Guide to Laptops

[Frightcrawler]

Okay, this thread is to help people (including myself) to help on deciding which laptop to buy.
Give information such as:

-which has the best touchpad, keyboard, etc.? the worst?
-quality of casing
-reliability of support
-anything else you've got
-certain good stuff (such as M10)
-processor

I'm hope this will really take off and many will benefit from it.

 

[TazExprez]

The best laptops out there right now are the the IBM T41p and the R50p. They cost $3449+ and come with the M10. If you want to spend considerably less, you could get a Dell 8600 with the M10 later this month. I will be doing the latter.

 

[ai42]

You get what you pay for. Business class laptops (ie Inspiron = home Latitude = business) are built a much higher quality. I've owned about a dozen laptops in the past 3 years and by far every business class laptop has been far superior than any home laptop in almost every respect (outside specs, and cpu/ram/hdd are usually very much the same).

I really like the new generation HP/Compaq touchpads
Almost any super slim laptop (1 inch thick or less) is built with magneisum/aluminum LCD back casing (not sure about the Inspiron 300m). Serious plus they can take a beating and they don't bend/flex at all.
Gateway I think has good support, but overall I was very disappointed with build quality/bang for buck ratio
Centrino (or more specifically Pentium M) rocks! OMG if you want a truely mobile processor it is the only choice.

 

[viper118]

also, another important factor is the screen.. there are generally 3 different type of screens available.. xga, sxga, uxga.. there's also widescreen avaiable but it depends on the model that you are looking at.. the uxga is definately the best looking screen and has the highest resolution, however, the text is quite small and you definately need to check it out before you purchase this screen type.. it's best to get a feel of how each screen looks first since it is very hard to describe in words about each different screen type.