Alright computer gurus...

S

Spitz

New member
I'm going to college this fall and will have to buy a laptop.

What's the best laptop I can get for around $2000-2500 (give or take)?

I've been looking at the MacBook Pro, but I am really scared of buying it because I've been a PC guy all my life and I fear that most applications I use today aren't Mac compatible. Although I am aware of Boot Camp, but I'm still a bit skeptic about it (I just basically don't know how stable, and how well does XP run on a Mac).

I'm very much interested in PC laptops too, so please help me! I've never had my own laptop either so that adds to the confusion too.

Thanks!
 
$2500 US is a good budget, you'll be able to find something nice for that. I have a dell 17'' inspiron, and to be honest i would suggest something else. it is ok, but the battery is crap and screen looks terrable when not plugged in. It feels cheap in general as well. Also, i would recommend against a 17'' unless you really need teh screen size. I find the overall size of the laptop, when equppped with the big screen, is too big to lug around. I have mine hooked up to my dell 24'' monitor most of the time.

that siad, i would check out acer, as they ahve some nice models available. if you can make the change, i would go with a macbook though. I wish i would've gotten a mac lots of times. I'm just so used to windows now that a change would be counter productive right now.
 
You could get yourself a pretty fat alienware laptop for that budget :D
In fact on that budget you could pretty much get any alienware laptop you wanted. Apart from the $4500 one. But then thats just silly money.
 
Spitz said:
I'm going to college this fall and will have to buy a laptop.

What's the best laptop I can get for around $2000-2500 (give or take)?

I've been looking at the MacBook Pro, but I am really scared of buying it because I've been a PC guy all my life and I fear that most applications I use today aren't Mac compatible. Although I am aware of Boot Camp, but I'm still a bit skeptic about it (I just basically don't know how stable, and how well does XP run on a Mac).

I'm very much interested in PC laptops too, so please help me! I've never had my own laptop either so that adds to the confusion too.

Thanks!
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Why do you want a laptop over a desktop? Is it for portablility?

If you want something to carry everywhere with you, a 17" laptop that weighs 9+ pounds doesn't make much sense.
 
That all depends on what your preferred method of transport is really...If I had a car I wouldn't care how much my laptop weighed. It would still be more portable than a desktop.
 
legionserial said:
That all depends on what your preferred method of transport is really...If I had a car I wouldn't care how much my laptop weighed. It would still be more portable than a desktop.
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Standing up with a 9+ lbs laptop strapped around your shoulder for more than 5 mins really starts to hurt no matter where you are.
 
For $2500 you can get a nice and powerful laptop, but I wouldn't recommend that though. Since your going to college, I suggest that you spend a whole lot less, and use the rest of your money for college expenses. It gets expensive if you add up everything you spend per year. Something like this notebook will do fine:: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834147176 Nice amount of ram, speed, and hard drive space, for cheaper than $2500 There's also this Fujitsu http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16834110207 it's a nice laptop too.
 
If I was in the market for a laptop, I would go to cnet.com and read all of their laptop reviews, they have been pretty useful to me when it comes to buying digital cameras and digital video cameras..
 
laptop really necessary?

I'm really not trying to be a smart *$$ here, but is there something different about college today versus 20 years ago when I went? I question the need for laptops. It's more of a "nice to have" item, isn't it?

(Personally, if I were the instructor, I would consider the use of a laptop during my lecture to be rude - and I hate when people bring them to meetings and barely look up from their laptop because they "are too busy" to afford others the common courtesy of their attention. Just don't come to the meeting if you are that busy...but I digress...)

And if you really needed one for use in the classroom, taking notes or whatever, you could get away with a much cheaper one.

I still have a fully functional PIII, 500MHz IBM Thinkpad that I use at work and for word processing and email (I even use it for high speed data aquisition) it works fine.

Okay, I wouldn't suggest getting one of those (it's getting to the point where you'll have support issues), but you should be able to get something to satisfy your NEEDS for a lot less.

My son starts college this fall - I built him a nice zippy desktop on the cheap.
 
