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Need suggestions on buying a laptop
MrBond:
I looked at Circuit City, dell, staples, and officemax.
Luxury:
I'd recommend a Pentium M processor. They were specifically designed for laptops. They have the best battery life, and are powerful enough for most of your laptop needs. Don't get hung up on the difference between speeds though. A 1.5 ghz M is the same speed as a 3.0 ghz P4 or so I've heard.
crashwg:
What exactly are you planning on doing with your new laptop? If you go back just a couple years laptops used less power and therefore had longer battery life.
I find that my 3 year old sony vaio is quite capable of doing most things short of playing Halflife 2. Since the battery is also 3 years old I can't realy give you an acurate timing on how long the battery lasts nor did I time it when it was new, but I can say that I'm pretty sure it lasted longer than 4 hours...
Also you should not forget that getting the older model will be cheaper, another plus!
MrBond:
I really don't need a power hog, I'll be using this thing to write lesson plans and email. Watch DVDs/play music and play the occasional game. Must have a network card. I'm staying away from used, but older is fine. I want something that will last at least 7 hours. I looked in the reviews for that vaio, and some people said it only lasted 1.5 hours! Ouch. Probably runs hotter too.
What about this: $899 Averatec Notebook PC (AV3250HX80)
Dermbrian:
We're pretty happy with the HP Pavillion low-end laptop we bought, except we're having rebate hassles.
But something that bothers me about that unit and my Dell that my company provides me is that neither has a LINE IN jack.
I've seen aftermarket solutions that use the USB port and an external device to add that functionality back in, but that's extra $$$ and can be a surprise. I use LINE IN all the time for converting LP's to .mp3's, as well as live recording to the hard disk in stereo. I'd love to do that on the HP laptop, which is really totally silent in normal operation.
Brian