Laptop advice

Aenigma

Aenigma

Active member
I'm going to be starting college next week, so I've decided to finally get around to buying a laptop. I'll mostly be using it for photos, papers, and music this year, but it needs to be good with CAD programs because I'm studying architecture and that's what we move on to next year. I won't be playing any games on it save for solitaire, and I'm not a computer geek, so it needs to be relatively easy to use. My price range is $1,000-$1,500. I know there's already 1,000 laptop threads, but I couldn't find quite what I needed so now there's 1,001. Any help is appreciated!
 
most people will say mac obviously. im more inclined to say IBM simply because their systems have been much more stable in the past few years. i dont know what kind of internals apple uses but IBM uses amd for some of there notebooks. rightnow amd is testing much higher than intel. ultimately its your choice though. my vote is for ibm though.
 
A good CAD program for a mac is almost always more expencive. What program are you getting?
 
i've got a macbook pro and it is amazing. they are expensive, but you get what you pay for. and you never have to worry about viruses or any of that shit. you may wanna check the compatability of the programs you will be using though.
 
these pictures speak the truth. set up my printer in seconds...

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nuff said.
 
for the price of it, and for whta your doing, a mac is deffinatly not worth buying. for that price range, most of the mac laptops suck a left nut compared to what you could get for a pc laptop. and as for viruses and such, all you have to do is buy a 60$ norton or mcafee program and viruses will be no problem at all... look at thinkpads for sure or check out Toshiba as they've been putting out a solid system lately
 
Right now I'm kind of inclined toward a Mac because I know people in the program who use them. This will be my only access to music, internet, photos, schoolwork, etc so I need it to be reliable above all else. I don't mind spending a little more to know I have something that will work, but I'll probably talk to a couple teachers and see what they recommend before making a final decision.
 
fine, ill elaborate.

hp's customer support/service is FAR from user friendly and they use parts that could double as toaster.

Dell, honestly dell it just as bad as hp but has a much better tech support program.

dont know much about sony. which is why im skeptical
 
have you ever tried contacting hp's tech support?

i realize automated systems are faster in some respects but once you get transfered to the right place...its barely english. ive had more trouble with my hp than any other manufacturer. thats when i started building my own systems.\ and in the 7 years ive owned my desktop i have never had an issue.
 
ive only owned one hp system and maybe i just had a wierd case but its the one bad experience that can ruin it for people. 2 months after my warranty expired my power supply went. 2 months. i know there was a pretty large conflict a while ago with people accusing some manufactures of not field testing their parts, and its cases like mine that provide good argument.
 
I recently purchased a laptop, and am super anal with my money. I hate compromising an am fully willing to wait forever before buying something shitty. I was kind of skeptical with all the mac love, and how trendy they are, plus they are expensive and I figured they couldn’t be thaaat could. That being said I was also really skeptical about Vista and read lots of horror stories about it when I was doing my research. I ended up chatting having lunch with out IT guys at work about who was the best etc and they universally said if I bought a PC make sure I could get one without Vista, and to seriously consider mac.

I took their advice and did more research on macs, borrowed a friends for an afternoon and havnt looked back. I went with the Macbook Pro and although it was expensive I can honestly say it is the best computer, not just laptop that I have ever used, it blows my PC desktop out of the water and I officially hate my piece of shit work computer now. That is my experience and I would recommend Macs to you not just for their computers, but their quality of service is awesome, I am super pleased to say that they live up to the hype for once. If you refuse to go mac, the IT guys at work said look for the best warrenty on laptop because they are always at risk, and recommended HP and Sony but admitted that their service sucked, but their laptops were comparable to a regular macbook.
 
i hate how everyone bitches that they are so expensive. macworld magazine did a test where they took a stock mac pro and customized a dell as close as they could to match the specs of the mac pro. now granted, these are extremely high end computers costing $3+G's, but the dell ended up costing like 300-500 dollars more. Now a comparison like this is always going to be flawed, not to mention it is done by a mac magazine, but for the quality of parts you are getting, you can't beat a mac.

there was also a lot of bitching about tech support with many companies above. I've only dealt with dell tech support before and it was ok. they helped me reformat my comp, but it took many phone calls. for those of you mac owners who live within a reasonable distance of a mac store, you can just bring your machine there and get you tech support done. it is very nice to deal with an actual person when getting tech support, not to mention a person who speaks english as their first language.

another thing, i always had to buy virus software, spyware software, ect for my dell. plus the cost of my time installing and updating the software. plus my time reformatting my dell when i had a virus.

with my macbook pro, i don't worry about a thing. someone above said that the time will come and they are correct. but it's going to be awhile. and by that time, there will be some kind of fix. apple is pretty quick to patch up their software.

and applecare is a must. no questions asked.
 
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