Considering getting a cheap laptop.

[Locut0s]

Over the summer I put together a killer system for myself at home. Now that I'm back at university I've been thinking about also getting a laptop. However unlike the desktop I built for myself this will be anything but state of the art, I'm a little taped out from building that system. All I need it for will be note taking, document writing, web browsing, and the occasional bit of gaming. One that I have my eye on is the following:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/prodde...S10062730&catid=22495&logon=&langid=EN

It's the Gateway 6018GZ. Unfortunately there seems to be precious little info on the net about it in terms of reviews. Anyone here have anything to say about it or might be able to offer other suggestions? You may wonder why I'm going with Future shop since better deals are usually to be found elsewhere, I know since I hand built my home PC, the reason is I will be buying this on a monthly plan so I need to get it from a place that offers such a payment method.

 

[mparr1708]

Originally posted by: Locut0s
Over the summer I put together a killer system for myself at home. Now that I'm back at university I've been thinking about also getting a laptop. However unlike the desktop I built for myself this will be anything but state of the art, I'm a little taped out from building that system. All I need it for will be note taking, document writing, web browsing, and the occasional bit of gaming. One that I have my eye on is the following:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/prodde...S10062730&catid=22495&logon=&langid=EN

It's the Gateway 6018GZ. Unfortunately there seems to be precious little info on the net about it in terms of reviews. Anyone here have anything to say about it or might be able to offer other suggestions? You may wonder why I'm going with Future shop since better deals are usually to be found elsewhere, I know since I hand built my home PC, the reason is I will be buying this on a monthly plan so I need to get it from a place that offers such a payment method.

The monthly plan thing will limit your choices for sure but shouldnt keep you from getting a decent laptop. You could probably do much better for the price they are asking for that laptop. A celeron would be my last choice as a processor in a laptop (Flame prevention: This is my opinion ..I know some people like them...I don't. The numbers speak for there self IMHO.). I would look for a notebook with a Pentium M or Turion 64 if you can swing it. In and around that $700 price range a P-M should be very possible.

You said you would like to game on it occasionally. What generation games? 64mb of shared ram (Meaning it steals video ram from your system memory) is not going to give you much. Older games should do ok (Think Age of Kings and Half life 1 era). You will have a hard time running newer games.

If you do go this route upgrade to at least 1gb of ram. There is a slow hard rive in this notebook (4200 rpm) and you would want to have as much system memory as possible to keep swapping to a minimum. The combination of a 4200rpm drive, a video card grabbing 64mb of your memory, and only having 256mb of ram to start with would be brutal.

I'll take a look around and see if I can link some better options for you. Have you thought about dell or hp? I know they both offer payment plans.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: mparr1708

Originally posted by: Locut0s
Over the summer I put together a killer system for myself at home. Now that I'm back at university I've been thinking about also getting a laptop. However unlike the desktop I built for myself this will be anything but state of the art, I'm a little taped out from building that system. All I need it for will be note taking, document writing, web browsing, and the occasional bit of gaming. One that I have my eye on is the following:

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/prodde...S10062730&catid=22495&logon=&langid=EN

It's the Gateway 6018GZ. Unfortunately there seems to be precious little info on the net about it in terms of reviews. Anyone here have anything to say about it or might be able to offer other suggestions? You may wonder why I'm going with Future shop since better deals are usually to be found elsewhere, I know since I hand built my home PC, the reason is I will be buying this on a monthly plan so I need to get it from a place that offers such a payment method.

The monthly plan thing will limit your choices for sure but shouldnt keep you from getting a decent laptop. You could probably do much better for the price they are asking for that laptop. A celeron would be my last choice as a processor in a laptop (Flame prevention: This is my opinion ..I know some people like them...I don't. The numbers speak for there self IMHO.). I would look for a notebook with a Pentium M or Turion 64 if you can swing it. In and around that $700 price range a P-M should be very possible.

You said you would like to game on it occasionally. What generation games? 64mb of shared ram (Meaning it steals video ram from your system memory) is not going to give you much. Older games should do ok (Think Age of Kings and Half life 1 era). You will have a hard time running newer games.

If you do go this route upgrade to at least 1gb of ram. There is a slow hard rive in this notebook (4200 rpm) and you would want to have as much system memory as possible to keep swapping to a minimum. The combination of a 4200rpm drive, a video card grabbing 64mb of your memory, and only having 256mb of ram to start with would be brutal.

I'll take a look around and see if I can link some better options for you. Have you thought about dell or hp? I know they both offer payment plans.

Thanks! Yeah gaming won't be that important for me. Basically it's just a time waster between classes 😉 So I'll definitely be looking at older generation games. In fact I'm an abandonware fan. I have a Geforce 7800 GTX in my home system for new games 🙂

Oh and in case you missed it, these are Canadian prices.

 

[mparr1708]

gah yeah I did miss that. I'm going to be no help at recommending where to shop then. I would still check the larger OEMs though. Most of them offer financing and I'm sure they ship to Canada.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: mparr1708
gah yeah I did miss that. I'm going to be no help at recommending where to shop then. I would still check the larger OEMs though. Most of them offer financing and I'm sure they ship to Canada.

I've been loking at the dell.ca web site and it seems that on my current sallery I could actually fairly easily afford a $2000 laptop and have most of my money left over for school, on their 48 month plan.

 

[TheCanuck]

You already said that the laptop isn't really needed (you've got a desktop), besides you won't be taking notes in class on it (too much of a pain in the ass, noisy etc). Personally I'd save my money for food and beer -- those are necessities when you're going to University! The campus is going to have more than enough computers that you can hop onto if you want to check email, do a quick write up etc -- just get a cheap flash drive to store files onto.

Not sure if they've got open wifi on your campus either. If they do then a laptop might come in handy to cruise the net...but again you can always just go to a campus computer centre for that. If I was looking for a cheap laptop for school I would look at a used P3-mobile with a 12inch screen then -- it'd be light, inexpensive and do what you want.

A 48month plan for a laptop for college is really a waste of money. You'll be kicking yourself for getting it after the initial "cool" factor has worn off.

 

[Locut0s]

Originally posted by: TheCanuck
You already said that the laptop isn't really needed (you've got a desktop), besides you won't be taking notes in class on it (too much of a pain in the ass, noisy etc). Personally I'd save my money for food and beer -- those are necessities when you're going to University! The campus is going to have more than enough computers that you can hop onto if you want to check email, do a quick write up etc -- just get a cheap flash drive to store files onto.

Not sure if they've got open wifi on your campus either. If they do then a laptop might come in handy to cruise the net...but again you can always just go to a campus computer centre for that. If I was looking for a cheap laptop for school I would look at a used P3-mobile with a 12inch screen then -- it'd be light, inexpensive and do what you want.

A 48month plan for a laptop for college is really a waste of money. You'll be kicking yourself for getting it after the initial "cool" factor has worn off.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I've decided against getting a more expensive laptop on any type of interest accruing financial plan. Instead I'm still looking at still getting the laptop in my original post. Futureshop has a no interest plan where you can pay it off over 6 months. My university is WiFi enabled, almost everywhere in fact. As for note taking that depends on the class and the software app I use. Taking my fathers laptop to school today I found that using plain old MS Word was actually quite a lot faster and produced neater results in my computing classes but was more of a pain in my math classes. However with some customization, eg hot-key'ing certain symbols and using a program with an integrated doodle pad, I can see taking notes even in these classes.