Laptop deal?

[smackaholic]

Lil' miss smackaholic is getting herself a laptop. Her geek friend recommended this one....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834152107

$579, free shipping. She doesn't need the latest greatest. Just something for school (starts community college in a week or two). Also wants something that will run that idiotic Sims game she likes. The Sims makes my 3 year old hp laptop sad. It will run for awhile but eventually it starts speaking in tongues and fire shoots out of it.

A preemptive GFYJO to all the faggits that will whine that I should take it to the geek forum. This shithole needs the all the traffic it can get.

Thanks/GFY in advance.

[ucantdoitdoggieSTyle2]

Are you soliciting feedback or just using this forum for twitter-like purposes?

[KC Scott]

Lil' miss smackaholic is getting herself a laptop. Her geek friend recommended this one....

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6834152107

$579, free shipping. She doesn't need the latest greatest. Just something for school (starts community college in a week or two). Also wants something that will run that idiotic Sims game she likes. The Sims makes my 3 year old hp laptop sad. It will run for awhile but eventually it starts speaking in tongues and fire shoots out of it.

From first look the price is in the same range where you could get a comparable HP from Best Buy or Office Depot / Staples - the pro with this is if there's an out of box / 30 day failure you've got a physical store to take it to and get a new one right there. Just reading the customer comments on New Egg the first dude had a hell of a time dealing with them. The con is you're paying sales tax - nothing else wrong with brick and mortar stores.

I bought the wife a Gateway 2 Xmas ago and it was junk - from the hardware perspective. Keys fell off when the kids would play games on it and couldn't be replaced. I've never heard of an MSI so you'd need to do some reaerch on it.

A 250gb HD is big - needed if she's gonna DL a lot of video or songs - not so much otherwise. 3GB of Memory is good for Vista - 4 is better. Not familiar with the AMD processor - I've always used Intel - most of what I've read indicate it handles Vista and wireless better.

[smackaholic]

Are you soliciting feedback or just using this forum for twitter-like purposes?

As if you actually need to solicit feedback in this dump? :)

And no, it's not just a braindead twitter/facebook proclamation. I fuggin hate those.

So, go ahead ucunt, feedback some.

I'm tending to agree with scott though. If jamming the state of CT out of a few bucks in tax revenue is my only reward, I prolly will take her to a real store. Of course, I will use a store that will prolly be there in a year which wasn't the case with my last laptop purchase. I bought it from Office Depot. Had fine service, so long as I could bring it in and actually talk face to face with somebody. After they closed shop and I had to deal with them over the phone, it was a fukking joke.

[ChargerMike]

...you might want to try this site Smack, these geeks can answer anything if you can hang long enough..password= leo


http://irc.twit.tv/

[Mikey]

Bought a couple of HPs in that price range at Costco and have been very happy with them.

[smackaholic]

Is there any fukking thing you can't buy at costco? I gotta break down and buy a membership there, I guess.

[Mikey]

Is there any fukking thing you can't buy at costco? I gotta break down and buy a membership there, I guess.

Intelligence.

[smackaholic]

Well, I went to the costco and indeed, you can buy pretty fukking much everything (in bulk)other than intelligence.

Wasn't really impressed with their laptop selection though.

Strolled over to the best buy afterwards. That fukking place has as many laptops as china has US T bills. And they even had a very enthusiast young lad named Ron who seemed like he had a reasonable amount of intelligence (not sure where he got it). I told him I was buying a laptop for my college bound daughter. Dude starts asking all sorts of questions about my daughter-where's she going to school? living on campus? blahhh blahhh . Anyway, he tried steering me towards a fukkkk, I forget the model, but he made a HUGE deal out of it already having MS office (don't care) and anti virus (don't care, even harder). It had 4G of mem, which would probably handle the Sims onslaught, but, I was kinda digging the 200+ dollar cheaper toshiba with 3G of memory. It is the L505 model and it can be had for $429 plus our oppressive state tax.

Anybody familiar with this laptop? Is it going to burst into flames while lil' ms s is Simsing? I have heard pretty decent things about toshiba laptops, but, it has been a few years and nowadays, high quality reputations aren't as durable as they once were. They also had a package deal going. $649 for this laptop and a toshiba 26" lcd TV. It would make a nice monitor for the desktop which still has a CRT nearly as old as wolfman. Trouble is, my finances this year are about like the nations, but, unlike the treasury, I don't have a printing press in the basement banging out sheets of 20s. Therefore, I'll prolly just go with the laptop. Maybe I can sell this crt in a few years at an antique stop.

[KC Scott]

Anybody familiar with this laptop? Is it going to burst into flames while lil' ms s is Simsing? I have heard pretty decent things about toshiba laptops, but, it has been a few years and nowadays, high quality reputations aren't as durable as they once were.

