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by Godless Heathen on September 25th, 2008

Godless Heathen

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I need to buy a new laptop for school, work, and entertainment, e.g. music, movies, games and to burn cd's and dvd's. I looked into a mac but to get what I want it was like $2,400, a bit ridiculous if you ask me. So what's the best laptop for the money?

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  • by dead leaves raked in a pile on September 26th, 2008

    dead leaves raked in a pile

    OK that's good. There's plenty of good machines there. I wanted to be sure you were not going to use it for anything really demanding. Like graphic design or video production.

    From what you said, the games will provide the biggest load. Any laptop will be able to handle the rest of the demands.

    At that price range, I expected every laptop to come with at least 2 GB of ram. Vista needs that to run properly. i was wrong - Alienware $1500 laptops only have 1 GB.

    And the biggest bottleneck as I see it for games is the video. Fast processors are a dime a dozen, everyone puts likes to show fast clock speeds, but for games it's the video. Most embedded videos are not up to serious gaming.

    I looked at Alienware, from the Dell website. They have one model starting at $1500 but with 1 GB but it did hace an 8800 GT video card but with only 256 MB... you'll need to upgrade both, I suspect, to get good gaming performance. There are lots of upgrades available and none of them all that cheap. Gaming Dells started much higher than Alienware.

    I also looked at Lenovo.com, formerly IBM. They have a laptop at $1345 that looks good to me. 4 GB ram, 250 GB hard drive, 24X dual layer DVD writer, and ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 512MB video. That DVD writer is faster than most (all?) PC drives I see advertised! I do not know the Radeon HD2600 so you might like to check that out.

    The Lenovo IdeaPad Y710-40542AU looks good to me

    But 5 years? no matter how fast it is now, it's going to be slow in 5 years and lacking all the new features and quite possibly no way to integrate them. You may be a bit optimistic with that target. However, I looked at Lenovo because IBM was right at the top of reliability and service surveys

    Hope you find one to suit your needs

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  • by dead leaves raked in a pile on September 25th, 2008

    dead leaves raked in a pile

    well you've ruled out a mac, and you've ruled out $2400, but i have no idea what you do have in mind. You also don't say what sort of games you play, which will have a big effect on the video support you need.

    Apart from that, any laptop will do most anything you ask, except you don't say what your job is, and you don't say what you're studying. What you're going to actually do wit it can make a big difference.

    give us a chance and we might be able to help

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  • by ItisANDitisnt on April 28th, 2012

    ItisANDitisnt

    Any PC will beat a Mac in price.

    But you may hate windows 7 with a passion.

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