Laptop Purchase Recommendation

beef · Post by **beef** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 11:59 am

All,
I am doing some research on purchasing laptops for salemen for the company that I work for and was looking for some advice. The only software that we will require it to run is adobe reader, as all are programming is done in such. The issue I don't want to run in to is we feel that we don't want them to feel that we went completely cheep on the systems as they will have to pay for some of the cost out of pocket.

We will be sticking with either dell or hp as that is what we have contracts with.

I'm pretty far out of the laptop market, so really have no idea specifically what we should be looking for.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 7:15 pm

If you are buying something for a company, keep your eyes on Dell's Small Business section. As for what it needs to do, cheapest ones they got should be more than sufficient. If need be, toss an extra gig of ram in. They just are not in need of any sheer power, no need to spend more money than you have to. Not like these things need to play Crysis or WoW for that matter...

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 7:34 pm

Check this page out. The deals get reset every Wednesday at Midnight. This is an insider's page with special deals. You usually save $100 over the main Dell homepage prices because of the way the notebooks are bundled:

http://www.dell.com/content/products/fe ... l=en&s=bsd

Right now the Latitude D531 is a very nice deal for the money. It's priced about the same as the low budget Vostro 1000, but it's a much better laptop. They're been heavily discounting them for the past few weeks.

I bought one of these for the wife 7 months ago. Nice lappy. You can also get XP Pro pre-installed for an extra $99 if you don't want Vista. They give you both the XP Pro and the Vista Business CD.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Mon Aug 11, 2008 7:50 pm

Yeah, if you paying more than $600 for a laptop, you better be gaming on it.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 1:04 am

Heck, if you're just surfing on the laptop, check out some of the stuff the forum guys are selling. Often, you can get a last gen laptop for $250. If you're playing games on a laptop.... shame on you!

EvilHorace · Post by **EvilHorace** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 5:26 am

I recently bought a Dell Vostro 1000 for work and I like it. It's fast and hasn't given me one problem so far.
I opted for a slightly better CPU (+$25) and an extra gig of ram (2 gb, +$25) because it runs Vista. Cost me less than $500 shipped.
I'm new to Vista but despite all those who seem to hate it, even the IT people where I work, I have no problems using it.
Although it doesn't have an advanced videocard like my older home laptop (a true gaming laptop and was costly), I can play games via Steam (like my favorite DM classic even though it doesn't look as good in "software rendering" ) at work too if we get slow and I'm bored. We're short handed now so that hasn't been an issue lately.
If you want even a cheaper new laptop, I saw an Acer unit recently at Circuit city for $430 after a $100 rebate. Don't know how good it'd be in comparison to a Dell, didn't look at its specs either.

beef · Post by **beef** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 7:21 am

Thanks guys, I think were going to be looking at getting dell vostro 1510's or so. Were looking at buying somewhere in the neighborhood of 300-500 laptops, so I am very interested in seeing what kind of deal we can get.

normalicy · Post by **normalicy** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:44 am

I recently bought a Dell Vostro 1000 for work and I like it.

Funny, I just set my friend up with that same setup. It is a decent laptop.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 11:47 am

The only problem I see lately in using older computers just for the web is that, unfortunately, web apps have gotten MUCH more resource hungry.

I clean up older PCs for charity and even on a system like a 1.6 GHZ Celeron with 512Mb and a clean OS install, which you would think would handle web browsing just fine, it chokes on some of the pages with a lot of flash video like MSN.COM and COMCAST.NET and interactive maps like Google Maps or the Weather Channel pretty much run like crap.

The more they move computing into the "cloud", ironically, it seems we need MORE computer not less.

Honestly even for a very basic user nowadays I'd avoid the Celeron or P4 based systems if you're buying new. Even the slowest Core 2 Duo is going to way outperform it.

ZYFER · Post by **ZYFER** » Tue Aug 12, 2008 12:40 pm

Well Celerons are pieces of junk anyway you try and put it...

Pentium Dual-Cores are more than sufficient. Any low-end you can buy new today is more than most people need, even for Flash-based pages. As always, I try and dodge Celerons though, they make even Semprons look good.