Saturday 14 February 2009

Laptop down!

My laptop broke last night, and while it is still in warranty (yay 5 year coverage!), I do need to update sometime and won't be surprised if now is the time.

Now, I have some ideas as to what I want:
4G of ram (Windows being a hog)
Vista Premium (if I must go with Vista, need something decent, if not Ultimate)
300-500G drive
15" screen
Quad-core CPU would be nice
Not too worried about graphics driver and co as don't go for games.

There is one computer at Noel Leeming that seems to fit most, although there are much cheaper ones. Hmm...

Anything else I should be looking for? (Yes, I could switch to MacBooks but have even less idea of what I would need.)

[END]

3 comments:

Foo said...

If running Vista, you will absolutely need lots of RAM - Vista is a hog. Vista Home Premium should do the trick and I'd go for 3 or 4GB of RAM.

Generally, laptops top out at about 320 GB hard drives but from there they start having two drives (so 2 x 250GB for 500GB, 2 x 320 for 640GB etc). Prices increase quite a bit when you go over the 320GB mark.

What you are after all depends on what you are using it for...if you don't care too much about games/video & audio rendering, then a Quad core would probably be overkill. I decent dual core will be enough. By the same token, avoid Celeron and Sempron as they are low end CPU's (although cheaper not as 'future proof'). Actually, nothing is future proof, but some stuff lasts longer than others!

Another small bit of advice - despite not caring too much about graphics, try and get a laptop with a dedicated graphics card rather than integrated graphics. The performance of the Vista Aero interface can be affected by low end graphics card.

Hmmm, that link to Noel Leeming has gone bye bye.

I'm also in the market for a laptop over here in London...and am taking my time to purchase the right one. I have my eye on a goodie but waiting to a) get a job b) have decent exchange rate from Kiwi to UK and c) see if prices might slip a little first as it's a reasonably new release.

Foo said...

Oh, if you need any more advice, shoot me an email!

Jamas Enright said...

Too late!

But after I pay my laptop off, next will be to upgrade my tower, probably getting a preassembled build from http://www.pp.co.nz