Best Cheap PC Laptop?

[Tom Scharpling]

Hello people -

After 18 months, I'm seriously close to pulling the plug on the great Mac experiment that went on in my household. My G4 laptop is going wacky on me yet again - the screen occasionally gets covered with digitized red streaks, and it's just too annoying and unreliable. The DVD player is pretty much unwatchable now as well.

If I have to bring this hunk of crud in for a repair, I'm saying goodbye to it for at least a week. And I JUST CAN'T COUNT ON IT ANYMORE. It let me down. For shame, Apple.

So I'm thinking about buying a PC laptop that I can write on and use for internet and general lugging around. I would leave my Mac at home for iTunes and whatnot.

Any suggestions? I would want it to be 1) cheap or cheap-ish, 2) small and light, and 3) relatively reliable.

Thanks for your opinions!

Tom.

[venison88]

I hear ya. I'm shopping for a new one too. I got one of those Toshiba Satellite U-205 series, and while as a machine its ok, being its a dual core, (careful of that. you want something called duo-core), its eats batteries bigtime. At max battery saving power usage, with the optical drive running, and one core running, i can only get useful 2 hours and 45 minutes out of it. Yet other people say they can get up to 5 hours from their brands. Careful shopping is in order. Oh, and i dont know if this is a standard, but watch the hard drive speed too. High cpu power and memory doesnt seem to be much good if you're hdd is only running at 5400 rpm. See if the 7200 rpm drives are available.  (Also, you might want to see if your laptop's os can be retrofitted with XP. Vista sucks so much ass. Quite a few program compatability issues, but thats another rant thread).

[moonshake]

I got a very good deal ($800 w/tax) on a fairly powerful Dell Vostro 1500 laptop a only few weeks ago on the Dell Small Business site. I assume they might have even better deals now. They aren't very light but are pretty reliable. I'd recommend Windows XP instead of Vista.

[Andy]

We had terrible problems with our HP.

I have a dell at work that's light and has a nice size screen.  Also, Dell sometimes has deals where they have 30% off for a day.

[Martin]

I've had an Acer Notebook for about a year (15,4" screen, 80gb HD, 1.67 ghz processor...). Got it for roughly $1000 then (in Sweden, don't know about how much it costs in America), but it's cheaper (and better) now.

Laptops get old fast due to the wear and tear, and I'm lugging mine along wherever I go, so I'm giving it one more year, tops, before upgrading. That said, I'm very pleased with it. The battery sucks, but it's the same for all laptops. Other than that, it's great - and I can do whatever I want with it, no real restrictions (apart from playing the latest PC games, but that doesn't bother me). I do all my work on it, play all my music, watch movies, and so on. Work the intarnets.

One thing that annoys me when buying a brand laptop are all the presets that come with it - all the small applications that clog up your desktop and stuff. Horrible. I wish for once I could get a machine with a clean Windows install on it. Acer is no better or worse than anyone in that department.

[KickTheBobo]

if you want a cheapo workhorse for internet, email & word processing, just buy a refurbished notebook from tigerdirect, newegg or ebay. from my experience, no one brand is better than another. you could buy a $2800 Sony Vaio and it could crap out after a year or you could have an Emachines that gives you a decade of performance.

my advice: get 512MB ram (although 1 Gig would be nice) and a mobile processor. If it doesn't seem "fast" enough, don't be afraid to throw another stick of RAM in there (easiest DIY upgrade). I wouldn't worry about harddrive space because you can buy a 500 GB external USB drive for all those movies and music and whatnot (also for backup).

look for a battery life of 5-6 hours. don't go any bigger than a 15" screen.

DO NOT GET A LAPTOP WITH VISTA PREINSTALLED. It will be a nightmare. XP Pro is fine.

Also, I would worry too much about a burner. If it has one, then fine, if not, just use cheap and reliable USB sticks if you need to transfer info.

I cannot stress BACKUP enough. I do my whole drive every night. My coworker brought his G4 tower in yesterday for me to have a look at because it was making funny sounds. Well, he's pretty much screwed because there was a mechanical failure in the harddrive, and it's unreadable.

Unfortunately, he had EVERYTHING from the past 5 or so years on it. all his photos, portfolio stuff, music. all gone. that is, unless he is willing to shell out $1000+ for data recovery.

[chrisfoll577]

DO NOT GET A LAPTOP WITH VISTA PREINSTALLED. It will be a nightmare. XP Pro is fine.

i second this. even though i am a mac person i have a few friends on windows who upgraded and are constantly battling vista.

