A laptop?

[Tuomas]

Heips peeps.

I'm a quitter. At least I feel like it now that I'm thinking of getting a laptop. It's because of the HD and all the 20Gb of stuff I lost there. If you don't know what I'm talking about, check here http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/yabb/index.php?topic=36649.0

I'm going to be starting work soon, and I'm going to be needing a computer I can rely on. That means, nothing special, just the fact that it stays together. So, I'll be probably using XP or Ubuntu on it, uninstalling Vista the minute I get it. I couldn't find any reasonably priced used ones, well basically the price difference isn't big enough to swing that way.

Now as I'm just starting work, you'll understand that I don't have a lot of money. My dad promised to help me if the price stays reasonable. I'm thinking below 500€, and that's a lot for me, i'll have to take a loan anyway.

Some, 6 months ago I spent quite a while checking out kaptops for my friends, and basically everyone ended up with an Acer. It still seems to be rather cheap, really considering, that the prices they ask are hellish. I might not need 17'' of scrrenage, 15'' would be enough, I'd prolly use my monitor anyway. But I ain't getting a mini-laptop either. I'd also need it to run some programs unlike the one I'm using now, which has only 393Mb of ram. Most laptop seem to still have 1Gb RAM even though everyone knows that's not enough for Vista. 2Gb seems to almost double the price

I was wondering, if you could help me find a decent laptop that could handle me, and later on, my work, my music-recording and whatnot?

-Tuomas--

EDIT: I noticed there's a new ACER Extensa 5630Z 15.4"/T3200/4GB/160GB/Vista Home Premium for sale at verkkokauppa.com. It's got a dual core T3200 2Gb processor, 4Gb DDR2 RAM, 160Gb 5400rpm SATA HD, 15.4" WXGA 1280x800 screen, Intel GMA X4500HD gfx-card, 6-cell battery, Intel High Definition Audio soundcard, ExpressCard/54? (what's this?). Plus Vista of course. All this for 499€, that's 450 £ or 650$

What do ya think?

[Ubel]

ExpressCard/54? (what's this?)

I believe that's some sort of slot where you can add some external card. Like and additional USB port and such but I'm not sure.

The Extensa seems like a very decent laptop for its price. I think the graphics card is good for some light gaming too. And Verkkokauppa is a reliable store so you have my blessing.

[Sam.]

I don't know a lot about laptops, but I would strongly recommend you not get an ACER. Having owned one, and it literally falling apart (the power cable no longer connected and the screen hinge snapped) after a year of normal use. It didn't leave my house, so it was just used around my room and it couldn't cope. My house mate also had an ACER and after 6 months his monitor began to fail (dead pixels and random green lines across the screen), and eventually stopped working all together.

[LimpingFish]

My experience with Acer laptops is the complete opposite, Sam.

Could be the exception that proves the rule, though.

[zabnat]

Acer is also on my blacklist. Our company had few of those laptops. I'm don't think they broke much often than other computers (HDDs did fail on the older ones though), but the main reason is that somehow they are really slow. I mean much slower than any desktop that is many years older than that laptop. Even the Ferrari was really really slow and it was supposed to be some top of the line model. Some speed can be gained by installing a clean OS without all the Acer software, but then you lose some features. It is one of the cheapest brand out there and you get what you pay for. 

[LUniqueDan]

Same as Zabnat and Zooty: AVOID ACER AT ANY COST.

- My power cord is actually fixed to my motherboard with Krazy Glue, cuz' there's no other way to fix it.

- My fan make Harley Davidson owners jealous

- I can roast toasts on my CPU and on my north bridge in the morning.

- The space bar and F10 key are Missing in Action since 1 year. I just hitted them and a sesame seeds underneath make them broke.

- My battery didin't last more than 10 minutes cuz all the machine is pumping way too much power.


Acer is just too bad.

[miguel]

Well, I have an Acer Laptop for 3 years and it works pretty well for what I want/need, that being mainly for AGS though I also play Oblivion on a decent rate.
I only had to install extra RAM and never had any problem and I use the Acer Software.
I guess I got lucky.

[Tuomas]

Well after 4Gb I probably won't need extra ram. But all the feedback here, it seems acer really isn't all that good... Care to suggest anything, because with a price of 1500€, I'm going to go with the Acer that's only 1/3 of it.

