Which Laptop to By (engineering school)??? Wireless Router for the House?

[Slugger926]

I am tired of fighting the kids for computer time at the house, and decided I will use some refund $ for a moderate laptop to help with school.

My three brand choices are Thinkpad, Dell and Gateway.

What stuff should I get on one?

Intel Core Duo or AMD Turion 64 X2?

RPM for Hard Drive?

GB for Hard Drive?

Min. Memory? (I am thinking one Gig)

Bluetooth?

 

[Guest]

slugger,

Good call. I reached the point you are at a few years back ago.

I have Dell desktops, but a Gateway laptop. I can't say that I have a preference for either brand. I will say that I was rather pissed when I had to change the power supply/cooling fan in the Dell desktop that I found out that they were proprietary, so I had to go back through Dell to get the parts. I am not sure if they still do that, but it makes me think twice about Dell.

I maxed out the memory on my notebook (RAM is cheap), moderate processor power, moderate size but higher rpms for the hard drive. In actuality I don't store a lot of files on the laptop hard drive - I keep them either on external USB harddrive or USB flashdrive. I especially like the flash drive, because I can access those files from any other computer (I use computers at home, work, school, other people's houses), so it is very convenient to store the information that way.

I have two desktops and a laptop connected wirelessly. The wireless connectivity works fine and I don't have wires spread everywhere. You do need to make sure you have the safety features enabled - people do try to 'pick up' on your waves for free .

Good luck - if you decided to go this route, I think you will find yourself a lot happier Just watch out - you may be looking for a laptop model that only has a 'few' things, but as you look at more models, more features become ... shall we say, more attractive.

Oh, and I don't have an opinion about Bluetooth® - I live in the sticks. We don't have fancy citified technology like that out here :brickwall:

JR

 

[Hill William]

I just set up a wireless network for my house last week. I used a Linksys card for the computer and a Linksys wireless router. Piece of cake to install. Just follow the on screen instructions and you'll be up and running and secure in 30 minutes. I got everythinh I needed for 100 bucks.

 

[udpolo15]

at university of dayton, which taught me everything i know, they are having all freshman engineering students get the gateway tablet PC. my wife's little brother is a freshman and the thing is pretty cool.

for work, i just got Dell D620 Latitude. it is pretty nice. small and light, but pretty powerful.

 

[Slugger926]

Everytime I look at them, I wind up adding bells and whistles pushing the price from Moderate to unaffordable. It looks cheaper in the short run to just buy one for Best Buy even though I would get less on the processor, video card for the $$$, it would have what is needed without being tempted on the unknowns.

 

[RIP - VTEnviro]

I'd steer clear from Dell.

I've found their quality has gone down over the years. Ms. VTE and I have both had major hardware issues requiring expensive fixes with our latest Dells. I'm leaning toward buying a different brand next time.

 

[grover]

I've got three recent Dells and a 3-year old Sharp Actius ultraportable (I love that ultraportable!). You have to take a step back and decide what you need to use this laptop for. Honestly, even the cheapest slowest laptop Dell sells for $500 are fine for just about any task you need a laptop for, which is why I've got 2 of them (one for my wife and bought one for my mom). Especially after you remove all the crap Dell installs on them! The only upgrades you need are a little more RAM (buy after-market and save a boatload) and a DVD+RW drive. Wifi is obviously a must, but it's standard anymore. The only real difference between laptops now is not speed- speed is absolutely NOT an issue, the slowest processors are more than fast enough for CAD, video processing and anything else you need to do- but battery life. Better processors will yield 6 or 8 hours from a battery. My D820 is supposed to get 12 hours!

As for bluetooth- well, it's a niche you either need or you don't. I have a bluetooth Treo700p and I can hotsync through it (which is not very useful because I need to plug it in anyhow to charge) but the useful thing is that I can wirelessly tether my laptop to my treo on the road and use it as a broadband 1mbps (max 3mbps) wireless cellular modem from my belt <_<

Intel Core Duo or AMD Turion 64 X2? - Cheapest one you can find will be just fine.

RPM for Hard Drive? - Cheapest. Faster RPM = higher transfer speeds, which you'd never notice on a laptop.

GB for Hard Drive? - Up to you. If you BT a lot of video, larger is better.

Min. Memory? (I am thinking one Gig) - 512mb will be fine for most applications. You can add another 512mb later if you want for far cheaper than you get get on a laptop bundle.

Bluetooth? - Not unless it's free or you need it for something.

Note: for reference, until I bought my Sharp ultraportable in 2003, I was using a P133 MHz laptop with 24mb RAM. It ran AutoCAD v14 just fine, even huge multiple-mb files. And for internet and MS Office, it was no different than my 3GHz desktop. In fact, the only time I ever had issues was using free juno dialup, since juno's dialer is such bloat! With a wifi card, internet was just as fast as anything else. It couldn't handle mpeg4 video, though. DVDs and mpeg2, sure, but not mpeg4.

For putting a Wifi hub on your cable or DSL modem, you can't go wrong with a cheap Linksys router. Dlink and netgear are good, too, but I prefer Linksys.

