Best Value Laptop w/ Decent Graphics

[Aeridyne]

I am searching for the best laptop I can load up two hard drives in. This doesn't necessarily mean the most powerful, that's not what I have the money for anyway, I suppose I should rather say the best cheap laptop I can get, lol.

I've only found 17" models thus far that can have two hard drives and I've researched the Dells so far but haven't found anything else. The reason being versatility and the ability to run multiple VMs on the second drive.

Within the Dell line I came up with three options that I liked

Vostro 1710 - Available new from dell, fairly cheap, not the most aesthetically pleasing, but has the option for dual hard drives and being from the business line it should prove reliable and easy to fix in the future. Would be nice if the graphics were just a bit beefier to be more future proof.

Inspiron 1720 - Doesn't seem like dell sells these new anymore, which really sucks because I think this would have been the one I would have liked the most if the graphics were good enough. I know it can have two hard drives, not being able to buy it from dell i would want one with a good warranty still, maybe ebay one that says it has dell warranty? Any info on this one would be appreciated, I know the screen is 1920 res capable which is nice.

Studio M 1737 - These I think are just sexy machines, dual hard drive capable, if you want to you can pay for the custom paint which is not a bad price for a fairly unique paintjob. Decent parts available and the construction is amazing, the bottom plate comes off in one piece so doing anything on it fix wise short of replacing the mobo seems like it would be amazingly simple compared to most other notebooks, that I like a LOT. Not sure if the 8600M is quite enough graphics for me though. Honestly I don't do a lot of gaming but I would like to be able to if I wanted.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Other Options are welcome, any comment is welcome, lol, I plan on looking at as many options as possible here. TYIA ^_^

 

[Aeridyne]

Well, i just researched all of what Toshiba had to offer in 17" flavor and the Studio M beats the pants off it, so Toshiba is out.

 

[Aeridyne]

As far as HP goes, it seems the Dv7t line is the best option there, although I got an HP last christmas for the nice graphics and it totally toasted on me so I lost faith in HP on that. The price is a bit high for a basic configuration, I configured one with the T6400, a single drive, and everything else standard, the one nice thing is that is has 9600M Nvidia graphics, but the tag is $950. How much better is the 9600M over the 8600M anyway? (please don't tangent this question and ignore the nature of the post, lol, thanks!) ^_^

 

[Aeridyne]

OMG the thinkpad are wicked as hell, also they command an extreme pricetag!!! the W700 is insane, anyone know of a cheaper 17" IBM, hopefully new, that can handle 2 hard drives?

 

[corkyg]

You don't have to go huge - AFIK all Thinkpads can handle a second HDD using the Ultrabay adapter. I have that with my T60 (14.1 in) - love it!

 

[Aeridyne]

Ultra tray adapter? Interesting, what would normally go in that bay? You don't have to sacrifice optical or something do you?

 

[Aeridyne]

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
OMG the thinkpad are wicked as hell, also they command an extreme pricetag!!! the W700 is insane, anyone know of a cheaper 17" IBM, hopefully new, that can handle 2 hard drives?

I now realize the w700 is the ONLY thinkpad that comes in 17" flavor sadly... darn. Guess that only leaves 15.4 and such, anyone have any recommendations on thinkpads and where I can get them cheap?

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
Ultra tray adapter? Interesting, what would normally go in that bay? You don't have to sacrifice optical or something do you?

yeah but the optical is hot-swappable

why do you want two hard drives, anyway?

 

[Aeridyne]

As I said at the top I would like to have two for various reasons, flexibility, ease of backups, running OS on one drive and VMs on the other, etc. As such, I don't think the ultrabay option is quite what I'm looking for unfortunately.

 

[Aeridyne]

Umm... anyone? seems like I'm basically left to weigh the options of these myself thus far... There's got to be someone with more notebook knowledge than me? I know there is, they are lurking all over this place, not posting, and making me wonder... lol

 

[Aeridyne]

well... i had an idea, i wanted to buy a studio at what was hopefully a discounted price, however apparently the business side of dell will not by any means ever be selling any of the "home" sector machines... not cool dell, not cool. So if i wanted to buy 100 studio 17s for the business i do IT for, it's no dice, would have to buy them all through the home side... blarg.