[Wonkyth]

what I'd do is: Get a Toshiba, one with a smaller screen if possible as it will have a better battery life; go for the 1GB of ram, but make sure you can install more, and do so at the first opportunity; don't worry too much about a big HDD, as you can always get an external one later, once you've built up a good amount of junk that you need to store.

[Mantra of Doom]

I've had bad experiences with HP (the heat coming of that old HP laptop we had burned with the heat of a thousand suns), but I hear they are getting better. I now have a Toshiba Satellite something or other, it has a 17" screen, 3GB of RAM, an AMD processor that is better than my desktop (it is being used in the other room so I can't check) and it seems to handle Vista's load fairly well. We got it about six months ago for about $650 in a Circuit City, before the stores shut down. 

You might want to get a laptop that has similar specs to an older model that runs XP, as I have heard that new laptops don't even have drivers available for XP. Just something to keep in mind. Don't worry, I don't think it'd be as bad to rip off Vista and install XP.

Good luck, I hope you find a laptop that will work for you.

[Sam.]

My current toshiba is 1 year old now, and has been very well behaved. Runs vista nicely if that's your choice. Excellent build quality with no wobbly hinges or dodgy buttons. Not massively high spec, 2gig of ram, 120gb HD, 17" screen and 1.6 ghz dual core.

Cost me 400 pounds new, so I imagine there are better specs around now for a similar price.

[Layabout]

What makes you think Vista does not run properly on a computer with 1GB of ram? All you have to do is install a clean, bloatware free version of Vista, download the updates (SP1 etc, should do it automatically) remove some unessential services, turn aero off, and Vista runs fine.

UAC is annoying yes, but it can be turned off if you know what you are doing. I can't wait for 7 though, with it's improved UAC, which you can set to only prompt you when a program tries to access your precious data.

As for backward compatibility, everything should run okay, as long as you set it to run in backward compatiblity mode.

I have no issues running AGS, Photoshop, Max, and my machine (with it's glorious cracked lcd) only gets bogged down by that memory hog known as Firefox (seems to get veeeery hungry when left in sleep mode). Since you are buying a cheapish laptop, I'm assuming correctly you won't be trying to play Far Cry 2, so gaming performance is a non issue (and that is mostly up to your graphics card and ram).

Check here for Vista SP1 vs XP SP3... you will be suprised.
http://futuremark.yougamers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=72298

I could never go back to xp unless it gave me the wonderful search bar in the start menu... oh and the fact it looks like fisher-price designed the GUI.

Yes I like Vista, apart from the UAC which is far too overprotective, that said, better safe than sorry.

As for the Laptop, you should really concentrate on getting the fastest processor and a dedicated gfx card. Ram is not so important as you can always buy extra ram sticks (ask about limits, this laptop I'm using has 1gb upgradeable to 2, some have 2 upgradable to 4, etc) You would be better off getting dedicated graphics over integrated, as you cannot replace it. Same with a hard drive. But not too small. You want something workable. 160gb would probably be a minimum if you are working with programs like photoshop. But then again, you can always use an external.

I am getting a new laptop soon as well. I hear the Toshiba's are good, but I'm not too impressed with the keyboards. The keys are glossy and feel unusual to the touch. I like the design of the HP's, sexier than a mac, heat issues seem to be getting better, and I've found one with the specs I want/need. Sony are overpriced, macs are overpriced (you can run xp/vista/etc on them now... Just goes to show mac users want to be pc users, they just won't admit it). I hear the Dell studios are pretty good. 2GB Core 2 Duo/2gb ram/160hdd/256mb atiHD3450/15.4 wxga 1280x800 for £469 inc vat and shipping. Not sure what the euro price is sorry. I would probably recommend going for something like this for that money or pay a bit more and get the one with more ram, more hd and better processor.

[Khris]

XP SP3 comes with a search box for the taskbar that uses indexing to quickly search all hard drives and lists the results split up in categories. Although I rarely use it, it's way better than Vista's puny start menu search.
I have a beta of Windows 7 on another partition and already like it much better than Vista anyway.

