need advice on good windows 7 laptop.

[macgig]

had some questions...

1. what brand and model should I get? does brand even matter?
2. what processor should I look for? I don't need top of the line but I don't want something too slow either.
3. where is the best place to buy this laptop? ebay or somewhere else?
4. how much can I expect to pay for something decent?
5. are refurbs a good idea?

thanks for any tips you can offer.

 

[Baddog22556]

You can buy good laptops for under $300 or maybe an Asus ROG G751JY-DH72X for $3000 or
anywhere in between. You asked a general question so here are general answers. If you give more
specific details on what it will be used for there will be more specific laptops to be recommended.
Good luck.

 

[macgig]

$3000? if I had that sort of money id get a mac laptop. Id be web surfing and emailing for the most part.... low end stuff... nothing too fancy.

 

[AddRAM]

1) Not a Dell
2) an i5 or equivalent to whatever they`re putting in a laptop nowadays
3) There is no best place, but definitely not Ebay, not for a new one anyway
4) $500 to $700 at least
5) No

 

[ThrashZone]

Hi,
We have no idea of where you're located at least pick a country and state if you want real help

Manufactures well that is sort of a narrowing piece and yea I'd stick probably with Dell/ Asus or MSI depending on your budget and needs,

I got a cheapo Gateway M-series laptop that has latest now almost 7 years and bought it through Home shopping network also bought a Acer miniature desktop from them too = who would of thought both would still be alive and kicking today both in the 5-600.us range :roflmao:

 

[AddRAM]

Dell is garbage, so is their support and so are their motherboards, pure garbage.

Go Steelers

 

[ThrashZone]

Yea I've never owned a Dell there build a pc stuff was always out of my price range

Hey you live in Jersey isn't against state law to cheer for the Steelers

 

[AddRAM]

We don`t have a football team, so those rules don`t apply.

Or a Baseball team, or a Hockey team etc etc etc :roflmao:

 

[whs]

Best is to study the ads that come with the Sunday paper. A reasonable laptop with an i3 CPU costs $300 to $350. The i3 is a decent CPU good enough for normal office work and internet. I personally would look for an i5 because I do some video work.

I always replace the HDDs in my laptops with a SSD. That is an extra $60 to $100 depending on the size of the SSD. The HDD you recover makes an excellent external disk with a caddy.

 

[AddRAM]

Agreed, replace the hard drive and max out the ram.

 

[macgig]

I'm in the USA east coast. I'll avoid ebay and the refurbs. and dell. I'm thinking HP maybe. thanks for the feedback.

 

[AddRAM]

I`ve had 2 HP`s I liked them both.

 

[dsperber]

Last week I finally ordered the Lenovo Thinkpad P70 (17.1" screen) I've been waiting to be able to order for the past 6 months. The new P50/P70 line was announced earlier this year and has finally become available.

These are NOT low-end inexpensive machines. In fact quite the opposite.

But if you're looking for a serious laptop/workstation with latest hardware, serious graphics choices with DP/HDMI external connectors, FHD or UHD laptop screen (optionally with Touch), internal 2-bay PCIe M.2 SSD support (for PCIe SSD RAID configuration if you need it), internal SATA3 HDD/SSD storage bay plus optical drive bay (which can be used for second HDD/SSD instead), optional built-in X-Rite color calibrator for the screen, serious capability, up to 64GB DDR4 RAM, i7-6700HQ or i7-6820HQ and non-ECC memory, or Xeon E3-1505M and ECC memory, etc., one of these could be for you. Win10 or optional downgrade rights to Win7 Pro x64 pre-installed.

Again, these are NOT low-end inexpensive machines. And for some reason Lenovo's initial pricing for some of the significant upgrades (i.e. additional memory and HDD/SSD storage) leads one to probably opt-out of getting them from Lenovo and instead just going with the "standard built-in $0 extra charge storage components and then buying these more competitively priced and commercially available extras and installing them yourself. Better pricing, better choice, better value, if you buy and install these memory and extra storage items yourself.

I've had my Lenovo Thinkpad W530 for 3 years and I love it. Lenovo made some bad decisions in their next W540, W541 and W550s machines. But with these latest P50/P70 products I'd have to say "they're back!". I also put friends and family who want to replace aging desktop machines into Lenovo's M93p desktops. Again, I recommend going with $0-cost standard storage and doing the memory/HDD/SSD upgrade yourself rather than buying those from Lenovo.

I've never been let down with Lenovo support, including ONSITE warranty hardware service (i.e. visits to my home from locally contracted service technicians) in the rare occasions where something's failed as well as phone tech support.

For the past few years I only buy Lenovo.

 

[ThrashZone]

Yep I basically looked at the spec's of them,
I knew at the time to stay away from anything with less than 2.20 Ghz Intel cpu
I wish now I would of gotten at least a quad core Intel cpu
There a lot of low powered units out there so and it seems H-P has them all

 

[Baddog22556]

I was a computer engineer/network engineer so comtrash and packard hell were on my blacklist.
Then gateway and then dell drifted in there also. I have an Intel Pentium Acer Aspire that does all I
need it to do. It has a crappy GMA but I don't game or graphics or photos so all is great.
(oh, I could have added more to the blacklist but can't remember them all. )