[FreeSpaceFreak]

despite my usual complete and utter disdain for HP, their ProBook and Envy lines seems to be better than their generic fare.

I have a 2008 HP Compaq, which was basically the predecessor of the Probook line. And I'm happy with it, never had any problems that a driver update wouldn't fix. It's a business-grade laptop, so the hardware is pretty well-designed.

My brother has a brand-new Envy, and he hates it. He uses it for gaming a lot, and the thing gets HOT. The specs are nice and dandy, but the fan's woefully underdesigned. He couldn't even use 3DSMax for longer than 15 minutes before the thing would overheat and shut down. Gaming, same thing. I put it on permanent battery-saving mode for him, and now it's better; but it kinda sucks paying all that money for those specs and not being able to actually use them.

So, my 2 cents, get a business laptop, not a consumer one. Business hardware is designed to work properly, consumer hardware is only designed to look spiffy on spec sheets.

[Mikes]

How about that one? http://www.razerzone.com/blade

[LordMelvin]

alternately, if you want to be badass, go for something a bit more rugged.

[Scotty]

Or not, because those are heavy to be carting around your typical college campus.

[JGZinv]

Being that I should be employed by asus shortly, you are indirectly supporting a fellow HLP modder by buying their product.   

Nah actually like the others I have various asus stuff, laptop, mobos, monitors, etc... all of it has performed well.

Not a fan on Dell support, or some of their more recent stuff. Knew a guy that bought a brand spanking new consumer grade Dell Inspiron laptop here not too long ago
with the slot loading drives... hated the thing after not even a week of ownership.

Check Best Buy on the Asus units, generally you can find them there quite a bit cheaper than online. But the selection is usually older stock.
Just don't buy into their geek squad optimized crap, it's a complete customer rip off.


Personally, while that's an awesome rig... as others have said laptops cycle pretty quickly as to being outdated.
I'd find yourself a used or little older model, in the $650 to 900 range, and put the money into something else. Build
a starter desktop rig later. notebook reviews forum you need to haunt when it comes to laptops, not only for the laptop
specific sections but there's a usually very busy buy/sell section.

I wouldn't pass up craigslist either, had some pretty good $200 laptops I snagged off there too.

If you want a budget laptop, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834107081
Stick a couple more GB of RAM in there ($30) and get a mouse... and you're set for pretty much any basic tasks.
It's dead silent, almost no heat, and works pretty darn well after some basic setup.  Certainly not a gaming computer,
but would work great for web browsing, docs, or toting it around campus. You can lift it on 3 fingers. Screen's good.

[MP-Ryan]

alternately, if you want to be badass, go for something a bit more rugged.

We have Toughbooks at work.  They're junk.

[jr2]

I second Toughbooks being junk.  The Marine Corps uses them.  They come back from Afghanistan trashed.  (Well, then again, I'm not sure if there is a laptop that wouldn't.  Still, the thing is supposed to be built for extreme environments. Ha.  I'm pretty sure a run-of-the-mill Toshiba or Sony would outperform those for durability.)

Consumer Reports recommended (4 or 5 years ago):

Toshiba
Sony
Mac

for laptops.  Sony is a bit pricey, Mac is even moreso.

I've had an HP, I never will again, I want a laptop to compute, not to fry eggs on my hard disk platters and bacon on the GPU.  I have a Toshiba now, and I love it.  My only complaint is the keyboard is a bit finicky and keys get stuck -- however, unlike many other laptops I've worked with, they always come unstuck, and continue to all function.

As far as warranty, a buddy of mine in job school had a Toshiba, the hard disk went bad under warranty.  I called them up, they sent him a box, he put his laptop in, they had it back between 1-2 weeks later with a new hard disk.

I really kinda like ASUS for their motherboards (although IIRC Nuke had problems with them and I've never really had to deal with their RMA departement).  I also have 3 ASUS RT-N12 routers that I absolutely love (actually have 2, I sold one to a buddy and bought another to replace it).

So, FWIW, my two cents.  BTW, Alienware is now owned by Dell.  Dell=sucky crappage IMO.  I've seen multitudes of Dells fail (many many optical drives, they are crap in Dells, and the slot-loading drives are a nightmare to replace as you have to rip the entire laptop apart).  Batteries fail in 1-2 years, hard disks go bad and cause BIOS freeze with no display on power on so the mobo or GPU looks like it's shot (only certain models; not sure if it fixed yet).

Friends don't let friends own Dells.  They used to be a great company in the 90's, and they got greedy and sold their souls to the devil.  Next!

