Shopping for a laptop

AlphaTrinity

So my brother calls me today and expresses interest in buying a laptop.
I've never bought a laptop, and only shopped for one briefly.

All I know (or at least I think I know) is that no matter what, one should get the Centrino package (Intel still owns the laptop market right?).
He says he only needs the laptop for typical stuff like internet browsing and probably word processing and things like that (definitely not gaming).
He claims a friend of his just bought a laptop for about $450 (after-Thanksgiving sale). He had not idea what the specs were, but I'm guessing it has a Celeron or some crap like that in it (sorry for calling it crap..where I used to work we dealt with hundreds of Celeron laptops and they were the slowest things I've ever had to deal with :o )

Anyway, he would prefer to spend as low amount of money as possible, but I would hate to see him buy something that will turn amazingly slow in a couple of months. I'm also afraid that, knowing him, something will come up in a few months where he needs a better performing machine.

So I just wanted to see what some of your thoughts were and maybe find out if there are some really good deals out there somewhere. I built a laptop on dell.com with a Core2Duo 1.66ghz, Vista(:() Home Premium, and 1gb of ram for $704, but that would probably be too pricey. I figured somebody here would know where to find good laptop deals. Let me know what you guys think

And sorry for the long post! You know me, always giving way too many details! :bigggrin:

Thrax

You're going to be about $700+ for a decently-equipped C2D machine, and about 800-850+ for an XP machine. Will your brother budge from the wait-until-next-year-if-you-really-want-it-for-that price?

AlphaTrinity

Eh, I don't know. It sounded to me like he wanted to buy this thing within a month or so. I guess I'll just look around for a Pentium or Celeron system.
Or maybe see what AMD has available in laptops

NiGHTS

A lot of big box retailers are offloading HP's. I helped my friend shop for one about 2 months ago, picked up a great system for about $750 after rebate. Pavilion dv97xx variant that was really a great setup. HP has a great online store, too, if he feels like putting together his own for relatively cheap.

Acer has the best warranty in the business, as Sledge can attest to. HP does come with a 1 year standard warranty, however, which still beats Dell.

Edit: C700T series (Compaq) starts at $450.00 AR on hp.com.

Thrax

And lenovo beats all of these in service and reliability.

QCH

Lenovo = Great laptops at higher than average price.

Dell = Good laptops at a bit over average price.

HP/ Compaq = Good laptops at average price

Acer = Good at a bit below average prices.

Powernotebooks.com = Good/ Great at average to below average prices.

STAY AWAY from toshiba and sony. While they have good features at a good price, they suck. I've seen several hundred laptops in my 6 years as a desktop support guy. We've had more DEAD Toshiba's and Sony's that were only a year old. Heck, Toshiba doesn't even trust their own certified technicians!!

Thelemech

QCH2002 wrote:

STAY AWAY from toshiba and sony. While they have good features at a good price, they suck. I've seen several hundred laptops in my 6 years as a desktop support guy. We've had more DEAD Toshiba's and Sony's that were only a year old. Heck, Toshiba doesn't even trust their own certified technicians!!

I'd have to agree on the Toshiba side as I own one of the Infamous A70 series with the faulty adapter jack; several of these where recalled and a successful lawsuit was lobbed at Toshiba. I think that in the late 90s/start of 2000, some major changes must have been made at Toshiba: I have a Satelite 100cs (96-97) that still runs flawlessly and have never had to do any work on it other than putting in a larger HD and more Ram.
In retrospect I may have even suggested Toshiba here in another thread:rolleyes2
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