What to look for?!?

shoeydude said:

Hey SevenForums!

shoeydude here and this is my first post. I will admit, I have been quite the leecher from this forum until this point.

I'm a senior in high school and I am starting to get into the process of browsing for a laptop for college. I have a budget of ~$2000 for a strong laptop to hopefully last me at least 2-3 of the first 5 years of schooling.

So now my question to you all is, what should I look for in a laptop of this quality? I assume my budget should buy me a fairly nice one.

More than anything I would probably say I am looking for power. I already have a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate which I plan on freshly installing once I make my purchase. Battery life is not of too great importance with most laptops today providing a solid 1.5-3 hrs of life. This is plenty for me.

Anyway, there's my blurb.

What do you suggest?

With a budget like that, I really would suggest getting a MacBook Pro. They are quite sturdy.

I know many will hate me for saying this, but its the truth.

shoeydude said:

Haha oh goodness.... I knew there was something I forgot!!

I have a little thing against Macs.

And I have that budget, but I don't have to use all of it

Ah, well. Then I suggest something along the lines of a Dell XPS Studio 16. Heard great things about Dell and that particular model.

In the end, its up to you.

Studio XPS 16 Laptop | Dell

DarkNovaGamer said:

With a budget like that, I really would suggest getting a MacBook Pro.

Here's my suggestion - Sony Vaio F Series

I personally still like Dell's. Toshitbas (ehn, there ok) Sony? (nope, there are some nuanced reasons for that)
HP makes great printers, not great computers.
Acers/Gateways/eMachine are garbage
Macs, they may be solid, but extremely expensive (very over priced hardware) and very very proprietary software and accessories, and I hate the Truly Anti-Competitive EULA and the company as a whole.

I have 2 Dell Laptops, an Inspiron 8200 that I got in 2002? that still runs great, although slow by todays standards, but it runs.

I also just got a Dell 1764 and love it. It is just a hair better than my desktop but doesn't have the graphics card for games. Just the Intel (32Mb dedicated) on-board graphics. and still I almost like working on it better than my desktop, as it's the i5 processor and screams pretty good at anything throw at it that is not heavy graphics. But plays HD video very very well. Dell's have not gone that far down hill. However I have my gripes about the company, they have good lines and bad. and the good ones are really good.

On my 1746 I can run 5 Virtual Machines (1 Server 2008R2 and 2 Win 7's) and Linux and XP all at the same time and still be able to work in the host system. All on 4G of ram Each of the Server and 2 7's with 512M allocated each. 256M to both Linux and XP.

And I think I can squeez some more out of it.

But I would also say look for i7 CPU and no less than 4G's of RAM.
You would not be disappointed with an i5, but I would not go any lower than that.