I fall into the category of you can get that lappie a lot cheaper and put that college money to some good use like food. Trust me on this one you're going to need to eat. I'd suggest not blowing your load for a few months so you can test the waters if you know what i mean. That said 500 or 600 bucks will give you pretty much evertything you need in a laptop plus some in todays marketplace. Hell I bought a compaq v2000 that's fast enough for me to record audio on for 600 bucks.
 
$2500? Why? Best buy had a new Intel core duo on sale last weekend for $599. I think it was a Toshiba. Depending on use, you might need to add memory, but it had a DVD/CD burner, and wifi.
 
Thanks a lot for all of your replies guys!

As for the price, well my dad pretty much approved me getting a good computer because he understands that it is the one I will have to use through my whole career (well, until I earn the money to buy myself a new one, in which case he has nothing to do). I will go to art school and will do a lot of things regarding design, and maaybe even animation.

I would like my computer to record too because it's what I do in my spare time.

As for the laptop, I also thought about the option of getting a desktop, but I live in South America and I'm going to college to the US. It's different traveling with a laptop than with a CPU, the monitor, the keyboard, etc...

What do you guys think of the MacBook Pro (and the possibility of using Boot Camp for some applications)?
 
Spitz said:
Thanks a lot for all of your replies guys!

As for the price, well my dad pretty much approved me getting a good computer because he understands that it is the one I will have to use through my whole career (well, until I earn the money to buy myself a new one, in which case he has nothing to do). I will go to art school and will do a lot of things regarding design, and maaybe even animation.

I would like my computer to record too because it's what I do in my spare time.

As for the laptop, I also thought about the option of getting a desktop, but I live in South America and I'm going to college to the US. It's different traveling with a laptop than with a CPU, the monitor, the keyboard, etc...

What do you guys think of the MacBook Pro (and the possibility of using Boot Camp for some applications)?
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I went through 3 computers in the course of 5 years in college studying Industrial Design and using high end apps like Maya, 3D Studio Max, Photoshop and Premiere. It is naive to think by spending $2500 on a laptop today, it will still suit your needs by your senior year.

$1200 gets you pleanty of power in the PC side and it won't hurt as much when you realize you need something else your junior year.

My Gateway MX7515 handles all my 3D/Video/Audio apps just fine with its Athlon-64 4000+ processor and ATI X600 grahics. It only cost me $1100 at BestBuy last December.
 
brzilian said:
Standing up with a 9+ lbs laptop strapped around your shoulder for more than 5 mins really starts to hurt no matter where you are.
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You've obviously never played a Gibson Les Paul. :)
 
Again, thanks for your input everyone.

Brazillian (heh, sorry, don't know your name), I am aware that technology will definitely fly in 2 years, hell, in a year from now. However, I am not going to get another computer while I'm in college (whether I need it or not), so I'm going to try and get the best I can within my budget for now.

I'm really falling in love with the MacBook Pro (and even more so now that I can run Windows XP on it), but if there is/are a better PC laptop out there (and I would appreciate it if you guys could focus more on the specs and less on the price) I would definitely consider that too.

Thanks a lot for your replies guys so far. I really appreciate them.
 
Spitz said:
I'm really falling in love with the MacBook Pro (and even more so now that I can run Windows XP on it), but if there is/are a better PC laptop out there (and I would appreciate it if you guys could focus more on the specs and less on the price) I would definitely consider that too.
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Did you check to see if the software you will be using will run/is available for the MacBook Pro?

3D Studio Max is a PC only app. Last time I checked, Parallels still doesn't support OpenGL or Direct3D. If you're using BootCamp, you would still need video drivers with OpenGL and Direct3D for the MacBook's video card.

I'm not even sure a Universal Binary version of Maya has been released yet...
 
Yeah that's what worries me. Good thing is, there is very little chance I will be doing 3d work with this laptop.
 
Well I rather have a good laptop than a bad one. Or not necessarily a bad one, but, you know.

Any ideas?
 
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