Right... Mac Fat32 ... Yes... Thank god someone solved that out already. Mac vs. Windows. That was there somewhere also so I dont have to say anything about that either...

Personally - nothing cannot make me to buy Acer of Fujitsu in my lifetime. And yes - I have pretty good arcument for that also. I fix computers - 90% of laptops that are beyond fixing are Acers. Broken motherboards, detached GPU (Graphic processor) chips and faulty internal power systems. Yes, they are cheap with good numbers (= big HDD, lots of RAM and so on) but with the price of quality.

Go for HP/Compaq, Sony or apple. If you're a big gamer, go to Asus - they have very good compromises on quality and gaming power.

There isn't much to choose on laptops. Screen and keyboard someone already mentioned and yes - those are normally the most important think to choose when choosing laptop. Befare of too bright (=Acer's crystal brite) screens if you dont want to watch yourself from mirror every day. If you know how to write fast, you might want to check that keyboard layout goes even close to qwerty standard. Some manufacturers have this brilliant idea to throw some special buttons to wrong places...

What really matters is the platform. AMD or Intel. Both have bottlenecks and both have their Thors hammers. Intel just seems to have a bigger hammer... :/

CPU choice: Intel i5/i7 CPU's are the safest choise. Those are not using too much power also (45w). Intel is the choice for performance(i7) and general desktop (i3) usage and long battery life. If you want to get more power with your moneys but you are ready to give away some battery life and little bit of quality, then choose AMD Phenom II N660 or similar CPU. AMD CPU itself runs little bit less than intel (35w) but motherboards and GPU's for AMD systems are almost always little bit more greedy than intel system and therefore AMD machine might be little hot and noisy. Althought it might be little bit hard to find high-end laptops with AMD chips ... which should make you think about the quality

Apple is not just an option - it is a new path. If you own Autocad, photoshop, office and/or other licenses products you might end to buy MAC versions of those or run them on virtual machines (= not good idea). Apple is a good option for normal user who doesn't do much with the computer or who is still looking for the first system to use. It is easy to learn, easy to use and just too fucking hard to fix anything by yourself. Money vs. power cannot compete with PC laptops, but then again Windows and OSX are from different century what comes to usability.

If you haven't bought any software yet and you like to make music or photoshopping then Mac might be your path. But if you already know how to regedit, upgrade ram, (un)install programs etc and you like to keep it that way, then go to PC. So many of my customers have bought mac but they have returned to PC because they cannot do some tinywiny thing with their MAC that they have used to do with PC. (No. I dont say that MAC is bad choise. It just isn't god. It cannot do everything.)

Dont go greedy with the hard drive. Bigger drives are mostly slow ones and with any of todays CPU normal classic hard drive can slow the system down. Even the fastest one. You can always get some space with external hard drive or using Dropbox/Wuala cloud drive. Todays choise is 120GB SSD (solid state disk) which is much faster than classic disk drive.

Also check that your laptop has the connections that you need. Firewire ports are mostly gone, VGA ports are replaced with Display ports and HDMI ports. Some of the laptops has only few USB ports and so. Also check out that you have optic drive if you need one.

Maybe this is enough... I have to do some real work over here.

My several year old one is an Acer, and has given me no problems but for old age. So i'm happy with the manufacturer on that, although i do recognise that manufacturers in every field go through hi and low times.

I don't play games on computers, they're like chasing your own tail. I'll join in the Wii or board game with others - i may try some global games but haven't yet.

That's why i spend so much time annoying forums..

But the graphics thing is UMA or something. Might be good for art/design.

Specs are generally fine even with the little things (webcam is HD 1.3mp, though i'll probably rarely use it). But it hasn't been delivered yet so i can only go off the spec list.

Go for HP/Compaq, Sony or apple

yeah I'd agree with that, certainly the Sony or Apple bit anyway. Sony Vaio are very good laptops. I also like IBM/Lenovo ones, they're not as good as the proper older IBM Thinkpads but still good. But of course, all these are significantly more expensive than an Acer will be. :)

Affordable Sonys had nothing in them, and HPs with the trimmings inside looked like fake display models made out of a plastic biscuit tin, they were so tacky.

But there's always a balance of compromise with these things, you don't get everything and everything.

For me, i think i've got it about right.

My laptop has a Pentium III 900Mhz :) T22

Running Puppy Linux and is basically a free netbook!

I like Acer laptops, my bro has one (I chose it for him) and my best friend also has one (again, my choice). They are very affordable but like many products these days sometimes bad ones slip through quality control for one reason or another.

I wouldn't recommend a Mac to anyone, they are crap.

It still hasn't arrived, i'm like a kid before christmas so i'm gonna spend my day looking for someone to press some VW steel wheel centres in some 8x13in Weller steel outer rims. Not proving as easy as i'd hoped, i might need to make a press cup for this pattern of wheel and i don't know if i can be arsed. Might just band some Vauxhall wheels.

Anyway, back to the plot, i've been looking at upgrades already. I can go to 3.2ghz with a Pentium i7 and combine that with 16GB RAM, all for £260. Not bad for a laptop, even in a couple of years time.

apple = shit anyway mate, using old Fat32 drives.... about time they pull there finger out and using NTFS which doesn't have a stupid 4GB file size limit. Like their phones though, wait no thats a lie. I hate itunes, i hate apple i HATE syncing, miss the good old days of drag and drop on walkman phones from sony.

Wow this made me laugh. Saying macs use old windows formatted drives. Brilliant.

Am I the only person who would've recommended Mikey to build his own desktop? If space etc wasn't an issue of course.

Edited 2 September, 201115 yr by Polo Will

Am I the only person who would've recommended Mikey to build his own desktop? If space etc wasn't an issue of course.

He was after a laptop so i suppose you would have been :-D

Given the choice id recommend the same as you, building it yourself is the only way to go!

The family/home PC gets fairly regular hardware and software updates/modifications by the brother in law, using his old stuff. All i know about it is that it works fine, was the first computer in the house to run Windows7, but i rarely use it.

My laptop has a Pentium III 900Mhz :) T22

Running Puppy Linux and is basically a free netbook!

A bit OT but I have a netbook at work running OSX leopard.

http://code.google.com/p/netbook-installer/

Mac, windows, linux - just use the OS that suits the job. They've all got their pros and cons

(my home PC win 7, home laptop ubuntu, work computers Mac)

I would tack at look at dells refurb site my mate got the Dell XPS 17inch with i7 intel CPU 500gb HDD and 4gb ram for the same cost of my new 15in with i5 and he has all the same warranty as he had a dead pixel and they came out and put in a new screen for him

Get a MacBook, I've had mine 2 years and battery still goes 7 hours, havn't reformatted it

Once and it's just as fast as the day I brought it.

my dell studio17 was a good purchase,had a wank hd which needed replacing but is bulletproof apart from that

may upgrade the ram soon to 8,but its got a good couple of years in it yet

bluetooth was a must when i ordered it