Help selecting a new laptop?
I have been out of the PC hardware race for a long time now; since I bought my Dell P133 way back in my days of living in the dorm. At present I have a decent Toshiba Satellite laptop (P4, low- 1.xGhz, 1/2GB shared memory, 40GB hard-drive)that I use at home. For what I use it for at home (surfing web, blog, personal finance, etc) its plenty of PC. I don’t game anymore hence the reason I settled for the shared memory to get the lower price.
But now I am getting the itch for a smaller more portable system. The present Toshiba rarely leave the desk it sits on at home. I want a laptop on the scale of the 12 inch Apple G4 (yeah I have looked at the Apple don’t anyone fall off their chair, especially Andy). But to be honest I am completely overwhelmed by the number of options out there on the market. I like Toshiba I have owned two of them and they have both been tanks, both in weight and reliability. I want something lighter with wireless so I can surf easily when traveling. I am going to finally get a cable modem at home and while I am doing that I will put a wireless hub at home.
The iBook is appealing simply because of the fact that I know I am going to get good hardware and there are less options to dig through. I do worry a little about converting over to the OS X and how my poor XP brain will cope with it.
So if I would love to here your suggesting for a highly portable laptop. If you have a good link to reviews and/or some info to help narrow the field of choices down I would greatly appreciate it. And you MAC users please try to sell me on the G4.
Thanks
Homis
February 21st, 2006 at 6:13 pm
If you want to buy the OS X machine, you should do that. You’re pretty tech-savvy, so I don’t think you’ll have any problems switching (it’s all in the amount of persistence you have).
In addition, I personally think that now is not the right time to be buying a PC. With Vista coming out later this year, and the majority of computers on the market not being fully compatible with it yet will probably make you regret not having waited a few months before buying one.
That being said, if you are interested in buying a Windows notebook, I would buy either a Fujitsu, a Sony, an HP, or a Toshiba (I have no opinion on Lenovo or Acer). Stay away from Dell! Gateway was making a big comeback, but they are having some problems right now, so I am taking a wait and see approach. I love AMD, but they are making some really crappy portable chipsets right now. You really want some Centrino variant (unless you can get a huge discount).
My personal recommendation for sub-notebooks right now are the Fujitsus. They have a line of machines (like the Lifebook S6240) that have 13″ screens, and weigh only 4lbs (most competitors in this weight only have 12″ screens). The optical drive is in a modular bay, which is great for multiple reasons - Roger has one of these, and he loves it because he can replace the optical drive with a 2nd battery so that he can use his laptop for an entire flight, and it also makes it easier to be serviced (and I would say that optical drives are the most likely component to fail these days). If you are interested in a Fujitsu, I recommend buying through Newegg.com.
Fujitsu also has the S7000 series which have 14″ screens, and are only a little heavier.
If you’re buying a PC or a Mac, the resellers universally rip you off for things like memory upgrades. You can do it yourself for a lot cheaper.
That being said, if you are interested in buying an iBook, buy that. In the short run, it’ll take some adjusting, but in the long run, you’ll have less headaches. Plus, it’s got the Unix cachet.
February 22nd, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Homis, you can’t go wrong with an iBook for what you want. They’re tough, performant, full-featured, have great battery life, and have excellent wireless reception. The 12.1-inch model weighs 4.9 pounds with battery. One downside is that it only has a 1024×768 display. Still, you might want to wait for the Intel version (might have a higher-resolution display, too). If you do get a Mac, be aware that you will have to learn a new paradigm – luckily other Mac users are very friendly. Email or call me know if you have any specific questions or concerns.
Side Note. We’re “Mac users,” not “Media Access Control (MAC) users.” If you become one (i.e. drink the Koolaid), you’ll understand.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Steve Jobs better be cutting you a check as we speak.
February 22nd, 2006 at 11:55 pm
Thanks guys! Andy do you really think the Intel version will be better hardware? I fear buying the first of the Intel version would be like buying the first model year of a new car model, lemonville. I have also heard that you can get a pretty good deal on Mac with a college ID. Is that deal still going on? Any details?
March 1st, 2006 at 12:23 pm
I
drank the koolaidswitched to a Mac about 2 years ago, and didn’t find the switch too difficult. Particularly if you’re comfortable using a unix command line, the majority of the new things you’d have to learn are fairly easy, because it is a pretty well designed user interface. Once I got used to how the Mac worked, I started to not enjoy interacting with my Windows machine, because so many things just took more steps or involved more waiting for the computer to catch up with me.As for the educational discount, I don’t remember exactly how it worked but it is a significant (in the region of 10%) discount, so it’s worth figuring out. Somehow on apple.com there’s a way of getting into the special educational store.