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Parents looking to get new laptop, any deals lately?

K

KingstonU

Golden Member
My parents want to replace an aging Pentium!!! - 900Mhz (at home) and a Duron (at work) with one laptop.

My mother wants to use it for things like:

- QuickBooks
- Excel
- Word
- Web Browsing/Chatting

and also PhotoShop and scrapbooking stuff when she has more time in a couple of years. So these old machines need to be replaced soon, but she also wants something that will be good enough in a couple years for photo editing.

So they are looking for:

- Decent sized screen (like 17") with good colors or whatever
- 1Gb-2Gb RAM
- Decent Dual core
- Decent Hard drive
- Reliable
- Less than $1,500

Size and weight are not important. She just wants the occasional portability and will likely use a separate keyboard and mouse with it most of the time.

Any recommendations? When is a good time to buy? Any good deals or should she wait till Back2School deals show up? All recommendations appreciated. Thank you.

 
I would recommend not going out of your way looking for a machine with 2GB, it is ridiculously inexpensive to buy a 2GB kit for laptops, whereas if you go to Dell, or HP or somesuch, upgrading from 1GB to 2GB is generally more expensive than buying the RAM aftermarket. And replacing the RAM is wicked easy.

You are fortunate in that most of what you have specified as the software is not particularly GPU intensive. It isn't even that CPU intensive, just about every single CPU being sold today will run those apps just fine. RAM is what you will need, and I've already discussed that.
 
I've never replaced the RAM on a laptop. Is there a guide on how to do this? Does/can it make for reliability issues?

The current PC can do what they are doing now, but my parents get frustrated with how slow they are as you can imagine. So the faster the better and the longer it will go without being frustrating again as long as it is less then or close to $1,500.

What is a decent GPU for responsive, FAST photo editing with PhotoShop CS3, what about CPU (I don't really follow laptop CPUs)?
 
really any GPU will run Photoshop. That really doesn't hog GPU, it is the RAM and CPU that you will care about. And just about any Core 2 or Turion X2 will get the job done just fine (so long as you get something with 1.8GHz or better, don't grab one of the ULV Core 2s)

Replacing the RAM is trivially difficult. There is a panel on the bottom of every windows machine (Apple has their's behind the battery) usually held on by 2 screws. It is usually clearly marked that this is the RAM compartment. You remove the old RAM, put the new RAM in and turn the computer back on. Easy Peasy.
 
Most times they put in matched DIMMs into the machine when they send it out, so that 1GB is 2 512MB sticks. You will want to get a matched pair of 1GB sticks to bring yourself up to 2GB. Some systems seem to suffer from running unmatched DIMMs, so that I why I recommend that you replace both instead of going for 1.5GB RAM mixed.

Past that though, just make sure that the RAM that you buy is compatible with the system. For Core and Core 2 machines, you need DDR2-667 PC5300 SO-DIMMs, not positive what Turion X2s take, but i think it is the same.
 
Yes if they are both DDR2 533 or 667mhz. Make sure the included RAM with the notebook is 667mhz and then upgrade with a 1gb stick of the same speed
 
um, dont even worry about 2gb at all, you dont need it. my x2 turion vista laptop is only 1gb and runs absolutely great, and even my vista htpc with a 2.4ghz p4 and 850xt runs well with just 1gb. games suffer a bit, yes, but anything else i dont even notice a difference from my 2gb main pc. vista isnt as much of a memory hog as it appears to be, it runs fine with 1gb ram even though its always using most of it.
 
To be honest, any computer will suit your needs. As been said to death, the one thing that you're looking at is RAM. If possible, find a tech-savvy friend to replace it for you, it's not a very complicated task but it'd be helpful if someone with a little experience does it.

Dells are pretty good for the price, if you look on dealcatcher.com they usually have coupons and other deals. Right now there's a $300 off a $1300+ Inspiron, so for what you want you could get for $1000 or so, with webcam and other features (and your own choice of laptop color). It comes with 2gb RAM by default, as well.
 
Inspirons are alright, but Latitudes are just about as cheap but with much better build quality (or so I'm told, all I know firsthand is Inspiron build quality, and it ain't pretty).

Like everyone else has said, get the minimum spec of memory then go to Newegg and pick up a 2GB kit, 533 or 667mhz should both be about the same price so go 667.
 
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