to get?

asd has good advice. I am not brand "crazed", although I personally have done well with HP notebooks. HP/Dell/Acer/Sony/Gateway/ASUS/MSI all make good noteboks, and are all pretty competitive with one another.

I would concentrate my search based firstly on:

What form-factor or screen size best meets your needs? IMHO, this is no small deal, and perhaps the first thing to consider! The difference in screen real-estate, not to mention "portability!" between say a 14.1" vesus a 17.3" is considerable!

Outside of a "better than integrated graphics card", your stated usage is pretty tame, and does not call for a lot of expensive bells and whistles. For example, you did not mention any HD type video capability, or desire for a blu-ray player, but it is something to keep in mind.

Another consideration: Battery run time. For me, I run primarily on AC, so it is not a big fator in my decision making process, but how about yourself? If you plan on running of battery a lot, you want to check out the run times from one model to another, as some of the differences there can be quite a bit.

Also, WiFi: Do you want/need 11n capability, or is 11g good for your needs? Plenty of notebooks still come with 11g only, and for many folks, this is no big deal, but be aware of this.

Although you can get some very good deals on notebooks with Vista installed, at this point in time, I would recommend not doing so. Many/most folks will want windows 7, and the cost of upgrading makes saving a couple bucks on a Vista based notebook questionable savings.

I would take these factors in mind, and kind of "profile" what you are looking for, then I would start looking at individual models that had the features that I was looking for. For your stated usage, there is a wide, wide range of models that might suit your needs, this is why I think you really need to narrow down the feature set that you want first. What commonly happens is that folks buy a model based on brand/appearance, or one or two specific features, only to later discover that there were other features that they were ignoring! For example "Gee, I really love the large, bright screen on this 17" notebook, but next time, I will buy a 14" screen model because this one is a moose to travel with!" Happens all the time...
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