Hi Guys,

I will be purchasing a laptop in the near future. This will be my first ever laptop. All my desktops are custom made and I didn't have dilemmas about who the Brand/Company should be i.e Reliability-wise, Quality-wise,... lastly Price-wise.

Now since I need a laptop for my work needs, I need to be worried about the brand/company i.e. SONY® Vaio, Compaq, IBM..um... that's all comes to my mind.

Can you please recommend/list me some good brands so I know where to start. After that, I will be researching onilne for the best model which fits to budget. Basically, I will need my laptop to function as powerful as a desktop. :)

Thanks in advance for all the ideas,
Yours,
McoreD

The sony vaio laptop I have had for about 2 years now has not given me any problems at all (knock on wood) :)

I have not had to pull it apart yet but I like it better than the assorted compaqs and dells that are floating around my work ;) If you need to connect to routers and such make sure you get one with the serial port - I was surprised to see quite a few laptops without basic serial ports when I bought this one ;)

Hope this helps some :)

/JD

I've used laptops for at least 15 years and always stuck to Toshiba. BUT, I am now on my second Vaio.

I have a Toshiba 5100 at home and it's a good pc, 15 inches and too heavy to carry around. Last year I bought a Vaio R505 that weighs 3 pounds without the dock, and has a 12 inch screen. Fantastic machine.

I just upgraded it with a Vaio V505 which weighs little more and contains the Cd-RW/DVD drive, still 12inches.

If you need a general all around laptop and don't care about weight then go for a 15 inch machine.

The feature I hate about Toshiba's and it's been the single most annoying feature they have continually maintianed over the years is that the battery discharges when not in use within two weeks. I hate that. I had an IBM Thinkpad for awhile and the battery did not discharge. The Sony doesn't discharge rapidly either when not in use

I'd go Thinkpad or Sony if I were starting over.

I don't agree about the serial port. Nobody connects to a LAN or router with those anymore. You don't even need a parallel port if you are up to date. You're gonna have a USB port, a PC Card shot, an ethernet port, and/or a built in wireless "g" to connect, and really that's all you need.



On the other hand I am going to Italy to visit my daughter next month and am taking her a laptop to replace a Toshiba 2400 I gave her in 1997 (still running). The new one is a Toshiba A10. (nice features, low price--15inch screen). Too bad about the battery discharging, but at least I'm sure to be giving her a stable, reliable machine.

I owned an HP laptop for awhile, but dumped it first opportunity. I also owned a Compaq. What crap, both.

So: IBM, Sony, Toshiba would be my choices. On the other hand if you live in a city that has limited supply and you like to touch what you buy, I guess you go with what ever turns you on. Who knows why guys fall in love with a certain girl or a certain song? :)

i just got my work to buy me 1 again

the last one i got was a SONY VAIO but this time ive gone for the DELL D800 with WIDESCREEN and DVDRW
- fully loaded
- comes with 1GB ethernet
- 54MB 802.11g WIRELESS
- DVD Rewriter (4x)

for only 1200 GBP

BARGAIN and worth a look m8

jake :)

My first laptop was a 10.5" HP 900. Fantastic machine, and fast (166 MHz). Back in those days this was the machine to have... Along with Compaq and some heave but competent IBMs.

Now it's another thing; HP and Compaq joined together and somewhere totally lost everything they knew about making good laptops. Now I have a Compaq (not payed for, got it thru my work) and it's crap, exactly as stated above. The *only* good thing is that the LED indicating it is turned on is cool - blueish... :) and I nearly forgot, the 15" screen is good and the resolution is 1400x1050.
Today I would by either a Sony or an IBM. One with a good screen and a decent keyboard. But there are of course always different details that are important or not to different persons. The new broadscreen machines look tempting. I saw one at a major store here and found that the hefty 17" screen had lower resolution than my 15"...

Serial port? I can't recall when I last used it. The parallell port, ok for some writers and dongles. USB 2.0 a must, and if possible 4 ports.

Basically a laptop will never perform as well as a real good homebuilt machine. They seem to have slower busses, only one hard drive, lack in memory (or the memory is to expensive), bad graphics and so on. You will end up with some kind of compromise. One get surprised to see also "high performance" laptops getting sold with 256 meg RAm and /or poor graphic adaptors with shared memory, screens capable of 1024x768 max, and so on. Lots of details to check there...

