ID:185521
 Jan 11 2006, 2:45 pm
|
|
Well, I was wondering what type of laptop I should get.My dad wants to buy me one.Anyways, we already picked the brand.And its an HP. We just dont know what type of HP laptop.Theres so many choices.The price range were looking for is about $400-$650.Could anyone help me out ?
| |
|
Jan 11 2006, 3:24 pm
|
|
Smoko
 |
Well, get the one with the best bang for your buck. Dont forget to look at reviews.
|
Laptops can be pretty pricey. What are you wanting to do with it?
You can get pretty cheap, bare-minimum laptops for just word processing and the like...while laptops on the whole aren't really built for gaming or running heavy resource draining programs (in relation to desktops, anyway), you can get some pretty darn good ones (they're expensive though). | |
Well, be careful with HP, I have never had luck with them. Infact, I was working on a dead HP laptop up at work today. Dead Harddrive and believed to be dead motherboard. Acer has some good deals, look at newegg.com. Remember, you get what you pay for, not just in power, but in duribility and lifespan. I would gladly pay an extra $100-200 just to be sure that my laptop will work in 2 years, and be somewhat functionable.
| |
if you are expecting to play games (think HalfLife2 level of graphics), then a $650 laptop may be too cheap. a decent 3D graphic card for a laptop can cost nearly half that price, or more.
if high-end 3D-gaming is not *so* important, two key factors for a laptop should be kept in mind: battery life and memory. laptops should run *atleast* 2.5 hours on battery power (i hear 4 hours is becoming a good standard). that means something like a Centrino-based processor or one of the new AMD equivalents. the more memory you have, the less need the system has in using the hard-drive as virtual memory (or swap-file in linux-speak). If you can get 1GB of RAM installed, you laptop will run longer since using the harddisk for virtual RAM uses up battery power. at minimum, get 512MB of RAM. another thing to consider is wireless access. if you are in an area (or plan to travel in such areas) where wireless access points are widely available (cafes, universities, airports, hotels, etc.) then a good wireless standard is worthwhile. personally, i would rather get a laptop without wireless built-in, as this allows me to choose a PCMCIA card with good features and power (also easier to replace if it breaks). | |