 

[DVINNY]

I won't get into the specs of my PC, but my laptop is a Toshiba Satellite with Duo Core and 1024MB of Memory and 160GB, it has built in wireless. I went with the Netgear with Booster B/G, works great. Laptop is more than enough

 

[Guest]

I'd steer clear from Dell.
I've found their quality has gone down over the years. Ms. VTE and I have both had major hardware issues requiring expensive fixes with our latest Dells. I'm leaning toward buying a different brand next time.

Dell quality has been going way down for some time. Not to mention their Award Winning customer service.

JR

 

[grover]

Dell quality has been going way down for some time. Not to mention their Award Winning customer service.

Unfortunately, all the OEMs have pretty much the same shoddy quality now <_< With PCs, you can build your own, but we're stuck when it comes to laptops.

 

[redrum]

I have always had good luck with Dells

But I have never owned another model so its hard to compare.

 

[Dleg]

Great advice on this thread. But if Dell is dropping in quality, which maker then would you guys recommend?

My home computer is a 2001 vintage Sony Vaio, and it's ready for replacement. I just want something inepxensive and reliable for internet usage and basic home stuff.

 

[Slugger926]

Great advice on this thread. But if Dell is dropping in quality, which maker then would you guys recommend?
My home computer is a 2001 vintage Sony Vaio, and it's ready for replacement. I just want something inepxensive and reliable for internet usage and basic home stuff.

This is what I got on another board from a professor in the IT department at Texas A&M:

Actually, tech support varies greatly - within the same company - between "home" support and "corporate" support. To be honest, I have had very little experience with the "home support" side, but I've had ALOT of experience with the "corporate support" side.

Therefore, if there is ANY way you can get your computer (desktop or laptop) via corportate channels, DO IT.

That said, there are 3 companies who I would rate as having GREAT support (again, on the corporate side):

Dell

Lenovo (IBM)

Gateway

There is 1 company I would rate as having "marginal to poor" support:

HP (especially for their printers)

And there is 1 company that is so "atrocious" that I'll never buy their products again, for home or business (and I'm not just talking about their computer products):

Sony

In 20 years, I've only had one company's tech support person hang up on me (purposely) during a service call, and Sony has done it TWICE.

Now, all this said, for a LAPTOP, my choices in order are:

Lenovo Thinkpad

Dell

Gateway

Note: get at least a 3 year warranty on whatever laptop you buy.

 

[Slugger926]

I have been leaning towards a suped up Dell Inspiron 1405 or Inspiron 1501 because of the Road Ready testing in the 800-1100 range. I would prefer their business level which is tested to military standards, but that computer is around 2500.

The Thinkpads seem more expensive.

Gateway seems more expensive for the compariable computer, and they don't show any data on being banged around.

I have a 2 year old that I can see throwing the computer down on the tile or his sister's head in a split second.

 

[JohnNevets]

I got my first home computer that I didn't build up out of parts last year. It's a Dell inspiron E1505, and I'm not saying it's the best one out there, but it has kept working for me. The one thing I can suggest is if you are looking at Dells, use their outlet area. I was able to save a significant amount, buy getting a "previously ordered" model. These are brand new models, that were ordered, but never got shipped out. You may have to check a few different times to find exactly what you want, but it was worth it for me.

Let us know what you end up finding,

John

 

[mizzoueng]

I have a HP laptop and we just bought the wife a new Compaq desktop. The specs on the desktop slip me, but I have had to fix some serious software glitches in the last 4 months. The last one involved actually removing the small battery that powers the BIOS flash memory and allowing it to "reset". Seems the onyl computers worth their weight anymore are Sony, some Dell, and Alienware (but only if you are gaming / modeling).

The one thing in a laptop that I learned to look for first (too late though) was the SDRAM speed. Maybe someone can fill in the blanks here, but you need to see how fast the data is transfered between the RAM and the processor, this is controlled by a small board connected to the MB. But in 99.99% of all laptops, this is soldered in and cannot be upgraded. So you could have a mountain of data storage but only a garden hose of data will get through. This seriously hampers my laptop when running CAD or anything in 3D.

Get the Duo processors, the AMDs are okay, but every experience I have had with them has been sub-par. THey hype them up and then fail to deliver. I almost want to go the Mac on the next go around, just to try it out.

 

[DVINNY]

Alot of laptops have to have their BIOS "flashed" if the USB isn't working properly. It has something to do with Windows XP service pack 2 that outdates the BIOS, it isn't really brand specific

 

[DVINNY]

Front Side Bus.

DON'T go cheap on that, it is the garden hose that mizzou is talking about

 

[Slugger926]

Front Side Bus.
DON'T go cheap on that, it is the garden hose that mizzou is talking about

Where do you find the Front Side Bus stats on Dell and Gateway laptops???

I remember when we got our Gateway desktop a couple of years ago, we spent extra on the processor which also came with the maximum bus rather than the garden hose. Some people thought I wasted my money on the processor until I showed them the differences in busses.

 

[DVINNY]

Baby got BUS!.....

...... little in the middle but she gotta lotta BUS

Get the model number for the laptop, and search online for stats.