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Business laptops

Malak

Malak

Lifer
I have never had a laptop. I have no idea who is good to buy from.

I was looking around, I notice compaq's are really cheap, but I'd never buy a desktop from them. Are they good laptops?

Voodoo, although a bit rich, would offer assurance of mind and the insides I want.

What I'm looking for in particular is light weight. 12" display at least(I saw a 7" last night OMG). Pentium M or Turion. Turion is easier on the battery, right? But they more or less perform pretty good, the both of them?

It's got to be lightweight. The voodoo was only 4lbs, that's great. I don't need much under the hood. 40GB-60GB. The voodoo has a 7200RPM, which is wonderful, but a nice-to-have.

512MB RAM is sufficient. Nothing fancy. Voodoo was $2400, which is rich, but it is probably the best laptop manufacturer out there, the mercedes of laptops. It's also the most powerful for it's weight that I could find.

Suggestions?
 
Well, if you're looking for business notebooks, then you should actually look at some business class notebooks. Head over to ThinkPads.com and see what Lenovo (previously IBM) has to offer. ThinkPads get you legendary reliability and technical support. The X-series would be perfect for you from the sounds of it; definitely check out the X32.
 
Originally posted by: Malak
Originally posted by: sigs3gv
I thought Pentium M was more easier on the battery.
Click to expand...

My understand was Turions were easier.
Click to expand...

That depends - the Turion MT's are smaller and more efficient than the older Turion ML's, and more more competitive with Dothan Pentium M's.

My company uses Dell Latitudes across the board. Most of us use D600/610 and D800/810s, but some of the managers have the D410 which is the 4lb 12.1" notebook. There's also the Latitude X1 but i've never seen one in person.

Contrary to what others may say, I've found the D-series to hold up better in terms of construction/durability than the older C-series that we used 2-4 years ago.
 
Originally posted by: pukemon
Originally posted by: Malak
Originally posted by: sigs3gv
I thought Pentium M was more easier on the battery.
Click to expand...

My understand was Turions were easier.
Click to expand...

That depends - the Turion MT's are smaller and more efficient than the older Turion ML's, and more more competitive with Dothan Pentium M's.

My company uses Dell Latitudes across the board. Most of us use D600/610 and D800/810s, but some of the managers have the D410 which is the 4lb 12.1" notebook. There's also the Latitude X1 but i've never seen one in person.

Contrary to what others may say, I've found the D-series to hold up better in terms of construction/durability than the older C-series that we used 2-4 years ago.
Click to expand...

Solid advice here. I have worked on a TON of dell laptops and the latitudes are great for business use. Thinkpads are also very good. For business use those are the two places I would look.

 
IBM has, as a rule of thumb, better quality than Dell. Also, the support is much better. (Technically, it's Leonovo, but it's still pretty darn good).
The T- or X- series should to the job nicely.
Also, if you're willing to "think different", Apple's iBook is a really quite nice buisness laptop. Integrated video out is nice to have for presentations, and MS office runs natively on OSX, so you won't have compatibility problems. With a bit of tweaking, the 12" iBooks can get remarkably good battery life.
Also, if you really want a "thin-and-light" laptop, the Asus Z33A barebones is very nice. JNCS.com sells them in complete form, and is known for good support of their products.
EDIT:
The Z33A weighs in at a featherweight 2.8 lbs. with battery, and with the jumbo-sized nine-cell optional battery, you can get over six hours of battery life. It also supports the latest-model Pentium M processors.
A good config (1.73 ghz Pentium M, 768mb of DDR2, 80gb hard drive, WinXP Pro, 9-cell battery and a 3-year warranty) will run you about 2000$ from JNCS. Note that this laptop uses the rather obscure micro SO-DIMM memory format, so it's very hard to find a memory upgrade for it. It also uses an extra-thin optical drive, so it will be nearly impossible to replace that, too.
I should mention that ASUS has lousy tech support. JNCS has good tech support. That's why you're likely best off buying from them as opposed to ASUS.
 
Originally posted by: Cheesehead
IBM has, as a rule of thumb, better quality than Dell. Also, the support is much better. (Technically, it's Leonovo, but it's still pretty darn good).
The T- or X- series should to the job nicely.
Click to expand...

Looks good and I have used these before. I'm not sure, but I don't think they have anything as small as Voodoo's lightweights though. They should be small enough though.

