need help picking laptop for school

[Boggin]

Stop watching porn and it will almost solve your virus problems.

Myspace too. The ads on myspace give mine viruses. You can get a mod for firefox that will strip all websites of ads and you can set it to allow certain websites if you want.

lol, there was no porn or myspace. apparently i had a shitty virus protector i forget the name of it

 

[snomaker321]

Well my sisters had a dell for school for the past 3 years and she hasnt had any problems with it. And im currently typing this on an 8 year old dell desktop. Granted desktops are a whole different ballgame, I havent had any bad experiences with dell.

What do you guys think spec wise? I know the more the better for ram, hd, etc, but wheres a good place to draw the line?

 

[jmeineck]

snomaker321

What laptop to buy depends a lot on your budget and usage model. If this is just going to be for school only then just about any laptop that can do email, run office apps and search the internet for research will work. If you take care of it it will last and if you don't it will break.

I agree with a lot of what AllanD said but he does a lot of over kill. Having an external storage device to backing up critical files is always a good idea. Dell does have the best customer service and their laptops are the easiest to restore in my experiance and the inspiron 15 is a good system and the i5 processor will do you good even if you want the system to act as your personal entertainment device as well. My recommendation would be to get the most Laptop you can buy with in your budget that will meet the requirements of the task you want it to preform and if you buy more computer than what you really need don't worry you will find a use for it

good luck with school!!!

koda6966,
I do schematic capture and PCB board layout using Mentor graphics CAD tools and I have a full blown Desktop with a i7 quad core processor and 8GB main memory and wish I had more power. Using 2 -- 24in flat panel monitors. Good luck doing CAD on a laptop. Not something I would recommend.

I've spent the last 14 years doing electrical design for Intel, so I do know just a little bit about computers, laptops
Jeff

 

[AllanD]

x2 on the jump drive. I had my entire Eastern Illinois University curriculum on a one gig jump drive. the one thing that I do recommend is that you back it up to your desktop regularly, and keep a continuously updated copy of it on another jumpdrive somewhere easy to get to. nothing would suck worse than losing your jump drive or data on it if it gets nuked. I lucked out and did not have any of those issues, but after forgetting it in the computer lab once, (got it back, someone was good enough to turn it in) I made damn sure it was backed up at home and I had a spare with the info on it.

AS for laptops, when I graduated EIU, they were looking at having mandatory laptops for all students in the future. so with that in mind, you want to get one that will survive four years of hauling to all of your classes every day. probably will mean a more expensive one. Stay away from HP, they are the worst reliable makes. A study on laptops was done and HP was dead last, with 25 percent of their machines dead within 2 years. Asus was the best, with only 11 or 12 percent dead. Dell was middle of the road. I will see if I can find the link for you.

Dell is better than HP for the reasons Allan D mentioned: easier restores, better customer service.

Just some thoughts.

AJ

HP branded 4gb "thumb drives" are $9.99 each at Staples office supply this week.

Get three and use them DAILY in rotation.

My three have a band of electrical tape around them to identify them
Red, Blue & Yellow.

I have another 2gb stick I've marked with Green tape that I use to for making
software installations on any system I touch. all that's on it are some utility programs and installation "kernels" for a commonly installed programs.
(EAC, NCH, WMP11.0, TagScanner, CC Cleaner, Defraggler, Smart Defrag, AdAware, Spybot, as well as the common Desktop icons for various system functions that are otherwise a PITA to create.

Also on it are my six favorite albums to test WMP and the audio functions.
(in case anyone wonders: Queensryche - "Empire", Metallica - "Metallica", Alter Bridge - "Blackbird", AC/DC - "Back In Black", Submersed - "Immortal Verses" & Evans Blue - "The Pursuit" (but their third album and new vocalist is good too))

I strongly recommend installing either Smart Defragger or Tag Scanner on any new computer and set it to defrag atleast weekly (at some time when you will be sound asleep)

CC-Cleaner should also be run weekly.

Most people are unaware that EVERY image their computer displays (even all those thmbnail pics and Youtube videos are saved in your internet "temp files"
which are a lot more than "temporary", because Windows never actually deletes them.

And before someone starts making anti-windows noises firefox is just as bad.

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[88_Eddie]

Dell has the best customer service cause they suck and their shit breaks all the time.

my mom got an HP in january of this year and it's already on hard drive #2.

i'm biased cause my dad works for IBM and it's all that i've ever owned. i had a memory problem in college and all i had to do was call them and they sent someone to my house and fixed it.

they are really expensive for the good ones tho, my laptop was $2500 even with the $1000 discount my dad got from working there. it had all these bells and whistles that i didnt need which drove the price up.

depends on what you need, if you just need to check email and type a paper or two, get a cheap ass one. i was running 3d modeling programs and the adobe creative suite so i needed a powerful machine

i'll say this too, dont buy a laptop from a company that is known for making something else, ie sony, toshiba, etc.