I'm looking at laptops. I can understand pretty much everything they tell you in the specs, but I don't read any trade magazines or anything to educate me about what's the best. For example...what's the difference between a Celeron M processor and a Core Duo? I see a difference in cache speed but I don't know what that means, nah'msayin?

Any general advice would be appreciated. So far I've looked at Dells and Toshibas, the Toshibas look pretty good. I don't wanna spend more than like 800.

Turion64 x2 processor would be good or an Intel Core Duo. I have never had luck with lagging Celerons. Don't forget about Gateway laptops, which deals can be found for at BB and CC.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2006 05:29PM by pgens.

I just bought a Dell XPS M1210, 2GB RAM, DVD RW and love it.

Perhaps I should add that I use my home computer very little. I use it for email/internet, movies and music, and that's about it.

from the 757 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Perhaps I should add that I use my home computer
> very little. I use it for email/internet, movies
> and music, and that's about it.

are you looking to use this as a portable machine or just pluged in all the time and used like a normal desktop computer?


"the wisdom of the wise will perish, the intelligence of the intelligent will vanish."

from the 757 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Perhaps I should add that I use my home computer
> very little. I use it for email/internet, movies
> and music, and that's about it.


That said, I would just go to BB and get the highest memory/hd combo of either Intel Core Duo or Turoin you can find in either Toshiba or Gateway (my own preference is gateway... sweet 15.4 inch widescreen display for your budget). Any of them are going to cover what you want to do. You may want to hold off until January or so when the Vista pre-loaded machines come out. Then at least you know you'll have hardware to handle it. If you don't care about Vista then anything with Windows Media Center will cover you.

I have to chime in with the macbook recommendation.

(my own preference is gateway... sweet 15.4 inch widescreen display for your budget).

I bought one of these Gateway laptops today, 2GB memory and 160 gig HD, I haven't played with it too much yet but I already love it.

It is nice. The only problem I ran into was having the "Media Center" portion of the OS suddenly stop working when I applied the Windows Update for it. Took me a while to figure out why I couldn't play DVDs until I backed out that update.

I haven't messed with the Media Center stuff, I don't know much about it. I'm an iTunes/iPod user. Is this Media Center thing really worth messing around with? I'm assuming that it performs a similar function as iTunes, which I've never had problems with. Any benefits to switching to Media Center?

Media center can record live video while using the built-in self-updating scheduling software, essentially making it tivo. If you have video capture that function works well.

not similar to itunes at all IMO. Itunes is geared around selling you shit, media center is geared towards helping you utilize entertainment technologies.

But media center does have a long list of notorious crashes and bugs.

Gravis Wrote:

> are you looking to use this as a portable machine
> or just pluged in all the time and used like a
> normal desktop computer?


Just use it at home. I should keep up with my own thread a little better.

Best use of your laptop is for pron and for exposing people online.