 

[Aeridyne]

Come on people, there's a lot to discuss here, vostro 1710 config vs. studio 17 config? Anyone have any exp w/ the durability of either? Anyone have any exp w/ a 1720? come one ya'll, gimme something to think about beyond what I already know maybe???

 

[xSauronx]

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
As I said at the top I would like to have two for various reasons, flexibility, ease of backups, running OS on one drive and VMs on the other, etc. As such, I don't think the ultrabay option is quite what I'm looking for unfortunately.

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
Come on people, there's a lot to discuss here

im not really sure about that.

external storage offers flexibility, on the cheap, for backups and general storage. with a dual core processor like you were looking at in your other thread (which isnt a high-end one), another hard drive probably wont make a lot of difference if you want to run multiple VMs at once (the performance is likely going to suck hard), and if you only want to run one at a time, my T60 can run ubuntu host and xp guest with reasonable performance, heres my specs:

core 2 duo T7200 (2ghz, 667fsb, 4mb l2, VT support)
3 gb ram
100gb 7200rpm hard drive

are you going to be wanting to run multiple VMs at once? are you going to be performing cpu and write-intensive tasks in this/these VMs? i keep most VMs on an external drive for the sake of space, and keep any im using regularly on the laptop itself.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Vostro, BTW, is not business-class in the same way that Latitudes are. They're Inspirons painted black.

 

[hans030390]

Can't beat the Gateway FX laptops (17"). The newest models are usually $1200-1300 at Best Buy, but they're awesome for the price...and yes, you can load dual hard drives (for RAID as well).

If you want something cheaper...find a used model.

 

[Aeridyne]

--Hans

Hmm, so you like the Gateway FX series hans? I checked those out on gateway's website, and I thought the same thing, that they can be loaded up with dual drives, but I didn't see anything on the site and there weren't any configuration options for adding a second drive to one it seemed, maybe I was missing something but I didn't see it so it made me wonder if I was imagining things when I was in best buy the other day.

--Flipped

Really? the vostros are like rebadged inspirons? So you are saying that the latitudes are quality but the Vostros are not so much? I was reading another guy's thread that was talking about an inspiron 1705 he had and that he did nothing but repair it, which made me shy away from the 1720 Inspiron as an option, are they really that bad? From what I'm hearing it tends to seem like they are poor quality. I had no idea that the Vostro was so similar to those, do they use the same hardware or something and just have a different shell?

--Sauron

Thanks for the input Sauron. I do plan on running multiple VMs at once, probably three or more, none of them doing anything real intense though, mainly just for setting up a windows test enviromnet with a DC maybe running exchange and some test clients, things like that. I have a Latitude D830 right now and I can run multiple on here pretty darn good for only running on a single 7200 rpm drive, but all of these right now are just little test clients that I use to interface with our real servers and would like to run a test server virtually as well among other things, so I figured that running these on a drive separate from my OS. Also I wanted this machine to be pretty self contained and portable, so storing them and everything else on an external drive sort of defeats the purpose of what I am trying to accomplish here. Aside from that I like the idea of two drives just for more flexibility and storage. (And i realize the stuff I'm looking at isn't exactly high end, I suppose it seems that way to me a bit though as usually I'm akin to using a cheap 500 dollar machine, lol)

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: Aeridyne
Really? the vostros are like rebadged inspirons? So you are saying that the latitudes are quality but the Vostros are not so much? I was reading another guy's thread that was talking about an inspiron 1705 he had and that he did nothing but repair it, which made me shy away from the 1720 Inspiron as an option, are they really that bad? From what I'm hearing it tends to seem like they are poor quality. I had no idea that the Vostro was so similar to those, do they use the same hardware or something and just have a different shell?

