Help a Mac user buy a PC laptop!

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Help a Mac user buy a PC laptop!

By teal_dx
- Fri Jun 12, 2009 6:05 pm #122624 So my wife wants a laptop to replace her 6 yr old desktop pc which is getting slower by the month it seems. It acts like it is going to come to a screeching hault any time.
(although my mac is 7 yrs old and as fast as the first day I got it... she just won't listen)
So she wants a new pc laptop for personal use (internet, email, mp3's, watch dvd's) and to use MS Office on.
We already have a wireless router, so she want's a 15" screen so it will be easy to take around the house, outside etc.

I have a 10% coupon for paypal/ebay on electronics.
I looked around on ebay and realized that I have not used a pc in years and don't know shit about them lol.

Which brands have a good reputation and which ones do I avoid?
ex: Toshiba, Sony, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Compaq, Dell, Acer...

What are the good processors and whet are the ones to avoid?
ex: Intel Core 2 Duo, Intel Core Duo, Intel Pentium, AMD Turion 64 X2, Intel Celeron, AMD Athlon X2, AMD Athlon 64 X2, Intel Celeron M...

And what processor speed? is 1GHz going to be plenty for what she wants to do? Dual Core seems to be the standard these days?

I'm not sure how much memory I should expect to be useful on a pc... but I was thinking 512MB would be adequate for what she wants to do?

thanks for helping a mac guy out

:thumb:
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By Joplies
- Fri Jun 12, 2009 7:29 pm #122646 My dads boss bought him a Dell inspiron and it kicks ass. Im lookin to buy th dell and im thinkin about the inspiron 15. Which to me sounds like would fit your wife the best (from dell side). They start at $529 on the dell web site and that setup right there would have her made. It even has a lil more than she needs lol but its still Cheap in retrospect.

Since she'll probly be running Vista, id recomend 3gb of RAM at the minimum. A dell proccessor i.e. T4200 would be perfect (which is 2 ghz)
The only thing i would recomend upgrading to is a bigger battery like the 9 cell. But that all depends on how long shes gonna have it out n about. If its mainly for at home then the 6 cell will work great.

Best of luck to you guys.
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By Shinepdx
- Fri Jun 12, 2009 7:36 pm #122647 Ok so i spent the last three years working in a computer repair shop so I have seen it all. Avoid HP, Sony, Compaq, Gateway, and Acer. Toshiba is ok, my first choice would be a Lenovo Thinkpad. They were making them for IBM while they were still branded IBM, then just took over the line after IBM got out of laptops. Dell would be my second choice, if you can get the Vostro line I would it is designed for business use, and they build them to a slightly higher standard then their other lines.

As for hardware, shoot for an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2Ghz or more and you will be happy AMD kinda sucks these days. RAM can be upgraded later cheap so no huge worries there just get 2GB at least for running Vista smoothly. Hard drive wise don't get to big, hard drives are built like crap today and laptop drives last 2-3 years. So if this is going to be your only computer get an external hard drive to do your back ups to.
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By Gorveatt
- Mon Jun 15, 2009 9:17 pm #123224 brian... don't take this the wrong way but... are you on crack? you could get her a macbook that would do all that and still run windows..

By 95DohcEG
- Mon Jun 15, 2009 10:12 pm #123250
Shinepdx wrote:Ok so i spent the last three years working in a computer repair shop so I have seen it all. Avoid HP, Sony, Compaq, Gateway, and Acer. Toshiba is ok, my first choice would be a Lenovo Thinkpad. They were making them for IBM while they were still branded IBM, then just took over the line after IBM got out of laptops. Dell would be my second choice, if you can get the Vostro line I would it is designed for business use, and they build them to a slightly higher standard then their other lines.

As for hardware, shoot for an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2Ghz or more and you will be happy AMD kinda sucks these days. RAM can be upgraded later cheap so no huge worries there just get 2GB at least for running Vista smoothly. Hard drive wise don't get to big, hard drives are built like crap today and laptop drives last 2-3 years. So if this is going to be your only computer get an external hard drive to do your back ups to.


Good info! :woot:

I been building comps forever and i recently built mine for like 500 at frys but thats going in and bargain hunting. Your looking for something she can just take and run with. (not litrally) Honestly, i'd look at Dell they are cheap sometimes you pay a little you get more. But nothing beats a warranty and dell is pretty good about that stuff. If you are a Mac user PC issues come up and are easily fixable although if something does go bad pull you hard drive send that shit to dell and now it's there prob.

OH, and i was recently at best buy and yes there HP or Toshiba or what not but i believe IBM has some to. I see a lot of people in the business world have those Laptops the size of notebooks. They were not to shabby only like 400-500 bux but core 2 processors 1.8-2.6GHz. 2-3 GB ram worth lookin at. Again there smaller and new Techknowledgy so if issues arise you are at the mercy of proprietary HP and such for there small equipment.

i like fixing computers so its my thing not everyones. Sometimes it's nice when it can be someone else's problem.
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By teal_dx
- Tue Jun 16, 2009 3:44 pm #123395 Well, she got bored and spent like $600 on stuff for our living room. :x So as far as I'm concerned, that was her laptop money. :D I was actually down with letting her get a PC just because it was cheaper than a MAC, but I'm going to delay the purchase now since we're trying to get a deck built this summer. 8)
Maybe the next time it comes up, she will have thought about getting a Mac :thumb:
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