Wifey christmas - best laptop for $1000 ish?

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heavenlywild

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#182618 7-Dec-2008 18:15

Apparently it is possible via USB 2.0:

http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=368112

Batman

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#183222 9-Dec-2008 23:50

sorry cant help but do a run down on my $962 lappy.

Looks cheap. Chunky clunky keys but macbook air-style pointer pad. But it punches way into the $1600 mark.

Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz means very cool bottom. comes with 1gig of hopeless pqi 800mhz ram but surprisingly boots in under 80s despite the truckloadsfull amount of pre-installed vaio garbage!

5 dvd makers.
4 extra music players.
3 video editing softwares inc adobe premier 9.0!
but you can't complain about the photoshop elements 6.0 nor the disco/DJ-mixer for aunt agnes' 85th birthday dance.

seems this lappy is for the peter jacksons on a diet who like 3rd party control of their softwares - check out the vaio (media) content metadata interface and the vaio entertainment tv device arbitration service - who also mixes sound every now and again.

to do that i need a further 2gig of ram. will get that tomorrow (no point getting 2x2g to run dual channel as the 32-bit os can't see the final gig)... after i've uninstalled the 3 dvd maker, 2 music player and video editing softwares that are inferior. oh and bye bye vaio 3rd party backbenchers.

heavenlywild

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#183240 10-Dec-2008 08:10

joker97: sorry cant help but do a run down on my $962 lappy.

Looks cheap. Chunky clunky keys but macbook air-style pointer pad. But it punches way into the $1600 mark.

Core 2 Duo @ 2GHz means very cool bottom. comes with 1gig of hopeless pqi 800mhz ram but surprisingly boots in under 80s despite the truckloadsfull amount of pre-installed vaio garbage!

5 dvd makers.
4 extra music players.
3 video editing softwares inc adobe premier 9.0!
but you can't complain about the photoshop elements 6.0 nor the disco/DJ-mixer for aunt agnes' 85th birthday dance.

seems this lappy is for the peter jacksons on a diet who like 3rd party control of their softwares - check out the vaio (media) content metadata interface and the vaio entertainment tv device arbitration service - who also mixes sound every now and again.

to do that i need a further 2gig of ram. will get that tomorrow (no point getting 2x2g to run dual channel as the 32-bit os can't see the final gig)... after i've uninstalled the 3 dvd maker, 2 music player and video editing softwares that are inferior. oh and bye bye vaio 3rd party backbenchers.

Well, to be honest, you cannot expect much from a $962 laptop. Yes, upgrade is definitely a must!

old3eyes

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#183242 10-Dec-2008 08:28

Well, to be honest, you cannot expect much from a $962 laptop. Yes, upgrade is definitely a must!

I bought my wife a Toshiba L300 laptop a month ago for about $800. Way better than the $2300 HP laptop she had before. High price does not gaurantee anything these days.

Regards,

Old3eyes

squirrel

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#184465 16-Dec-2008 10:57

Firstly, it all depends what your wife is going to do with it.

If it is just going to be a desktop replacement or a machine around home to play games and/or HD video files, you may want to consider something that doesn't have an intergrated graphics chipset (such as Intel's GMA graphics and anything with 'shared memory'). Not easy to find for under $1000, but they are out there.

If it is going to be a machine your wife will travel with occasionally (especially internationally), weight and build quality will be a bit more important. Battery life will be important if she will be using it while travelling (instead of just at the destination). A DVD drive may be important if it is going to be used as a movie player while away on holiday.

If she will be travelling with it everyday, taking it to work and such, then weight and size is going to be a huge issue. My GF's MacBook seemed ok, but after a few weeks of taking it to work every day (especially with commuting) she realised how heavy it really was. In that case I'd recommend a netbook, especially if there is a desktop machine she uses at home too. Go for a 10 inch model such as the HP Mini 1000, the MSI Wind, or the Eee PC 1000H (I'd avoid the HA and HD models as the features you lose aren't worth the $30-$50 less that you'll pay).

I can personally speak for the Eee PC 1000H. I was able to buy it and a 2GB DDR2 SODIMM for less than $1000 (with a 4GB SD card thrown in for free). I'd recommend putting at least 2GB of RAM in whatever you buy for her. The 1000H surprised me: I thought it would be really underpowered. It does perform quite well with most things I throw it it, but it isn't going to be much competition for a fairly recent desktop. It plays video quite well, but it does stutter a little with highly compressed HD files (as it is decoding the video and then scaling it down for the smaller screen). The lack of an optical drive isn't a huge issue for me, but it does make Asus's Restore disc completely useless, and there seemed to be no clear reason the HD had two 40GB partitions instead of one 80GB partition.

Stripping out the extra pre-installed software is something you may want to do with whatever you get, before giving it to your wife. The ammount of useless cack that some manufactureres pre-install astounds me. The Eee PC wasn't too bad, although I was confused as to why DVD player software was pre-installed when there is no DVD drive. I repartitioned the drive and installed an n-lited version of XP Pro (from a USB thumbdrive), and it runs extremely well.