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Laptop Purchasing Advice
Thanatos
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey, my roommate is buying a new laptop, and this is about the best one I could find for him:
It's $954.00. I looked at Lenovo's laptops, and couldn't find anything even remotely comparable for the price. I'd prefer to avoid Dell, but this is hard to beat. Anyone got any suggestions for other options, or see anything wrong?
Studio 17 Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T6400 (2.00GHz/800Mhz FSB/2MB cache) Operating System Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium Service Pack 1 64 Bit System Color Option Jet Black Memory 4GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 at 800MHz Built-in Keyboard Options Standard Keyboard (included in the price) LCD Panel Glossy widescreen 17.0 inch display (1440x900) Video Card 256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 Hard Drive Size: 320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM) Adobe Software Adobe® Acrobat® Reader 9.0 Combo or DVD+RW Drive 6X Slot Load Bluray (BD) Combo Drive (BD Read Only) Sound Card High Definition Audio 2.0 Wireless Networking Cards Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Mini-Card with Netgear WGR614 Wireless Router Camera Module Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam Office Productivity Software (Pre-Installed) Microsoft Works Anti-Virus/Security Suite (Pre-installed) McAfee SecurityCenter with anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, 30-Days Battery Options 56 Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell) Service 1Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis Dial-Up Internet Access No ISP requested LCD and Camera Glossy widescreen 17.0 inch display (1440x900) w/ 2.0M pixel Camera Processor Branding Intel® Core™ 2 Duo Processor Labels Windows Vista™ Premium Dell Remote Access Dell Remote Access, free basic service Finger Print Reader NO FINGER PRINT READER
It's $954.00. I looked at Lenovo's laptops, and couldn't find anything even remotely comparable for the price. I'd prefer to avoid Dell, but this is hard to beat. Anyone got any suggestions for other options, or see anything wrong?
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The only thing that sticks out as wrong to me is that the 17" screen. A 17" widescreen these days should at least do 1080p. Also, a 17" screen is really large. Is this laptop going to mostly hang out on a desk? It's not going to be very portable, both in terms of physical size and battery life.
2. If he really wants a BluRay disc drive, you might as well have a 1080p monitor attached, otherwise it's largely pointless
3. I really don't think you can get a 17" display that can do 1080p anywhere
4. Even if you could, what's the point?
Edit: Oops, the one on sellout.woot.com has an integrated Intel graphics chip, that's considerably inferior ATI mentioned in the OP.
A 15 inch screen with a 1680x1050 resolution is a better deal to me.
Also keep in mind that price and specs are not the only factors you should be looking at. Durability and build quality are also an important considerations, in which case a Dell Latitude or a Lenovo ThinkPad would be your two choices. You're going to pay more but you'll receive a better product.
Another consideration is battery life. I can't compare the Studio 17 to comparable Dell or Lenovo business notebooks but the Studio 15 does have worse power performance in comparison to either the Dell Latitude E6500 or Lenovo ThinkPad T500 (all of these are 15 inch notebooks).
That being said I'm not sure you can really go wrong with a Dell. Obviously a lot of people have had bad experiences with Dells but that is true for any manufacturer. It's really a matter of whether you want to spend a little more money in order to squeeze out the full potential of the notebook form factor, and I think a business notebook would give you that in every area save for games or multimedia.
Edit: Regarding 1080p and Blu-Ray, I wouldn't recommend a Blu-ray drive, either. It seems really silly to me to use a portable device like a notebook to watch Blu-Ray movies. I can't imagine what effect that would have on battery life, DVDs are bad enough. There are, however, 17 inch screens that have resolutions as high as 1920x1200. Hell, there are 15 inch screens that can do that. They do exist. I wouldn't recommend that resolution for a 15 inch notebook, however.
Edit2: You might also want to spend more money on the warranty and get at least two years.
And personally I think Dell's build quality sucks, but my Sony laptop needed new memory modules at 11 months, so I don't really have any productive advice on that front. Edit: You know, I'm really questioning this laptop. How are they getting blu-ray and a 17" screen in there for under a grand? I just went to Sony and had to go to around $1500 to pull off this setup.
PSN: TheScrublet
It's pretty much a given that a laptop with a BDROM is also going to have at least VGA output. Mine has VGA and HDMI, and I regularly hook it up to larger screens to act as a portable blu-ray player.
Regarding the price / features it's probably legit. Lots of laptops around the $1000 or less mark have BD-ROMs these days, and a 17" LCD doesn't actually add to the cost of a laptop, especially at that resolution.
He has it at work right now, so I'll post the model number tomorrow and see if its available in the US. So far it's had no issues (been almost a year) and by far the best deal on a laptop I've ever seen in Canada.
edit: I should specify, mine is. Some are GT's.
It seems like the on-board video would make the Blu-Ray a pile of shit.
I agree. Everything I'm seeing on a google search is saying you need a minimum 256 MB VRAM and a 1.8 GHz+ CPU (and that Sony is at 2). Most of them are recommending either NVidia 7 or 8 series and up, or ATI X1K series and up. However, this site seems to think the integrated graphics chipset in that Sony is fine. Some more searches revealed a general opinion that the HD decoding features let that chipset play blu-rays even though it won't be able to handle games very well.
As I see it, your friend has three options:
1. Buy the cheap but better-on-paper Dell, but add an extended warranty so if it has build problems, he's covered.
2. Buy the Sony and try blu-ray first thing. If it sucks, take it back since it's not working as advertised.
3. Increase the budget. To be honest, you can own a computer for a long time now...my parents are still happy with a desktop I built them in late 2004. But for a laptop, $1000 is probably a bit low of a pricetag to get both longevity AND blu-ray.
PSN: TheScrublet
I still wouldn't want an Intel on-board video card on any machine. Especially not to run blu rays.
In my experience most people trash their laptops in 3 years. A lot of broken laptops come across my desk at work and home.
Any laptop I've had that has lasted more than 5 years is essentially a word-processing and emailing dinosaur.
If you're going to be using it for basic functions only, like word-processing and internet browsing, the best way to make it stay in tip-top shape would be to do a full-wipe/reinstall every 2-3 years.
Just my experience. For the record, last year I got fed-up with notebooks and purchased a Velocity Micro machine. I'm much happier, even if the portability is less than desirable.
Personally I would have them buy the 15" version of the same laptop for a few hundred less. 17's are really impractical to move around with.
Last I heard it's something like a 25% chance it won't make it to 4 years, which is pretty high (source). That's a couple of years old, but it's hard to tell if things are getting better or worse, the new GPUs from nVidia are apparently pretty shonking.
I bought a 4 year warrenty for my laptop, didn't regret. I also have a Dell, and although I have had a couple of parts fail, I've been fairly impressed with the ease of the tech support service (though I'm fairly technically literate which helps so I only ever use the e-mail system).
In general laptops have a lifespan of 3-5. That's not to say they will certainly fail after that time, only that they're designed to be replaced after that long. This is referring to PCs and not Macs.
I had "Moron Insurance" on an old Dell back in school. Suffice to say, one night it decided to become a beer can. Complete with beer.
The insurance covered an entire new machine. A newer machine. Refurbished.
While I can't speak to the technical aspects, I will swear that that referb was slower and less responsive than any new computer I have ever purchased. I'd never buy one referbed unless it was an absolute steal.
I finally brought him around to the "two $500 laptops spaced 3 years apart is better than one $1000.00 laptop you use for six years" school of thought. Ended up with a 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo (1 MB cache), 3 GB of RAM, a 15.6" widescreen monitor, and a 160 GB HD (he only has 66 GB right now, including an external 40 GB hard drive that he can use with the new one).