whats a good laptop for me? I am looking for something really worth the money and fairly cheap?

Question

I need a laptop the burns movies and CD's and has at laest a 120 GB hard drive with 2 Gigs of memory and a good graphics card? waht kind should I get and how much does it cost?

Answer 1

Dell inspiron 1501

2GB memory
160GB hard drive
Burns and plays CD's and Dvd's

it cost 750$ at walmart

and it works GREAT
don't be fooled just because its from walmart. its a very good computer and its more expensive if you buy it directly from dell

Answer 2

Saw a compaq dual core with 120 gig hard drive for $399 2 sundays ago. Dont buy a laptop with a lotta memory versus one with a big hard drive. memory is cheap and canbe bought cheap online. it's easy to change memory. changing the hard drive, now that's a biatch and $$$. Your best bet are Compaq and Toshiba. They should be no more than $500 when a good sale is going on.

Answer 3

Best buy for a good computer with a dedicated video card would be the Dell Vostro. Somewhere under a grand depending on CPU.

Answer 4

Go with a Toshiba, as they are good computers, but because they are not really popular as yet they still are less expensive than the exaxt same type but put out by Dell, HP, compaq, etc.

Most of those well known brands are not any better than the Toshiba brand, and only cost more due to name brand recognition. We pay for the well known name, on top of the hardware we purchase.

Also, don't do any upgrades with the manufacturer, regardless of who you go with. For example: RAM modules, processors, video cards, WiFi cards, Firewire, etc, are all fairly simple to upgrade or add more of to a system. When you choose the "upgrade this system" option, you pay an inflated price for the hardware itself, as well as an inflated installation price. It is much less expensive to buy the hardware yourself and learn how to put it in, and it really is not difficult, than have it upgraded at the factory.

Now, go with an XP box. A Windows Media Center 2005 Edition if you can. They are now selling more of them, not like when Vista first came out and suddenly nowhere could an XP OS be found on a prebuilt machine. The reason I say go with XP is because you can always upgrade it later on, and please believe me when I say it is not difficult to do so, not at all, and they are less expensive right now, and take less hardware to run well. Currently, for any version of Vista above Home Basic, you really need a minimum of 2 gigbytes of RAM for a really good experiance, and I would strongly advice 3. I install 3 to 3.5 on ALL of my machines, as RAM is not that expensive any more as long as you buy it seperatly and install it yourself. Do not try to install 4 gigs even if the specs says the OS can handle it, unless you purchase an x64 OS which can handle up to 16 gigs if on the proper motherboard. Currently, on a x86 with a 32 bit OS, the last .5 to 1 gigabye of RAM, the upper 4th gig, is held in reserve for other uses, and if you install that much it is wasted money.

Now, for your particular needs, if you go with XP, you can easily get by one 1 gigabyte of RAM. A 120 Gigabyte hard drive is perfect. Any ATI or NVidea video card will suffice, but I prefer the ATI, to be perfectly honest.

Try to avoid the costly Roxio and Nero multimedia suites because they are known to cause issues, and can easily crash. There are a ton of free programs which you can use to burn anything you wish to burn. XP Media edition comes with free software for most of these things, CD burning, and changing to the mp3 format is a breeze with Windows Media Player, and you can download the Quicktime and iTunes for free as well. There is a free image burning and other image options with a program called imgburn, which you can find and download for free at http://www.filehippo.com

I know this may be impossible, but try to avoid the two major security software programs, McAfee and Norton being installed onto your system. If they are, the first thing you should do is go to whichever is installed on your hard drives website, aquire the "special" removal tool, disable the program and run the tool to rid your system of it. These two are notorious for poor functionality, and they are very difficult to remove once installed. Once it is removed, get yourself your choice of suite, either a paid for version of a combination of free firewall, and anti-virus programs, plus at least one anti-spyware program. Those two Vendors force their products down consumers throats and refuse to say how difficult they are to remove, and what the consequences are for that failure. Which is at the least system instability, poor functioning of the security solution of your choice due to interference and incompatibility and system crashes at worst. Get rid of those programs as soon as you can.

Now, you can hardly buy a laptop without an wireless adapter already installed. Just know that it will come with a combo 802.11b/g, and not an 802.11n capable adapter. If you wish to upgrade to the faster protocol, which also has a wider range, you will need to be prepared to yank that pre-installed card and replace it with what you want. Not difficult in the slightest.

By purchasing the minimum of what you want, and then looking for upgrades on sale, you can achieve a smoking system that you really love. The only major thing you need to watch out for when messing with your hardware is to ground yourself before touching the interior of your box. Just buy a inexpensive wrist band and hook it up as instructed and you won't need to worry about static elctricity burning out your hardware.

Good luck and much success finding the perfect laptop and a very merry christmas.