Laptop

I'm going to look at laptops this week and don't want to spend over $500. Any suggestions?

Thanks

Wifes office bought a Toshiba at Best Buy a couple of months back-$470ish, with windows 7. It does everything they ask of it.

I recently bought an HP at Walmart and am quite satisfied with it. It was about $550

I did not buy extended warranty.

The last Best Buy story I heard was from the lady who took her laptop in for some small problem to get that fixed and her battery swapped out for a bad one while they had it.
It would not surprise me at all.

Anywhere other than Best Buy. Just my opinion from pass experience.

We just bought two new laptops - one for $300 and one for $400. Used them both alongside my son's $700 laptop and they worked just as well and fast for anything we wanted to do.

Depends on what you need it to do. I just bought an extra Laptop for $299 from Walmart, which I consider an excellent buy. Toshiba L55D-S5976, with 2.1 GHz Sempron processor, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB hard-drive, DVD burner, wireless LAN, three ver. 2 USB ports, multi card-readers, etc.

Also got a Compaq Presario CQ62-209WM for $399. Has 3 gigs RAM, 250 GB hard-drive, wireless LAN, DVD burner, three USB ver. 2 ports, AMD dual-core 2.1 GHz processor,etc.

Don't fall for the overload of hype attached to many laptops that are priced much higher - unless you've got an above-average or specific need not usually found in lower-priced units.

Watch for one-day, free-shipping, no-tax specials and buy when the buying is good.

Fooling around a bit, I stuck a USB digital TV tuner into the new $299 laptop and it works great as a portable TV.

I just bought an HP because Ive owned several AND NONE HAD ANY PROBLEMS. Knock on wood

I found the best prices at Office Depot or Staples, watch their weekly sale bills.

I bought an HP Laptop,,,,,,500 GB HD,,,,,,,4 Meg RAM,,,,,,17 inch scren,,,,,Intel i3 Chipset,,,,,,HDMI, VGA, USB, LAN, SD Card receptacles, Wireless, Web Cam and Mic AT OFFICE DEPOT for %450 as they gave me $100 trade on an olddddd ancient slowwwwwwwww laptop. I couldnt beat that at Best Buy or anywhere else, no one else would take my my 7 yr old slow worn out puter, let alone allow me $100 bucks.

Of course if you only need 250 or 320 GB HD and 2 or 3 MEG of RAM and a small screen and less outputs, then you can drop down to the $300 range. ITS WHAT YOU REALLY NEED THAT MATTERS MOST, heck you can even get down to $200 for a refurbished with less HD and RAM so if that meets your needs GO FOR IT

John T A very well satisfied HP user

Last year I began to think about the need for portability for scanning old documents in courthouses for genealogy.

An article I read at that time stated that the failure rate time period of laptop computers was about three years.

The article also spoke of careful shopping and quality which generally comes with a higher price tag. In essence the lower the price of the laptop the quicker it failed.

To a point I guess it is somewhat about the quality of parts that go into a laptop, better ones costing more. I don"t know that I agree with that however.

Can"t say that I agree with the article but thought I"d mention it for your consideration to possibly aid in your own research.

It all depends on what your intended usage is. If you are going to actually be doing a lot of moving around where vibration is a major consideration, I would seriously look at the newer solid-state hard drives which have no moving parts. To keep the cost down I would get a good quality used laptop and get a SS drive installed in it.
My personal choice would be to stay with XP for the operating system.
Just my 2 cents worth.

ACER makes a good one.

I've had both good and bad experiences with Best Buy, but the bad has outweighed the good, and I don't think I'll give them another chance to balance the scales.

Fool me once. . .
Paul

ACER!!

Got two of the little rascals and they do just fine.

Allan

ACER!!

Got two of the little rascals and they do just fine.

Allan

Considering that you can buy a new 500GB laptop hard-drive for $50-$60, seems occasional parts failure isn't a huge thing to worry about. Since the hard-drive is partly mechanical, it's often the first thing to go -and they rarely go compleletly all bad at once.

