Best laptop for under 1200?
05-30-2005, 02:18 PM
#1
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Best laptop for under 1200?
I have a Dell now and hate it, so no Dells.
Don't really play games. The programs I use that will slow it down the most are Premiere and Photoshop. I do alot of web and photo stuff.
I'm looking at the IBM Thinkpad G41 but don't like the HDD and can't have it switched. (unless I buy a HDD after buying the laptop and swap it it... don't want to have to do that)
I also need to be able to have it at my house by this Friday or Saturday.
256 mb of memory is fine because I have a 512 card to stick into it (putting it to 768).
Don't really play games. The programs I use that will slow it down the most are Premiere and Photoshop. I do alot of web and photo stuff.
I'm looking at the IBM Thinkpad G41 but don't like the HDD and can't have it switched. (unless I buy a HDD after buying the laptop and swap it it... don't want to have to do that)
I also need to be able to have it at my house by this Friday or Saturday.
256 mb of memory is fine because I have a 512 card to stick into it (putting it to 768).
05-30-2005, 02:39 PM
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Any laptop you get for less than 2000 is going to pretty much be a piece of crap, yeah they have some as low as 800 sometimes, but that's going to be stripped down and next to useless.
For 1200-1500 you start to get into units that are at least functional, but just about all of them under 2G are toys, if you want to buy a computer, save up and get a real one.
For 1200-1500 you start to get into units that are at least functional, but just about all of them under 2G are toys, if you want to buy a computer, save up and get a real one.
05-30-2005, 03:14 PM
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I just bought an HP dv1000 laptop. 14" widescreen and 5lbs so its not a pain to carry around. I have Adobe CS2 installed and it seems to work fine. Compaq has the V2000 which is basically the same but cheaper.
05-30-2005, 03:32 PM
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Originally Posted by psoper
Any laptop you get for less than 2000 is going to pretty much be a piece of crap, yeah they have some as low as 800 sometimes, but that's going to be stripped down and next to useless.
For 1200-1500 you start to get into units that are at least functional, but just about all of them under 2G are toys, if you want to buy a computer, save up and get a real one.
For 1200-1500 you start to get into units that are at least functional, but just about all of them under 2G are toys, if you want to buy a computer, save up and get a real one.
Yeah for a laptop thats under 1500 your going to do fine with word processing and light programs like AIM and whatnot... but for something that will need the power to handle the heavy video rendering that comes out of Premiere your going to need something that is like $2500, and a setup that has hyper-transport (or hyper-threading same thing) so a 1 minute video on premiere with some effects doesn't take 30 minutes to render.
If you go for a laptop thats worth $1200 it will probably come with a low-power Mobil-celeron processor clocked at like 1.2ghz, which will be painful to use premiere on, and I imagine it locking up alot with the low ammount of memory. It will also have some sort of shared video card that would effect the performance of Premiere too. But if you just need photoshop, it should be fine unless you will be dealing with super high resolusion images with a high dpi.
Also, when you go into the faster processor with bigger faster disk drives its going to suck up more power, so the battery life won't last as long as one of the mobile-celerons. Maybe half the battery life of that.
Just my .02
05-30-2005, 05:47 PM
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Alright. I won't be using premiere much, but I will be using it a couple times a month. I will use Photoshop about once a day with images that are 2240 x 1488 and about 1mb each, so they aren't too big. I might also be working with RAW images every once and a while, but not often.
I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1100 right now (2 ghz Celeron, 768mb memory, 40gb HDD) which gets me by, but I'm definitely looking for something that will handle it all better.
Also, I have a friend who has had problem with Compaq.
I'd be fine with that IBM if it wasn't for the HDD and the availability.
I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1100 right now (2 ghz Celeron, 768mb memory, 40gb HDD) which gets me by, but I'm definitely looking for something that will handle it all better.
Also, I have a friend who has had problem with Compaq.
I'd be fine with that IBM if it wasn't for the HDD and the availability.
05-30-2005, 06:07 PM
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Personally, I like the Dell 600m, 8600 series. But if you dont want dell, then the IBm shoudl be fine. Its pretty trivial to swap out the HD for something bigger/faster (hint: hitachi makes a 7200RPM laptop drive, 60GB).
05-30-2005, 07:11 PM
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Originally Posted by dr3d1zzl3
yeah some chinese company who is going to take over the world and feed us drugs via gel stuck in the keys of their new laptops...
05-30-2005, 07:32 PM
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Since everyone thinks you can't get a quality laptop for 1200, what would you get that is staying as close to that as possible?
05-30-2005, 07:37 PM
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I think you are on the right track with the Thinkpad, not that I have any knowledge or confidence in this new company, but when they were built by IBM they were pretty darn good machines for the money.
I just wouldn't want to try doing video work on anything less than the fastest machine I could possibly afford, maybe even haging it out for one I can't afford, simply because that stuff is very CPU and memory intensive and lesser machines are going to tend to choke.
I just wouldn't want to try doing video work on anything less than the fastest machine I could possibly afford, maybe even haging it out for one I can't afford, simply because that stuff is very CPU and memory intensive and lesser machines are going to tend to choke.