Tell the truth and shame the devil, aye, Vostros are rebadged Inspirons. Same shell (just a different color), same hardware. That's not necessarily a bad thing. My g/f and I have had a Vostro 1500 for about 14 months and have been very pleased with it. It is pretty solidly built - very little flexing in the shell. Probably more flex in the 1700-series Inspiron/Vostro, as there are greater expanses of plastic.

That "1705" you mention is actually the e1705, and is an older model - Inspirons/Vostros have since been redesigned.

Latitudes are supposedly a step up, and intended to compete against Lenovo's premium Thinkpads. As a little bit of a side note, not all Thinkpads are the same - some are better-built than others.

The big selling point for the Dell laptops are price. Catch a good sale or coupon code, and they are hard to beat.

I worked for a company a few years ago that (among other things) repaired in-warranty laptops. According to that unit's manager, IBM/Lenovo had the lowest repair rate, Toshiba the highest, and HP & Dell in the middle.

pic of Inspiron
pic of Vostro

 

[Aeridyne]

Wow, ok, I had done more research to find that they are basically the same thing, even that the shock cushion for the hard drive is present in both and that seems true, looking at both of these it is obvious that they are using the same shell, same everything. Wonder if internally any little parts are different, like different mobo layouts or anything like that so long as the platforms are the same, ie both the same intel chipset would both have the same mobo and such, seems like they would having the same shell like that.

Good to know that the 1705 was an older model and that the newer ones are probably improved, he was saying all the things he had wrong with the 1705 and it was a laundry list.

The latitudes are decent I guess, they are really the only model line that I have a lot of experience with multiple machines, I manage about a hundred of them daily consisting of D800s, D810s, D820s and D830s. I must say, some of them are used extremely extensively and impress me that they can work that hard, others I have pulled brand new out of the box fried. I pulled one D830 out of the box, went to image it, plugged it in, and upon turning it on it made a high pitched wail of agony, the battery light started flashing, the screen came on really distorted and I thought it was going to explode! Others I have pulled out of the box with bad batteries, optical drives, and a few with hard drives that only lasted a few weeks or so before they came up with bad sectors.

I didn't know that the toshibas weren't that great, i had thought that toshibas were pretty good, i had one that was the first laptop I ever actually bought and I loved it, I only got a new one because the graphics weren't quite up to par, bought an HP with high end graphics in it and it toasted within a week because of a driver crash, which in my opinion is Nvidia's fault for a sh*tty chip and a sh*tty driver that nuked each other, but HP put it in there so they are to blame to. I know that the IBMs are nice, i found one once that was old as dirt, and old P1 thinkpad and the sucker actually worked and the battery could still hold a charge for about 30 seconds, IBM makes good stuff. I heard about an old RS400 mainframe getting kicked down a flight of stairs as a theif tried to steal it, they hooked it up later and it still worked fine, oh and a guy had a thinkpad once, and this one is 100% true, had a fire, the fireman chucked it out the window landing in debris, later on the guy came and picked it out of the debris and i think there was snow on the ground, had to pry the lid open because the plastic had begun to melt shut, the screen was a tad distorted, but, turned it on and it booted fine! lol, that's durability. One of the things I have liked about the dells more than anything is that they are usually easier to repair, the C600s for example were a breeze to take apart, and the Studio line takes it to a whole new level.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Once upon a time the Toshiba's were very good - and they were once the world's best selling laptop. I guess they just sort of got too concerned with penetrating the lower-end consumer market, and made some compromises.

I have a Thinkpad story, too... I have an old 360CSE - yup, a 486 CPU! A few years ago it was on a shelf about 6 ft off the floor. Well, I hadn't secured the shelf properly, and when there was a nearby explosion, the house shook and the shelf tumbled to the hardwood floor; laptop, too, of course. The bezel by the floppy drive broke, but the sucker powered on with no apparent damage. Ah, quality...

 

[Oil]

Do you need a 17" laptop? The Thinkpad T500 can hold 2 hard drives but the DVD drive must be removed

 

[BlueAcolyte]

The Asus G50 can hold 2 hard drives, has a 9800GS GPU, 15.4' screen. It's around $1200.

