best laptop for the money?

[Yuriy O]

Hey guys, what you think is the best deal on laptops now?
I mean what brand to look for, considering quality, speed, and money factor?
If someone been looking into the subject recently, please drop your 2 cents. Appreciate it.

[Mike Boeh]

When I was looking, it seemed like HP/Compaq offered the most bang for the buck. But I decided to get a sony GRT390 because of the insane xbrite screens they offer....

[cliffski]

sony vaios are amazing, but expensive. make sure you check out battery life. ive found it to be one of the most frustrating limitations (in fact the only one)

[Dan MacDonald]

The sony vaio GRT series was an amazing laptop, but it had a 1hr battery life. The new A series is even more amazing (I have one ;) ) it has all the greatness of the GRT plus a 17" screen and a 3.5 hr battery life. The xbrite screen is something that has to be seen to be understood. It's amazing

[mahlzeit]

A little over two years ago I bought a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop. Its most impressive feature was the 1600x1200 screen. Its least impressive feature was the harddisk that lasts only one week past the warranty period. The replacement disk failed too, again after about a year. This time I assumed it was still within warranty but the nice people at Dell told me replacement parts are only guaranteed to work for 3 months. So in two years I have had to buy two new drives. Of course I wisened up and bought the second one from someone other than Dell. Not only was this a lot cheaper but it has a much better warranty too. It will probably fail again within the next 9 months. Apparently the laptop becomes too hot, which slowly kills the drive (judging from comments on the Dell forums). My advice: Don't buy Dell.

[Jim Buck]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 that has lasted almost 2 years. I love it and will never buy a non-laptop unit ever again. You plug an external keyboard, monitor, and speaker, and voila - it's as though you have a "real" computer.

I, too, had hard drive problems from time to time, but it was nothing that scandisk couldn't fix though it seemed worse at the time (hardware blue-screen-of-death based on a bad sector where the pagefile lived). I wonder if that's the problems you came across? I've seen other people have this problem before. In more than 10 years of using computer, I never had a hard drive completely fail on me.

[mahlzeit]

To clarify: My first drive did that too, it would blue screen when the kernel tried to page memory. But the symptoms got worse and worse and the disk became unusable. The second one simply refused to boot one day. In both cases, diagnostics showed errors all over the drive. Both were IBM TravelStars, by the way. My real issue with Dell -- apart from hardware I can't trust -- is the lousy customer support I received.

[Jim Buck]

Wow, that really sucks. I've had reasonably ok customer support through email with them. Usually, I would end up solving the problem myself through info gleaned on their messageboards of google groups.

[Derobrash]

I'd recommend looking at the fujitsu siemens amilo A models.
If you go somewhere good like www.dabs.com . You can pick up a complete BEAST for about 900 quid.

I bought one from there about a year ago,

64mb Radeon 9000 mob
AMD Athlon 2600+
768mb ddr (I added half a gig myself - it takes desktop stuff)
40gb hdd ( a bad point, but most people have some kind of fileserver anyway so.. )

and I bought that for £750

Now you are looking at getting something like a 128mb Radeon 9700 mob, with an amd 64bit 3200+ and etc for just a bit over that. I almost want to sell mine and buy a new one :)

[anothersomething]

HP has the best prices and the worst tech support. Considering you're probably a game developer you should know how to use a PC... so go with HP.

[Matthew]

This is probably too late of a notice, but on the off chance it's not I thought I'd pass it on: Dell is running some end-of-the-quarter coupons, and one is $750 off $1500 or more on notebooks. Apparently this is now only valid on the XPS gaming notebook, after the others flushed their stock.

Coupon code: ZD5$P0NS954P16 (Exp Wed 10/20 5:59am CT). A great deal if you can jump on it. This is from www.techbargains.com -- check there for any updates on validity and expiration.

[Yuriy O]

Yes, I looked at Sony xbrite...the screen is so clear....Is there any other laptop that can compare on screen clarity?

[GBGames]

My main concern when it comes to laptops is: does it run Linux?

That being the case, I can't just decide based on specs. I have to do research on http://www.linux-laptop.net and otherwise Google to see if people have issues with the brands I am looking at.

For my notes so far, I've found that ATI is bad at providing drivers for their Mobile cards. They claim that the manufacturer of the laptop is the main point of support, the manufacturer might claim that they don't support Linux and points you back to ATI's site. I haven't seen anything about nvidia's laptop support to be fair, but then I haven't heard that many people complain about it either.

It doesn't do me any good to find a laptop with awesome specs I can't use. Software rendering on a machine with the latest video card isn't going to be worth the expense.

[Dan MacDonald]

Linspire ran perfectly on my sony :)

[Mike Boeh]

The new HP machines now have xbrite, so that opens up a lot of less expensive options :)

[Bruto]

I would recomend a Toshiba M30.with next gen intel M 1.6 +
It didn't get any good reviews but i assure you it's a great machine.
I run 3dsmax with photoshop at the same time and i can work without
a problem.It has a nice wide screen and it can take up to 2GB RAM.
(comes with 512) and 60GB hdd.

It has an fx 5200 with 64MB it's not a great card at all but i play SW battlefront
without a problem and TW:Rome and even DOOM3 at the very lowest settings.

It's beautiful relatively light and very well featured with all kinds of
wireless connection ethernet and a DVD RW.

since the thread is V/M i highly recomend that.

price varies from $1300-1500.