Also, if you're willing to "think different", Apple's iBook is a really quite nice buisness laptop. Integrated video out is nice to have for presentations, and MS office runs natively on OSX, so you won't have compatibility problems. With a bit of tweaking, the 12" iBooks can get remarkably good battery life.
Click to expand...

I'd prefer to think the way 95% of the market thinks, that helps more.

Also, if you really want a "thin-and-light" laptop, the Asus Z33A barebones is very nice. JNCS.com sells them in complete form, and is known for good support of their products.
EDIT:
The Z33A weighs in at a featherweight 2.8 lbs. with battery, and with the jumbo-sized nine-cell optional battery, you can get over six hours of battery life. It also supports the latest-model Pentium M processors.
A good config (1.73 ghz Pentium M, 768mb of DDR2, 80gb hard drive, WinXP Pro, 9-cell battery and a 3-year warranty) will run you about 2000$ from JNCS. Note that this laptop uses the rather obscure micro SO-DIMM memory format, so it's very hard to find a memory upgrade for it. It also uses an extra-thin optical drive, so it will be nearly impossible to replace that, too.
I should mention that ASUS has lousy tech support. JNCS has good tech support. That's why you're likely best off buying from them as opposed to ASUS.
Click to expand...

I'm not worried much about upgrading stuff, so that sounds great. I'll check them out.
 
The X41's are 2.7 pounds in a 12" screen...... You can't get much lighter than that without suffering usability/ergonomic issues with the end user.

Voodoo/alienware do not produce business laptops.... And at their prices, you'll get more for your $$ by buying a ThinkPad or Dell Latitude... and at least Lenovo still uses IBM's support center which I might add is US based for North American customers..... Can't quite say that about Dell when you are only buying one or two systems.
 
voodoo 4lb is lightweight? ibm x-series are under 4lbs.

if you want, check out x40, it is 2.7lbs. also, check out x41 (tablet), it is 3.2lbs. x31/x32 are 3.6lbs. you can probably get them under $2k.
 
Voodoo might cost a little more, but they are the only ones that offered 7200 RPM HD in a lightweight. I think that counts for something.
 
Originally posted by: Malak
Voodoo might cost a little more, but they are the only ones that offered 7200 RPM HD in a lightweight. I think that counts for something.
Click to expand...

I guess it depends on whether you need a 7200 RPM hard drive. Faster hard drives are really only noticable when larger either a lot of files or very large files. For word processing, presentations, spread sheet, video watching, webwork, etc the faster hard drive won't make as much difference as a processor bump. For video editing, game playing, engineering software, some others the faster hard drive can be important (but again, might not be as important as a processor bump).

7200 RPM drives typically require a small bit more power as well as better thermal management...
 
Originally posted by: Keeir
Originally posted by: Malak
Voodoo might cost a little more, but they are the only ones that offered 7200 RPM HD in a lightweight. I think that counts for something.
Click to expand...

I guess it depends on whether you need a 7200 RPM hard drive. Faster hard drives are really only noticable when larger either a lot of files or very large files. For word processing, presentations, spread sheet, video watching, webwork, etc the faster hard drive won't make as much difference as a processor bump. For video editing, game playing, engineering software, some others the faster hard drive can be important (but again, might not be as important as a processor bump).

7200 RPM drives typically require a small bit more power as well as better thermal management...
Click to expand...


But 2.5 pound notebooks are NOT(edited) made for video editing, or high end work,...... so 4200-5400 rpm drives do nicely. People seem to forget the sacrifice of moving to an ultra-portable isn't just screen size.
 
Originally posted by: Malak
Voodoo might cost a little more, but they are the only ones that offered 7200 RPM HD in a lightweight. I think that counts for something.
Click to expand...


It's quite easy to change the hard drives in most laptops, you know. With the money that you would save by not buying a Voodoo, you could get a 7200RPM laptop drive of your choice and put it in to, say, a ThinkPad X32 and still come out way ahead, price-wise.
 
Originally posted by: Trippytiger
Originally posted by: Malak
Voodoo might cost a little more, but they are the only ones that offered 7200 RPM HD in a lightweight. I think that counts for something.
Click to expand...


It's quite easy to change the hard drives in most laptops, you know. With the money that you would save by not buying a Voodoo, you could get a 7200RPM laptop drive of your choice and put it in to, say, a ThinkPad X32 and still come out way ahead, price-wise.
Click to expand...


X32 uses a 2.5 inch.... X40 series uses 1.8" which are only available in 4200rpm currently.
 
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