Looking for a Laptop...

[salz]

I'm helping a friend's dad buy a laptop for my friend (it's a surprise), and his dad is willing to spend around $3600 (if I only had that kind of money to spend

). He went to powernotebooks.com and found a huge laptop (it kind of looks like the alienware laptop) with a pentium 4 2.4Ghz processor, 1 gig of RAM, ATI Radeon 9000, etc. etc.. In other words, the works. My question is for $3600 what would you guys recommend? The biggest problem I see with this laptop is the size and weight. I know my friend would want something that is easy to manage and she's pretty small, so the lighter the better. So what do you guys thihnk? Is there a laptop with the perfect balance of size and speed? I would say size is more important because I don't think she will do much on her computer besides instant messenger, word, excel, and internet explorer. Maybe a game here and there, but nothing that is going to make the system work very hard. Thanks for the help.

 

[XBoxLPU]

Maybe an Ibook ?

 

[salz]

bump

 

[Mikki]

Dell makes some rockin laptops, esp. if ya got the money, that's my recommendation...

 

[Drewpy]

With that kind of cash to blow, I'd look at some of IBM's laptops. Some of them are really light like their X series. Although I don't think they come with large screen (14" and below... I think)

The IBM T series are kind of mid range, not the best features/lowest weight. But a good mix of the two.

It's kind of a love/hate thing with the IBM pointing stick though.

Dell used to (maybe still does) make a model of laptop with both pointing stick, and trackpad built in...

oh well, I've gone on for long enough.

 

[BaboonGuy]

The apple g4 1ghz tiBook

 

[DaveSimmons]

Dell high-end Inspiron 8xxx series, with big screen, mobile P4 (not desktop P4), Radeon graphics, and extra memory (512 MB total). Probably closer to $3000 than $3600. Maybe give the friend a $500 Amazon gift cert to buy software, DVDs, music, etc.