Back to topic: does it have to be a laptop? If I needed the mobility, I'd go for one, too, but as I don't, there's no way I'll get one instead of my trusty tower. Until a few months ago I had been using a case from '99, of course the innards were constantly replaced with more current ones. Looking at the prices of RAM sticks or hard drives, there's no way in hell I'd spend twice the money on a machine I'd have to ship to a repair center for a few weeks only because some tiny component went dead.

[Tuomas]

Doesn't really have to be, no. But it adds to the mobility, as I don't yet know where i'm going to spend the summer. And I'm going to have to have it there to work with. Or I could borrow a computer from someone, but still. Mostly because I grew sick and tired of this bloody case I have here that takes the whole table with the monitor and all. It's just about convinience I think...

The Dell one Layabout suggested seems the same with the same price. Don't know where I could find one here, I'll make a search later. But I suppose people would say Dell's better than Acer then?

[Layabout]

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/default.aspx?c=fi&l=fi&s=gen&~ck=cr

The Dell website in Finnish apparently. This is where you would get one from. Not sure of their prices.

[Nikolas]

I have a Vostro 1010 Dell which I bought 7-8 months ago. Battery is still alive 4-5 hours without power. Everything is working fine. Even Vista is fine on there! and I got it at 350 GBP, including shipping and external WIFI mouse and keyboard... For the price, the 250 GB disk, the 2 GB RAM, and the 15" screen it seemed like a great deal (and it seems to be so, thus far).

[Tuomas]

EDIT: Nevermind

[Trent R]

Didn't read through the whole thread, will later.

But I will add that the casing of Acers suck. The laptop is fine, just the casing and ports and other pieces will fall out of place.


~Trent

[rbaleksandar]

Have the following thing in mind - all, I mean really all, companies have crap for sale. So many defect parts, so many lies in all this "cool" models. I'm personally with a Toshiba Satellite A200-14D. I have it for more than a year now...And I have repaired it 3 times. It doesn't matter if it's cheap, or if it's from Acer, ASUS, Apple, Sony etc. You just have to choose something that suits your needs, hope that it won't come up to be defect and most important thing of all - check the service! If the service of the company has a bad reputation (ask friends, relatives, check in the internet etc.), don't buy from it. If it's defect - bad, but since the service is good you won't have any problems (I thank Toshiba really - some other friends have laptops from that company and no matter in which country you go with your international guarantee, everything comes in its right place) except going here and there (some companies offer you transport of their product to the service for free!). If it's defect AND service is bad - forget about it. No offense to all those, who have ASUS for example, but the service is a pile of dung. I had to travel to a town nearby mine to get to the service of Toshiba. I left it there and after 2 work-days they called me and told me: "Your laptop's been repaired. You can come and get it in the working time.". A friend has ASUS. So something wrong went in this baby (the laptop I mean ) - it wouldn't start at all. Probably the HDD. Who knows. So the service is in the same town we live. Okay, that's cool. BUT following happened. He left it there...And after almost 2 months he had to threaten them to sue the company, because his laptop was still not repaired and they didn't give him any information (believe me, the guy was in the service building every week 2-3 times!). Finally they replaced his laptop with a better one for free as an excuse. Great, but my friend was under pressure for almost 2 months and he had to borrow a laptop from the uni because he needed it so badly.

  So that's all. Good service or don't buy!

Best regards,
rbaleksandar


PS: Try to find a laptop without any OS on it or at max a free Linux distribution. No need to buy some crappy Vista installed (as I did but I like my laptop so much, that I didn't care) and after less then 1 week uninstall it and replace it. This is money spend for nothing.

[Mozesh]

Didn't read through the whole thread, will later.

But I will add that the casing of Acers suck. The laptop is fine, just the casing and ports and other pieces will fall out of place.


~Trent

My Acer is still in tact, bought it sept 2007. Although the bottom is somewhat broken because of a long time of physical abuse.

A reason why Acer laptops might be considered slow is because of all the crap Acer install with your windows. Personally I have windows 7 beta and a tweaked vista and it all works fine and dandy. I've got an Aspire 5920(which you can buy a better version of for around 600 euros), pretty decent for gaming although I only play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead which aren't the most demanding games.

As mentioned before, try to get one with a free Linux distribution, I know I don't want to pay for another license if I ever come to replace this laptop.