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Graduation, and the HP Pavillion?
Tucanwarrior13
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
With my graduation money I'm going to be buying a notebook for my college classes coming up. I've given this some hard thought, and lots of research and have come to the conclusion that the HP Pavillion DV9000t looks like a really good computer. My concern is not knowing anyone with this specific machine. I know people with HP notebooks who love them, but I've never personally owned an HP (all Dells). Does anyone here like them, hate them, know of a better computer for around 1000 dollars?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
Tucanwarrior13 on
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Look at getting a Macbook, it's a much better laptop for college.
Other than that, Vaio's are great PC laptops, probably the best as far as design/construction goes. The rest look cobbled together.
So really my point is to look into laptops geared more towards business, not the shitty ones that are obviously marketed at freshmen.
The only downsides are fingerprints on the shiny casing and ~2-hour battery life on standard settings.
Do not get an HP. They are clunky and are not well put together. I had one. It did not survive a year. Get a MacBook.
As per size, 15 inch is just about perfect. Doesn't pain you to watch shows and play some games on it, yet still fits comfortably in the backpack. It has never seemed too big, even fits ok on the wimpy little chair/desk things most colleges seem to have. No need to go for the 13 inch, personally that would annoy the living shit out of me because it's so tiny. And 17 inches is, obviously, ridiculous.
Seriously. HP webpage, "Small and Medium Business". Nice solid light machines.
Dells have really crappy motherboards....
Some HP's CDROM drives go out quickly...
Dells cannot be upgraded except with Dell ram or sometimes other random crappy brands of ram (no Corsair for you)
Dell has no ASP's (Authorized Service Providers) if you do have a problem under warranty all you can do is send it to them.
If you are getting a notebook you intend to carry around and not leave at home, then 17in is too big. Go with a 15.4in at the most.
Macbooks are very well made for the most part (some weird quirks in some models), the magnetic clips on the A/C adapters will save you from damaging your computers D/C jack (ex: you trip over your cord).
A new non crappy Mac goes for $1500+
Macs are never on sale and cost the same everywhere.
The 13 inch macbook, which is all you'll really need, costs a cool grand. I'm recommending that.
I have to say I completely disagree that you have to pay $1500 for a "non crappy" Mac. I bought the lowest end MacBook (when they had the $180 iPod rebate, $100 printer rebate) and that served me well for a while until I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade from 512 to 2 gigs of ram, as I was being pretty hard on the system. Now though, with the updated system specs, there's no need to upgrade the ram like I did, the base system is just fine (2.0 ghz C2D, 80 gigs, 1 gig of ram), falling far short of your $1500 range.
If you're getting Vista on a machine, try to go with 2gb of RAM. After it conditions itself for a month or so, a single gig will be just a bit faster than XP (and still lower game FPS). 2gb will far surpass XP with load times and stability (except in FPS).
My wife's had one of the Bigass Dell 17" machines for over two years, and it's not once had an issue. Other than it being huge (and me ending up carrying it often) it's a good machine.
edit: Comparatively is the Sony Vaio FE Series a good machine? I'd get it with the 2 gigs of memory most likely. 1220 for a Vaio with all of the stuff I want on it seems like a pretty good price.