The following is a copy of a post I made a few months ago in In the market for a laptop, and also in COMPUTER HELP-Looking to buy a laptop computer..
I'd recommend first choosing the retailer, not the laptop. In particular, I recommend
DiscountLaptops.com. They have consistently had extremely high ratings from
ResellerRatings.com over the years.
The brand that DiscountLaptops sells the most of is Sager, which is little known. They are a major manufacturer of high end gaming laptops under other brand names, such as Alienware.
So I'd go to the DiscountLaptops site and choose based on features and price.
Dell gets a rating of
4.37 on
ResellerRatings.com, on a scale of
10. DiscountLaptops gets a lifetime rating of
9.98. Dell works by driving down their parts and manufacturing costs, and covering for the resulting lower quality with a good replacement warranty. Better to have quality hardware to start with, and still get a good warranty, as
Sager Notebook, the primary laptop manufacturer supplying to DiscountLaptops, does.
Bump on the memory recommendation. Not even 512 Mb is enough. I've got a Toshiba laptop, and its got 768 Mb, and it is barely enough. If I open more than a couple of apps, it gets dog slow, terribly slow. I'd go for 1 Gb for any Windows XP or Mac OS laptop (or desktop for that matter), at a minimum.
Newegg is the only way to go
Yes - I am a
big fan of Newegg.com. Anytime I know what I want, I buy there.
But in cases like this, where I don't know just what I want, a place such as DiscountLaptops.com is better, since it guides one to good choices.
Dell may have the replacement warranty, but the first thing they told me to do when the screen started to act up was to take my computer apart and reseat my own screen. I did. It fixed the issue, for a day. Had a problem burning CDs. “It’s a software issue buy new software” Software, I downloaded from them, didn’t have a key to unlock it. 43 emails, hours of phone calls and lots of frustration later, they did make good on my refund. I wouldn’t rank them the worst, but they are not the best by far. I will probably go to my local Circuit City or Best Buy and see what I can find. I know both of them have treated me well locally when I have had to return things.