Thinking of getting a laptop

[aarogb]

I have saved up some money to buy a laptop do you guys have any suggestions?  I will mainly be using it for school and some music and Youtube and watching videos on TW and stuff like that.  I have about price range is between 300 and 500.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Dan:]

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0337652

[NHfroggin]

  Quote

I have saved up some money to buy a laptop do you guys have any suggestions? I will mainly be using it for school and some music and Youtube and watching videos on TW and stuff like that. I have about price range is between 300 and 500.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I have a dell inspiron, its going on its 4th year and still running strong. Only problem was a bad fan when i first got it i called they were here the next day and it was fixed. My sister has a HP laptop not sure what the model is but she had problems and had to ship it to hp. She was without a computer for about a week.

What ever you go with get the most memory you can. I was able to upgrade to 4GB with a 500GB hard drive.

-matt-

[TrippyJai]

If your planning to use the laptop for school and leisure internet, specs wouldn't be much of a problem for you. The most important thing is the feel the of the laptop. I went laptop shopping and had the chance to feel the weight, the key pad and layout. Choose one that you like and one that feels comfortable in your hands.

Many of the specs on laptops now are good enough to do whatever you want with duo core processors, 2-3 gigs of ram and atleast 200+ gigs of HD space.

[Dan:]

another thing: If the laptop is for school you don't want it to be too big. Large screens are heavy and bulky. On the other hand, you also don't want it to be too small because you want to have enough keyboard room to comfortably write for long periods of time. I have a 14.1" screen and I think it would be perfect for a school laptop but some prefer larger 15.6" screens. I think either would be good choices.

[oteymc]

Check out Acer brand laptops.  I know the company I work for just bought three that are really nice for around $600 and they had huge screens.  If you went with a normal screen I would imagine you could get one in your price range.  I couldn't believe how nice they were for the money, they had a lot of extras too.  I don't know that much about their track record of longevity or anything though.

[Nibbles]

If you don't mind carrying a charger cord with you, go ahead and get a Core2 Duo laptop - it will probably get 2-4 hours of battery life depending on what you're running on it.

If you decide to go this route, make sure to get a P-series processor and not a T or E series one (for instance, get a Core2Duo P8500 instead of a T9300 or E6600) as the T and E series have similar clock speeds as the current P series but eat up 2-3x the amount of power and generate a lot more heat.

If you're after mobility and not having to charge your laptop every few hours, I'd go with a CULV processor like the Core2 SU series. You'd be sacrificing some processing power for battery longevity.

For around 500 bucks though, I personally would get this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220763&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Notebooks-_-ASUS-_-34220763

[SoFlaBassAddict]

Shop around.  Laptops are incredibly cheap now.  You can get a fairly good quality machine for very little money right now.  Especially for what you seem to need it for.

[Bill U]

I'm not an expert on laptops but I will say the best places to buy computers has already been listed.

http://www.microcenter.com/index.html

http://www.newegg.com/

I've bought many computer related stuff from both places and have never been disappointed.  They both usually have the lowest prices around too.

[HuntFishAK]

We also have an Inspiron, and it is awesome.  I really like Windows 7.  I swear that they came out with Vista just so they could release 7 as the Holy Grail of operating systems.  Definitely get as much RAM as possible.  Ours has 4GB and it screams.  I keep most of my music and pictures on an external hard drive, so that keeps alot of the internal drive space free.

[South FLA]

Consumer reports recently did a laptop roundup, and I think Toshiba rated best, see if you can get the report online.