I'm a huge proponent for having a nice desktop and a decent yet inexpensive laptop, but thats whats worked out for me. When I'm at home I would rather have a fast desktop with a big screen and a nice desk setup instead of a small laptop with a cramped keyboard.
You didn't mention price, but if your looking at laptops in the $1000 range I would seriously consider spending about half of that on a nice desktop(even better if you build it yourself) and then get a decent dual core laptop for $400 or so.
I recently bought a pretty nice dell with a pentium t4500 and 2gig ram for $350 at bestbuy. Its probably faster than what most people have for their main computer, but I only use it for office work and videos. I have my quad core desktop with killer graphics for everything else.
Just mentioning this because you said you werent sure if you would even use it unplugged all that often. I would never want to sit at home on my laptop instead of a desktop.
If you want a good business class laptop, I have to recommend Lenovo. Since they acquired the ThinkPad brand, I've been impressed. Sturdy and durable - and I have a decent GPU in it and it's great for what I do. I admit I miss my i7 Desktop at home, but hey, college is college.
From the old bloke "down under" here in Aus. (Tasmania actually) if you MUST and NEED a laptop, spend as much as you can afford, on the fastest, max RAM, biggest HD, best Video card, biggest 16:9 screen, etc. something with "local" service & back-up available, where you can (if you have to) go and have a "face to face" discussion with a service Tech to discuss the problem you are having, and lastly try like hell to only buy a laptop that comes with a real, physical, can hold in your hand OEM Windows 7 XXX whatever DVD. NOT an OS image sitting on the hard drive.
You could also pay particular attention to exactly what standard warranty is provided, what type of extended warranty is available and how much extra, a list of what is NOT covered by the warranty (I don't trust em) and what 64 bit software are they prepared to bundle with the deal.
A good time to purchase is always towards the end of the month. Why's that I hear you ask? as one who has worked for Multi National Sales orientated Companies for many years, they all work on monthly and 3 monthly sales targets and their stock is normally priced accordingly.........they get real keen towards the last 2 to 3 days of the month, especially if their sales are down, give it some consideration, ask and ye shall recieve, don't ask and *^*&%^*%&^$ you know the answer.
Good luck, let us all know how you go.
PS: my next purchase (not a PC, just a bigger LCD TV) will be made during the last 3 days in January 2011, when all the public's Christmas money has been spent and the stores are screaming out for customers, happens every year.
Good thing at UEFI. BIOS is old and outdated. UEFI is the only way to boot to a drive larger than 2.19 TB's. It's a combination of having a 64bit OS, UEFI, and a GPT partition. So that new Western Digital 3TB Green HDD can be booted from, but it needs to be done like this. I was listening to MaximumPC's podcast and they did it.
Good thing at UEFI. BIOS is old and outdated. UEFI is the only way to boot to a drive larger than 2.19 TB's. It's a combination of having a 64bit OS, UEFI, and a GPT partition. So that new Western Digital 3TB Green HDD can be booted from, but it needs to be done like this. I was listening to MaximumPC's podcast and they did it.
AJ
If I'm not mistaken, you can split big hard drives in multiple partitions and boot from them. Not sure, though..
If I'm not mistaken, you can split big hard drives in multiple partitions and boot from them. Not sure, though..
You're definitely right. I think the first attempt just to see what happened, it gave them a 2.19 TB partition and another partition with the remaining space (made it sound like they didn't have to do anything- it just happened). This is going to become more relative for media center PC's that don't really need more than one partition. I'm glad UEFI is getting rid of the BIOS, just cause of it being so outdated and old. Yes it works, but it doesn't need to be so basic.
Wow, thanks a million for all the help and suggestions. You guys are the best, no question about it.
Good tip on when to buy, and great reference links. Even a picture, thanks Dennis. All that remains is to decide, shell out the cash, weep a bit, and learn Win 7. :-)
Probably be a utilitarian laptop, like Rridgely says, and hope old HAL here stays awake for a while. That Envy does look nifty, maybe too expensive for what I need.
have a samsung r780 laptop here, much of the innards made by samsung (ram, motherboard, hdd etc)& spread out well to make heat a very small concern ... core i3 more than adequate for me, not being a gamer
they seem to have a good range and as long as you don't specify corei7 reasonable affordable
