Laptop Recommendations

[Quietus]

Hey guys,

Ive been charged with buying a laptop for someone and I dont know much about them.

What is the best of the "normal" laptops out there? Can anybody help me with brands or types or anything?

Thanks for any help..

You can't go wrong with Dell.

[econ21]

I bought an Acer laptop and its expensive graphics card went pop playing RTW, so I would not recommend them (although that problem may just be specific to a particular model). Took an age to get repaired and ended up costing almost as much as a new one (in retrospect, I probably should not have even tried to have it repaired)

It seems really hard to repair a laptop - one bit goes, you have to change the whole insides - so I would put reliability at a premium. Toshiba laptops have always had a reputation there, I believe, but Dell may be ok too. Go for a big well known brand rather than be tempted by something cheap but unknown.

When I bought mine a year or two back, Centrino processors were "new" but I guess they are standard now. They are lighter/get less hot than Pentiums and tend to come with good wireless networking. A Centrino processor of a certain speed tends to outperform a Pentium of the same speed, so don't let the numerical speed (GHz, MHz whatever it is) distract you unduly.

I'm not sure - based on my experience - whether I'd recommend using a laptop for gaming. Nowadays, they can do it - with the right graphics card - but at least given my experience it seems a bit risky. I keep my laptop for work only (or very old, graphically undemanding games when I am travelling) and keep the latest graphically challenging games (e.g. RTW) for my desktop. I guess this assumes you can afford two computers - but if you can't you might question whether you really need a laptop rather than a desktop. Laptop prices go down if you don't need a laptop that can run the latest games.

[Divine Wind]

I bought a Dell laptop recently and its been top notch so far. They get a thumbs up from me too.

[Sjakihata]

I just ordered a dell inspiration 6000

[ichi]

If your friend likes to use his laptop for media stuff then I recommend the 17" inch HP Pavilion; wide screen, fast, lots of ports that accept the various chips and digital media.

ichi

[KukriKhan]

This forum http://www.notebookforums.com/ is visited by both users and vendor techs, and can give you a pretty good idea of the good, the bad & the ugly on notebooks.

For me, the big issue was upgradeability. If I was gonna spend bigbucks on a hi-end notebook, I didn't want to have it be obsolete in 18 months. So I went Alienware.

They make machines with upgradeable graphics cards and processors. $2,800spread out over 5 years, instead of 2, made more sense to me.

It's a year old this week, and (so far) can still handle every game/demo I've thrown at it. I expect to upgrade the vid card late next year.

As usual, the 2 big questions are:
1) What is the user gonna use it for? games? surfing? school?
2) How much money ya got? :)

[PanzerJaeger]

Wow, thanks for the help guys.

This is going to be a bigger project than I thought, im going to have to get more info on the laptops and what he wants it for..