I agree with the XP choice when possible. But, I'm now reluctantly using Vista on some new machines. Vista will support many older programs,whereas Windows 7 "Home Premium" will not. And, even if you spend extra money and get Windows 7 Pro, it still cannot always run programs that the cheapest Vista or XP can. Windows 7 Pro can only do it if it's got the correct hardware and suppports "Virtual Machine."

As to the solid-state hard-drives. I'd be MORE nervous using them, not less. We've got several lap-tops that have been dragged all around the woods for years. My wife uses them for home-schooling, while I'm cutting. We've had no failures worth mentioning. I just had to put a new HD in her 3 year old Toshiba Satellite. Stuck her's in the fridge, booted and cloned. Stuck in a new 500 GB drive for $50.

It is very rare when a hard-drive fails completely, all at once. Hard-drives are partly mechancial and often give warnings when they start to fail during the boot-up stage. Many times, all you have to do is stick a lap top in the fridge, bang it, then boot it up and save all the data.

Electronic drives - if they crash - lose everything, instantly. And, condsidering the price right now? A 1-gig solid-state drive can cost over $200-$300. I can buy a new conventional hard-drive at 500 GB for $50. I can buy a new 1.5 TB drive for $150.

I am amazed at the relatively inexpensive price for computer parts these days.

This morning on Woot site they had a solid state drive for $199. Not real large compared to hard drives as it is 128 gig. Coupled with one of the current inexpensive external hard drives it should have plenty of function to it.

Would there be much failure to such a solid state device?

I"ve been viewing laptop repair videos and it should be quite easy to remove and replace about any part that fails.

Seems time will tell. My experience with other types of solid-state storage is - when it goes it goes instantly. I've had several 8 GB thumb-drives crash and lose everything - with no warning.

I find conventional hard-drives to be very reliable, considering they are partly mechancial. Kind of a hybrid of the old floppy drive disk and an old record-player with an arm that reaches out to play a record.

Considering that a 20 MB hard-drive was once considered HUGE, and we now have 2 Terrabyte drives for $200, seems storage is amazingly cheap.

My wife's first lap-top finally got so slow we stopped using it. 7 year old HP Compaq with a single 1.6 processor and 500 MB of RAM. I just stuck a new 500GB hard-drive into it (for $50) and 4 GB of RAM (for another $50), plus a new DVD burner for $25 and it runs almost as fast as our newest lap-tops now. We're going to use it as a portable "file cabinet" and TV when we travel.

HP is off my list. My HP laptop refuses to boot. HP says it's a known problem but refuses to fix it unless I give them $300.00. Instead I put the money toward a new Dell laptop. No more HP for me!

My Toshiba that I got at BestBuy works great. $330.00 with Windows7 Intel Celeron 900, 2GB DDR2 Ram 250GB HDD 15.6" HD Screen. Of course,I got this on sale.

Yep, I just bought a number of refurbished IBM "Thinkpads" under the name of Levono. My cheapest was about $200 for a T41 with only a 40 GB hard drive, 512 MB Memory but dual core processors and Windows XP Pro that I will use on the job talking to customer equipment using Procomm, storing everything on external Terabyte HDs anyway. Paid about $300 each for the T30 that I'm typing on now and one that I gave my mother that can't stand her new HP Tower running Windows 7. Both have 80 GB HDs, rest same as the T41, except Pentium 4. I picked up a T60e that has 320 GB HD, Dual Core processors, 1.2 GB memory. ALL are running Windows XP that walks all over Windows 7, but Microsoft is about to stop supporting XP, so I just brought them up to Service Pack 3 with all of the patches and will keep them updated...and cloned, because Microsoft is about to stop supporting XP.

I've got a HD for the T30s that has an OS called Ubuntu, which says its a "Human version of Linux", and thats a strange critter. I thought about overwriting it with XP, but think that I'm going to play with it as it is and see what kind of support I can find for it. Trying to deal with Linux commands is an experience and a half, but this Ubuntu seems to dumb it down to human use that falls somewhere between Windows and MAC.

Anyway, back to your question, I will take XP over 7 any day of the week, and just gave a brand new (month or so old) HP laptop running 7...away to someone that I don't like so much. They thanked me for the gift and I welcomed them, but walked away laughing "You will so get yours when you turn that piece of crap on, you rotten...".

Mark

Thats Lenovo, not Levono.

Mark