Need Laptop Advice

[Vision]

I have to buy a laptop for work. I need a wireless card, cd/rw, usb ports for connection to printer and cell phone for internet, long battery life, a dvd player would be nice. Anything else?

What type of price range am I looking at? Any suggestions? I've heard of people having lots of problems with these things.

Any suggestions for a moble printer?

[Vision]

Thanks

[KoRn]

Anywhere between a few hundred dollars to about $2k. Just depends on how many features you want. For everything you mentioned expect about $1,500 for a good one.

As for mobile printers don't get one...... I hate printers. They are evil.

[kingu]

I use an HP pavilion zv5000 series (the ZV5010US, specifically) that I picked up for a little under a grand. 3gig AMD64 processor, bright widescreen, harman/kardon speakers built in, multimedia card slot (for camera or pda cards), 3 usb, 1 firewire, svid out, lcd out, svga out, par port, 60gb hd, dvd/cd(rw) - I highly recommend the unit. The only thing that was really missing was a keypad, and I picked up a USB one from Kensington (they have a really nice wireless one now that also works as a regular calculator when not attached.)

Battery life is about 2 hours, a little more or less depending upon circumstances. There are enough air vents out the side that I can hold it on my lap for those two hours without frying my legs or the processor. It is also heavy - certainly in the desktop replacement range. The unit does end up fitting nicely in a Kensington backpack, but does not travel well slung over a shoulder.

I'm quite happy with it, actually. Highly recommended, especially if you end up watching movies while travelling.

[Vision]

Any brands you suggest or to stay away from? Printers are evil?

One thing I don't like is the touch pad mouse. Do any models have another method?

[kingu]

As for mobile printers - use a Kinkos or related office outlets to do printing on the road. Most hotels have business centers with printers on site (expect to spend some time occasionally hunting down drivers, then hunting down how to uninstall them.) I haven't found a mobile printer that doesn't either fall apart or weigh so much that I want to throw it down the stairway.

[Viking2002]

Most decent laptops nowadays have built-in wireless cards. I'm currently supporting several hundred Dell D600 and D610 models. By and large, they seem to be reliable, hardware-wise, but beware of Windows 2000. It seems to blow away your 802.11 WEP encryption on a whim, especially when it picks up open WLAN signals floating around. And, for resaons undiagnosed by us at the moment, the Dell software not only picks up open networks (such as hotels and airports), it seems to propagate them to the other laptops in the domain, as well.

[KoRn]

I've have seen good Dell, Gateway, and IBM laptops. I don't have a personal preference, just get the best deal you can find from a reputable brand. You can get an external USB or PS2 mouse, so you don't have to use the touch-pad.

Printers are just evil to me. I had the opportunity to vent.

[Vision]

Are you familier with this one?

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=70844&item=6770278037&rd=1

[Woodman]

Take this from someone who has had many laptops over the last 10 years (usually high end 2 or 3 spindle units) the can be great, but they all suck in some way.

For Constancy of quality and usability my favorites have been Toshiba's and IBM's. The only thing I don't like about my current IBM is the duel pointer stick and touch pad. Personally I like touch pads although they can be hard to use on a train.

The current T series IBM's are reasonable (under $2000 for a high end well equipped unit). I am looking to move to a tablet, but I haven't gotten buy-in by our purchasing group at this time. The Tablets I have been looking at are HP and Toshiba, but they generally don't have built in optical drives too save size and extend battery life.

Here's the recommendations in features:
Pentium M, 500+ MB's RAM, 80 GB High Speed Drive, Wireless that support 802.11g/b/a and LEAP. MINIMUM 2 USB 2.0 ports S video out and component video. RCA Out audio jacks and a CD R/W DVD Player Drive. around a 15' screen (avoid the sub 15's). IBM T series meets these requirements nicely.

[NautiNurse]

Sony VAIO notebook. Have owned three of them.

[Petronski]

One thing I don't like is the touch pad mouse. Do any models have another method?

Get an IBM Thinkpad, they use the TrackPoint. Imagine a tiny joystick that feels like a pencil eraser:

[bannie]

LAPTOP ADVICE:

Don't engage unless wife is lap-top-ee.

Further, I believe they're pricy.

[Woodman]

None of the 20 or so Gateway high end laptops we bough at work 2.5 years ago lasted more than 2 years without some major problem, most being bad screens, cooling fans, mobos or the screen just went blank (I had two do that to me). Some of them only run when they are laying on their sides.

[Sloth]

Got my wife an E-machines M5405 a few months ago for about $740 after sales taxes & rebates. She likes it well enough.

[KoRn]

Wow that's a poor track record. We've only bought a few and they did great, but then we switched to IBM because they gave us a better deal. I have yet to see an IBM mess up.

Having said that tomorrow we will get flooded with calls from remote IBM users with laptops that won't boot up.

[Woodman]

IBM now has both Touch Pad and Pointer Stick. You can adjust the sensitivity on the touch pad until it is pretty much useless unless you mash it though. The one nice thing about this configuration is that there are two left and two right buttons (each high and low) to choose from when you are jammed on a bus, train, or plane.

[Woodman]

I also had a purchase of about 60 high end towers come in (4650's) with Intel 815 chip sets and 1 GB RDRAM. All are just about 3.5 years old and now they are failing one at a time mostly bad power supplies some hard drives. I'm not trying to trash Gateway with any sort of vendetta, just giving a heads up. I have worked in shops that were all IBM, Compaq, HP, Dell, and whatever was cheapest, but I have never seen anything like this. I even worked in one place that bought TwinHead or other bargain laptops and they were more reliable than these Gateways we bought.

[axes_of_weezles]

E-Machines got bought by gateway. New emachines are labelled gateways, FYI. Emachines/Gateway/HP are all made in Taiwan in the same factory.

E-Machines M6805 here, no problems after a year.
512MB, DVD/CDRW,Wireless B/G Athlon 64, 80 Gig hdd.

~1200 new.

[KoRn]

Come to think of it. We bought some Gateway PCs and we had trouble with 3 of them. All power supplies. We have also bought Compaqs and they seem to have HD issues.

I guess all of the big PC companies can make lemons. Build your own is what I say, but management never sees it that way.....

[Woodman]

It doesn't matter as much what factory your laptop was made in as it does what the reseller asked them to put into it. Quality of manufacture is pretty consistent in Asia, but cheap (or high margin) laptops will have lower quality parts. These parts really rear their ugly head from all the bouncing around, recharges, bad environmental (hot cold, wet) conditions and poor cooling. Just my two cents.