[Gilly]

Yeah but once Vista gets its kinks worked out which it will for the most part, you're left with an inferior OS. I haven't had Vista for that long, but I haven't had problems with it and it does run much faster. The only thing I've noticed is it seems to take longer to boot. I just don't see why you wouldn't get Vista unless you are getting a great deal on a computer with XP. I don't think Microsoft is going to let Vista fail...It's not like it's the new Millenium Edition. Vista seems to be very stable and extremely secure. It's just a different interface that needs some getting used to.

[buffcoat]

I can recommend some of the lower end (13" screen) VAIOs.  My friend got one and she loves it - I think it was about $1300 all told 6 months ago.

[Tom Scharpling]

Here's a thought - should I get a Mac desktop, then let my G4 be my backup? I do like Mac, and since Microsoft doesn't have its act together, should I just stick with Apple?

It looks like its a bad video card, by the way. I took it to the always awesome Apple Store, and one of the geniuses working there helped write up a case order for me. Now I just have to find a week that I can afford to be without a computer.

Waah.


Tom.

[bruce]

Go for the MAC desktop Tom for the simple reason that they are just workhorses that will last. I mean my old imac was about seven years old, and was still going strong. Just needed to replace it for various reasons.

[Tom Scharpling]

I wonder how big of a Mac desktop I would need. If I was going to, for example, hopefully edit video down the road for some projects. I've always planned on getting a full-on desktop to do all kinds of stuff on.

Anybody have any idears to how big/strong of a computer I should get?

And what's the deal with refurbished Macs?

Thanks -

Tom.

[Gilly]

Your going to need somewhat of a high end desktop if you are going to do video editing (unless it's just light editing). A laptop probably won't cut it. I don't know much about it, but from what I've heard you need some pretty heavy duty specs to do any serious video editing.

[bruce]

Actually all the desktop macs can do video editing with the pre installed program of imovie. You best bet Tom is to go to a store and tell the people there exactly what you are looking for. All the new ones they just put out can do what you probably need. But if your doing some serious Film Work then go for the Mac Pro.

Refurbished macs sound great but I always got the feeling that I was looking at used cars.

[bookem_dan-o]

Sticking with Apple is always a good decision, unless you're into playing videogames on your computer.

I'd recommend that you buy either a Macbook or a Macbook Pro. The Macbook's are smaller than the Macbook Pro's, but at the expense of the quality of the graphics card, which may impact you if you plan on playing games or running some video and animation applications like Apple's Motion or Adobe After Effects. But either machine is more than adequate for editing video (and I say that as a professional video editor who owns one of those ridiculous 8-core MacPro desktops with 16GB of RAM). Even a G4 Powerbook is good enough for most video editing tasks. I cut over 40 weekly TV shows on my trusty old 12" Powerbook G4, and that machine is slower than Gorch's Rascal. My Macbook Pro is 3-4 times faster than that Powerbook, just for perspective.

My biggest recommendation is that you max out the RAM in any laptop you buy. That, combined with the size and speed of your harddrive, are the 2 biggest factors in laptop performance. The CPU speed, relatively speaking, don't mean shit if your harddrive is slow and youre constantly running out of RAM. If you buy one of the new Macbook Pros which Apple released within the last few months, you can install 4 GB of RAM in it, which makes a world of difference if you're editing video, or just doing general multitasking. My first generation Macbook Pro can only have 2GB RAM max, and as you can see in my menubar from the Post Your desktop thread, my RAM usage is always pegged out. I constantly long for 2 additional gigs of RAM.

Speaking of which, DO NOT buy your RAM from Apple. Just spec out your machine at the Apple Store with the least amount of RAM possible, then purchase your RAM from a 3rd party vendor, such as Crucial or TransIntl. Apple royally rips you off in this department. I saved almost $3000 just by buying my 16GB RAM upgrade from TransIntl, instead of Apple!

The biggest advantage to buying a new Intel based Mac, besides the superiority and stability of Mac OS X, is that you can run WindowsXP/Vista on the same machine, either by installing it natively onto it's own harddrive partition using Boot Camp (which requires a reboot everytime you want to run Windows), or right within OS X, using a "virtualization" program such as Parallels Desktop. The speed of Windows using something like Parallels is just as fast as a "real" PC for most things. In fact, I used to edit the Best Show podcasts on my Macbook Pro using Sound Forge (Windows only) running on Parallels.

Refurbished Macs are just as good as "new" Macs in my (and the majority of others) experience. They come with the same 1 year warranty as new Macs, although I ALWAYS recommend purchasing the Applecare warranty extension with Mac laptops. It's one of the rare cases when a manufacturers "extended warranty" offer is worth it.