Choosing a new laptop

[imported_ceefka]

A friend of mine is looking for a new laptop. He had a 1.1 GHz PIII Compaq 256MB 7GB HDD.

The only demanding application will be Photoshop. The rest is MS Office, surfing, downloading music and mailing. He's an occassional gamer, no heavy stuff.

Preferences
- widescreen for watching DVDs.
- long battery life.
- WiFi, well of course

What are the specs he should look out for? Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Crescent13]

Dell 9300

 

[mickles]

With respect to what he is looking for, he's going to want to checkout screens personally, to see what he likes; make sure he compares resolution because working space on the screen can become important.

For battery life, he's not going to want a power-hungry chipset like a P4-M, he'll want a Turion or a Pentium-M, maybe even Celeron-M. Try to stay away from big power video cards as they'll reduce your battery life. You'll want to look for the battery size too. 6-cell is standard, on most laptops will give ~2 hours, but you will see variants in the 4, 8, 9 and 12-cell sizes.

Wifi is pretty much standard on any laptop these days.

For widescreen, look for the W before the resolution detail: i.e. WXGA or WUXGA

You'll probably want 512mb of ram, but if the model you're looking at has only 256mb, just buy another stick independently, this tends to be much cheaper.

What kind of portability is he looking for? This will help you decide what size you'll want to get. Portability is usually ~6 pounds or less, with 15" screen sizes or less... but usually it's 14" or less (most general case, some people carry around their 17" screens, personal preference).

Hope that's a decent start..

Mike

 

[imported_ceefka]

Thank you Crescent13 and mickles.

Crescent13 your post doesn´t really make sense considering your sig. Oh, I get it, you're trying to be funny. Damn foreigners here.

Mickles, your post was quite useful. I believe I can put my friend on the right track now. I was just getting the hang of choosing a desktop. A laptop is a whole different ballgame.

 

[cheesehead]

I've got my Inspiron 9100 for sale. Very powerful machine; 3ghz P4, Mobile 9700, 15.4" widescreen, WinXP Pro, 1GB DDR400, 7200rpm 60GB HDD, etc. Will install Dell B/G mini-PCI card. I can get two hours on a charge, but most people report about one and a half.

ASUS has a line of widescreen laptops they just released. Most of 'em are barebones, though; I reccomend buying through JNCS.com.

 

[shiftomnimega]

I recently bought a new laptop online to replace my 3 year old compaq. I am replacing it with the cusomizable Compaq V4000T series.

Your buddy might want to check out the 2000 series seeing how gaming isn't a huge deal. I went with the 4000 series since it was a Pentium that didn't come with an Intel graphics card (which would probably eliminate heavy gaming).

My laptop came to around 1500, but for what your buddy wants he could easily customize an HP/Compaq laptop to what he specifically wants to under 1000.

If your buddy is anything like I am he might want to go with a gig of ram and multitask away. If he's feeling a bit ambitious he could also just go with 256 megs of ram and get an upgrade from Ebay or a credible memory dealer for much cheaper than HP offers.