Laptops

SoDeepPolaris · Post by **SoDeepPolaris** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 8:34 pm

Alright everyone, I'm looking to buy a laptop.

First off, I hate how non-upgradeable and expensive they are, however with my college situation it would be advantageous to have a decent rig to tote around.

I get discounts through school for Apple and Dell products and I hate Dell.

I'm looking for a machine in the $1500-2200 range with 2gb RAM, pretty good size hard drive, 15+inch display, atleast a 128mb graphics card (mobility would be fine, no onboard please), and decent tech support.

Anyone have recommendations/advice of what to steer clear of? I was thinking, as of now, Macbook Pro (but not sure about how good Bootcamp runs XP) or some Acer/Toshiba options.

As far as gaming goes, I'd like to not have to take my tower to the dorms so if it could run WoW, SC, CS, Quake4 decently I'm fine.

ShammerS · Post by **ShammerS** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 9:14 pm

You should be able to get quite a bit of horsepower for that range.

My best piece of advice is that, if you do get a Dell, head to Notebookreview.com and click Dell coupons, they'll save you a shitload.

chocobojoe · Post by **chocobojoe** » Sat Aug 04, 2007 9:29 pm

I'd go with the macbook and install XP on it...

danc1005 · Post by **danc1005** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 9:44 am

Get an XPS laptop.

BigBadOrc · Post by **BigBadOrc** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:21 pm

Get a 7200 RPM harddrive.

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech ... index.html

Effect. · Post by **Effect.** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 10:30 pm

Alright... I might have a list for you.. >_> Be afraid...

This is a nice one.
This one rawked my sawks.
And this is just beautiful.

If you want more I can find them, or if you want something with different specs on it.[/url]

Amp Divorax · Post by **Amp Divorax** » Sun Aug 05, 2007 11:50 pm

Here's my experiences with laptops.

1. I have to recommend against Dell's laptops as the quality is rather questionable. Of note being their decision to usually use the Centrino based wireless chipsets (which have numerous driver issues) and lower quality sound chipsets that bottleneck the system.
2. When it comes to the graphics chipsets, I strongly recommend against ATI's mobility chipsets as they are notorious for running extremely hot. If you want something to run games decently a Nvidia Geforce 7 based GPU is more than enough to pull it off.
3. In the case of Macs, the macbook pro is the best that I've seen when I was able to check them out for myself (I cannot recommend the regular macbooks as they feel neutered beyond belief.) and will run just about any game you want thanks to bootcamp and parallels.

Cbav · Post by **Cbav** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 9:09 am

this thread actually helps me out a lot. I'm wanting to buy a laptop of my own. I've always wanted to get a macbook because of how great they look and feel when using them - But I'm not to sure about using macintosh.
I didn't know you could install XP / Vista on them. :O

SoDeepPolaris · Post by **SoDeepPolaris** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 2:10 pm

Cbav wrote:this thread actually helps me out a lot. I'm wanting to buy a laptop of my own. I've always wanted to get a macbook because of how great they look and feel when using them - But I'm not to sure about using macintosh.
I didn't know you could install XP / Vista on them. :O

I wouldn't recommend running Vista through bootcamp due to it's extremely high RAM necessities. It already achieves a slight decrease in performance for running the parallel. Atleast, that's my understanding.

XP should be fine, hell, you can run XP fine with 512mb.

hascoolnickname · Post by **hascoolnickname** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 2:22 pm

SoDeepPolaris wrote:I wouldn't recommend running Vista through bootcamp due to it's garbage.

oh

Amp Divorax · Post by **Amp Divorax** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:49 pm

What's the point of using Windows Vista on a Mac?

Potter · Post by **Potter** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 11:00 pm

Amp Divorax wrote:What's the point of using Windows Vista?

Ryuhayabusa · Post by **Ryuhayabusa** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 1:14 am

Buy a modbook.

http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=home

Youll love yourself.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mwvodca ... /index.php

SoDeepPolaris · Post by **SoDeepPolaris** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 2:10 am

Ryuhayabusa wrote:Buy a modbook.

http://www.axiotron.com/index.php?id=home

Youll love yourself.

http://www.macworld.com/weblogs/mwvodca ... /index.php

Yeah cause that's great for gaming...

Ryuhayabusa · Post by **Ryuhayabusa** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 4:26 am

Yea it is Just get an apple keyboard and mouse for when your home and wanna game

there like what 15 bucks used.