Good luck!

Try here............
They have a pretty good forum there as well.....

Just got myself an Acer Ferrari.....

Very pleased with it and it looks cool as well......

There can be only one... Dell's XPS :eek:

Intel Pentium 4 3.4ghz Extreme Edition
Dual Channel DDR 400
4X DVD Burner
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700
Hitachi 60gb 7200rpm HDD
Bluetooth transceiver and IrDA

Depends on what line of business you are in. The pix firewall I have needs to first be configured by such a port - RJ45 won't help until you set up the interfaces - perhaps now they have USB but when I got it they didn't - I suspect that most companies out there won't toss a couple thousand dollar piece of equipment out just to get a usb port in it ;)

And there are many other 'legacy' systems out there as well ;)

:)

/JD

Second for sure. ;)

Alienware Area 51 kicks donkey

http://www.alienware.com/system_pages/area-51m.aspx

The Alienware Area 51M?

MaximumPC April 2004 Page 56

"The Area 51M doesn't have quite enough power to outmuscle the brutish Dell XPS (reviewed on next page)" Overall rating 9


The Dell XPS scores a perfect 10 outclassing the field and is pronounced the fastest laptop in the world. And faster than most desktops!

Having supported many laptop brands where I've worked, for me it's a toss-up between IBM and Dell. I've also worked with Toshiba, Compaq(absolutely the worst), Gateway, Sony (close third, but best sound). Apple is reliable too, but plenty pricey.

Much appreciated your valuable contribution guys. :)

Sony Vaio, IBM, and Dell seems to be the popular choice. That Acer Ferrari 3000 laptop was impressive too. Personally, I certainly wouldn't mind getting that but I just came to know that the company has chosen to go with Dell laptops. So mine will be most probably a Dell Latitude D600.

It has the Pentium M Processor with 1MB L2 Cache at 1.6 GHz with Centrino Mobile technology.
In their performance benchmarks, Intel® Pentium® M Processor 1.70 GHz could beat the Mobile Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor ? M 2.60 GHz, so I am quite impressed. :)

Cheers,
McoreD

i have an hp ze4101. just got it cause i got a good deal on it. it has an athlonxp cpu in it.

For more than 10 years I had a new Toshiba each year paid for by my employer. In between I tried Compaq and HP (crap). Now, I am retired and have to pay for my own laptops. I am on my 3rd Sony since retiring (PictureBook, R505, V505) and bought my wife a Toshiba 5100 Satelite (not bad). BUT, I have had now 2 failures of optical drives on Toshibas (a Tecra and a Satalite). Today, in desparation I bought an ACER 3000 (Ferrari) a gift to my daugher I must take with me Saturday (to italy). The new Toshiba A10 I bought for her failed. The CD burner wouldn't work. This ACER is a really nice machine. Perhaps I still prefer Sony, but the ACER is a close second, as I sit here this evening loading it up with goodies. Has built in "g" wireless plus built in BlueTooth.

The key board on the ACER is better than any I've used recently.

Dell, Alienware and Voodoo would be my picks in no particular order. They got me one at work last year. Dell, 2 Ghz, 40 gig hard drive. It seems to be working fine. I have it loaded with Win98/WinXP dual boot due to several PLC and radio programming programs that only run in DOS.
One thing that I like about the new Alienware is that you can update the Graphic card.

What is kinda interesting on this Acer 3000 is it uses an AMD 2500+ mobile CPU, comes with 512MB or RAM and has capactity for 2 GB of RAM.

Heard good things about Dell and whould have gone that way had I enough time.

Well, maybe next time, <heh heh>

I have a Toshiba as well and I have not had any probs with it. Jest use it around the house. ...griz ;)

Can't go wrong with a Dell.

The Acer 3000 has been delivered and installed at my daughters place in Sicily. It is a fine piece of gear and I regret not keeping it and giving her my wife's Toshiba 5100. <evil grin>

But, on the whole I still find my V505 Sony the best thing I've had so far for portable computing. I've had all the Toshiba's as they came out the past 10 years paid for my company and they were always my computer of choice until I hit the Sony groove.

Dunno much about Dell, but maybe that's a new track to take.