 

[heymrdj]

I have an HP9500t and it's been rocksolid. And the 3 year warranty has been tits, they'll repair any little thing on it you ask them. I dropped it and dinged up the top and they replaced the entire lid and coating under warranty, next day air both ways, I was only out of it 3 days.

I think now their the dv7t? I don't have much to say about them as i don't own one, but at the place I work we carry dv5t's, and I say they've been alot more solid than all the Vostros we're replacing mobo's in.

Loaded in mine:

Core 2 Duo T7500 (biggest at the time)
4GB OCZ DDR2-800 SODIMM (2x2GB)
Has had two 500GB 7200RPM WD Scropio black drives in it, right now has a 320GB WD Scorpio Blue and a 160GB Hitachi travelstar.
Vista Ultimate 64bit

 

[Aeridyne]

Originally posted by: Flipped Gazelle

I have a Thinkpad story, too... I have an old 360CSE - yup, a 486 CPU! A few years ago it was on a shelf about 6 ft off the floor. Well, I hadn't secured the shelf properly, and when there was a nearby explosion, the house shook and the shelf tumbled to the hardwood floor; laptop, too, of course. The bezel by the floppy drive broke, but the sucker powered on with no apparent damage. Ah, quality...

Wow, that's a good one too, nice. I love it when a machine is built that well, gives me an epic nostalgic feeling, lol.

Originally posted by: heymrdj

I think now their the dv7t? I don't have much to say about them as i don't own one, but at the place I work we carry dv5t's, and I say they've been alot more solid than all the Vostros we're replacing mobo's in.

Interesting, someone else on this thread said they talked to some repair place or whatever it was and they said the HPs & Dells were about equal for number of repairs. Now I don't know what to think.

-btw, not sure if you were saying that you had a wd scorpio black 500 mobile drive or not, because I couldn't find any and a tom's review said they only go up to 320 for the scorpio blacks, I wanted to check one out since the seagate was the only one I knew of that had a 500 gb 2.5 in. drive, rather excited for the moment i was dismayed to find that it didn't exist as far as I can tell.

**As for that asus above, does asus have any not too horribly expensive 17" models that can do dual hds w/ decent graphics?

**and for Oil's comment, I wouldn't want to remove the optical to put the 2nd drive in, that would be a pain, since I want the drive to be permanent basically, which is why I didn't want to mess with an external one either.

 

[corkyg]

Interesting coincidence! Idecided to upgrade my T60's HDD from a 200 GB to a WDC 320 GB Scorpio 7200 RPM. And, I used the T60's Ultrabay drive to do the cloning. I booted with a Thumb drive containing Acronis TI2009 (12), and the job was done in 18 minutes. I removed the Ultrabay, took out the 320 Scorpio and then removed the T60's main 200 GB drive (both SATA.)

I then put the Scorpio in the T60 caddy aliong with the rubber rails (part of the above shock mounting story's success) and powered up.

The T60 booted right up - all programs and files intact including two partitions - everything proportionally expanded.

The Ultrabay is hotswappable with the optical drive - a very handy tool!

 

[Aeridyne]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Interesting coincidence! Idecided to upgrade my T60's HDD from a 200 GB to a WDC 320 GB Scorpio 7200 RPM. And, I used the T60's Ultrabay drive to do the cloning. I booted with a Thumb drive containing Acronis TI2009 (12), and the job was done in 18 minutes. I removed the Ultrabay, took out the 320 Scorpio and then removed the T60's main 200 GB drive (both SATA.)

I then put the Scorpio in the T60 caddy aliong with the rubber rails (part of the above shock mounting story's success) and powered up.

The T60 booted right up - all programs and files intact including two partitions - everything proportionally expanded.

The Ultrabay is hotswappable with the optical drive - a very handy tool!

The ultrabay sounds really cool, would be nice if more manufacturers offered functionality like that, Dell used to with the C series I believe if I'm not mistaken, too bad you have to take out the optical drive though otherwise I would probably just go with that and sacrifice the extra screen space for thinkpad durabilty.