My back-up (Use my work dell for 99.8% of evertything) is a Toshiba L305 with the Pentium T3400 running vista and it's great. 250gb HD - I think I paid $529 back in April at Office Depot. It's the second Toshiba I've owned, and never had any problems with the first either.

Do some research - you'll see they get pretty solid recommendations.

[smackaholic]

I said I bought my laptop at office depot, then wondered how you could shop at one this year. Then I pulled my head out of my arse and realized it was comp usa that I bought mine at. I guess office depot ain't dead yet.

[smackaholic]

I have just been informed by lil' ms s that the msi laptop is the only one in the price range that will do because it has a dedicated video card. She says that she found out from other Sims geeks that sims 3 will not play on a machine with an integrated card.

What say you fukkers?

Know of any other boxs in the sub 600 dollar range that have dedicated boards? Preferably from brick and mortar stores.

[Mikey]

The laptop I got at Costco earlier this year (HP G60 Notebook) has an AMD Turion dual core processor (2.10 GHZ), 3 MB of RAM, 350 GB HD. Not the greatest performance but plenty for my needs. But....It has a 16" diagonal 16:9 wide aspect HD screen and NVIDIA GeForce graphics. Good for watching movies or whatnot. WiFi, integrated webcam, DVD R/W and ingtegrated multiple memory card reader.

It was $550 out the door. After using it for a couple of weeks I want back and got one for the wife and one for the boy. Too bad that deal came and went.

[Felix]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8092151896



ASUS at $479 dual core processor with 3g ram and a 320 GB hard drive

my wife wanted an inexpensive laptop and the guy at Best Buy showed me this one
pretty impressive for less than $500 and you get a free Windows 7 upgrade when it comes out

[KC Scott]

I have just been informed by lil' ms s that the msi laptop is the only one in the price range that will do because it has a dedicated video card. She says that she found out from other Sims geeks that sims 3 will not play on a machine with an integrated card.

What say you fukkers?

Know of any other boxs in the sub 600 dollar range that have dedicated boards? Preferably from brick and mortar stores.

Smack - there's this new website called Google.........


Here's a $529 HP Laptop from Best Buy with Nvidia G-Force 8200M Graphics card.

If you're wondering how it will work on the Sims This site gives you the specs

[smackaholic]

Went back to bestbuy this morning. Ended up with this one....

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp ... 8093382123

The 429 dollar one, would have done me fine, but, she wants the built in web cam. The extra $100 bucks also buys better video capabilities and a more efficient processor that allegedly gives much better battery time. It also makes less heat, so algore will be glad. Seems to me the higher efficiency ought to get me some shweet gubmint $$$$$$, but, i'm not holding my breaf on that one.

We also went with the $269 3 year best buy warranty. I did the same with my HP lappy and it more than paid for itself.

[KC Scott]

We also went with the $269 3 year best buy warranty. I did the same with my HP lappy and it more than paid for itself.

Fuggg that warranty - huge rip off.

The warranty from the store is 30 days - Manufacturers warranty should be One year - if it hasn't shot craps by then your OK.

You know the whole rig will be obsolete in 24 months, right?

[PSUFAN]

Just bought my kids acer aspire netbooks @ $300 apiece. I'm hoping they get a couple of years use out of them.

[Go Coogs']

Just bought "his and hers" laptops for me and the Mrs.

Both Dell Studio XPS 15"

500gb HD
2.1 GHZ Intel Duo Core Processor
4 Gb RAM
Comes with Office '07 already loaded on it
Webcam
Backlit keyboard, bluetooth, and a bigger battery

Both combined cost me just under $1600.

I thought it was a pretty good deal.

[smackaholic]

500 Gig.

You could pretty much download all the pron ever made.

[ucantdoitdoggieSTyle2]

We also went with the $269 3 year best buy warranty. I did the same with my HP lappy and it more than paid for itself.

How so? You paid what, $500 for the laptop... $600? It sounds more like you kicked your own fucking ass by paying another 50ish% for services needed to fix a faulty POS. Perhaps if you bought a decent model to begin with, you wouldn't have assraped yourself with such vigor.

[smackaholic]

We also went with the $269 3 year best buy warranty. I did the same with my HP lappy and it more than paid for itself.

How so? You paid what, $500 for the laptop... $600? It sounds more like you kicked your own fucking ass by paying another 50ish% for services needed to fix a faulty POS. Perhaps if you bought a decent model to begin with, you wouldn't have assraped yourself with such vigor.

About 4 months after we bought it, the HP was dropped and the screen broke. This is a 400+ repair. So, in that case, the warranty paid off.

I realize that paying 50% doesn't make much sense when looked at from an actuarially point of view, but, I know my daughter. She's a klutz. They likelyhood that she will bounce this one is pretty good. If she doesn't, I will at least recoup a bit of it with a battery replacement in a year or 2.

If I was buying it for myself, I would skip the extra warrantee, but, I'm not.