[Mongoose]

Funny, because both of my brothers have had a good deal of success with their Dell laptops, Vista-related nonsense nonwithstanding.  Hell, my mom has a several-year-old Inspiron that her former job was giving away, and the little thing still chugs along.

[Scotty]

I have to put my praise in for Toshiba.  I've had my current laptop (the one I'm posting from, incidentally) for nearly two years now, and it still faithfully serves to this day.  Works for everything I really need to (as an engineering student on a college campus), and a lot more besides.  Numpad (which I could just not live without), comfortably large keyboard, awesome speakers.  Even works for whatever gaming I need to do.  Runs WiH enough that I can actually play it, even with the hideous performance hog that the unoptimized UEF ships are notorious for being.  Runs every thing else well enough that I barely even notice any framerate drops.  Hard drive large enough for me to use everything I need to put on it and more.  It really does everything I would ever need.

[Klaustrophobia]

i third the junk toughbooks.  the navy uses them also.  aside from being not all that much stronger than an ordinary laptop, they are the mother****ing slowest computers i have EVER used.

[Kazan]

If I went with XP, I'd go with XP Black.

I'd love a desktop, but that's not going to happen.

Also, in the engineering department they use Linux 1/2 the time anyway, so I'll probably end up dual booting. And I'll probably use a Fedora distro, though not one that includes GNOME3.

EDIT: Excuse me, probably not all of state. Just the Collage of Engineering.

The College of Engineering expects all incoming students to own a laptop or tablet.

And I hate tablets.

Side note - the AMD catalyst drivers for linux are usually awful for any of their newer chipsets (i.e 6000 and 7000 series). Unless you can deal with no linux acceleration of -edit:(3d)- graphics (which I've never really cared about) you'll want to get an Nvidia card.

BS

[LHN91]

If I went with XP, I'd go with XP Black.

I'd love a desktop, but that's not going to happen.

Also, in the engineering department they use Linux 1/2 the time anyway, so I'll probably end up dual booting. And I'll probably use a Fedora distro, though not one that includes GNOME3.

EDIT: Excuse me, probably not all of state. Just the Collage of Engineering.

The College of Engineering expects all incoming students to own a laptop or tablet.

And I hate tablets.

Side note - the AMD catalyst drivers for linux are usually awful for any of their newer chipsets (i.e 6000 and 7000 series). Unless you can deal with no linux acceleration of -edit:(3d)- graphics (which I've never really cared about) you'll want to get an Nvidia card.

BS

Guess I should have added "in my experience". I've yet to get an AMD driver to work well in Linux with anything newer than a 4870, while Nvidia drivers seems to just work.

[jr2]

they are the mother****ing slowest computers i have EVER used.

I do have to input here that that is most likely due to NMCI's (Navy/Marine Corps Intranet - civilian company that the Navy and Marine Corps thought would save them money by farming IT-related duties over to them instead of keeping their own IT personnel - doesn't work very well, as NMCI disappears when deployed, so they have to keep both ) draconian policies (using McAfee Firewall + Norton AV, Guardian Edge Hard Disk Encryption, etc).  Based on the system specs (Intel Core 2 Duo, 2 or 3 GB RAM) they shouldn't run that slow.  They just have a million and one security policies in place.  Not sure of the effectiveness on those, but they are certainly effective at enforcing a 5-10 minute boot time (more if you're logging on to that unit for the first time).

[Klaustrophobia]

that explains the slow office computers, but the toughbooks are not on NMCI, they are on the local LAN.  desktops (which are quite old i might add, using parallel printer ports) on the same network approach warp speed in comparison.  without a word of exaggeration, i've seen single mouse click on one of those toughbooks take 2 or three minutes to regiser.  i know it's not all the computer's fault, because i'm sure there's still a few levels of encryption on them, and the IT guys who maintain them are **** and don't have an IT background, but i think it's still fair to say the toughbooks are quite poor performers, all that aside. 

[jr2]

Which ones do you guys use, the CF-52s?  We used to use old ones, I forget what they were, CF-50 or CF-48s .. I wanna say 48s, and they sucked balls, like you're describing.  The CF-52s, when not on the NMCI network, run ok, and I imagine, if I installed straight XP SP3 + MSE on them, they would probably fly.

[Nuke]

Are you absolutely, 100% committed to using a laptop? Because a desktop is going to last longer, break less often, and perform a lot better.

and when it does break you can fix it.

[Bobboau]

I want power.

I want performance.

I want reliability.

then you want a desktop.

[LordMelvin]

If I went with XP, I'd go with XP Black.

I'd love a desktop, but that's not going to happen.

Also, in the engineering department they use Linux 1/2 the time anyway, so I'll probably end up dual booting. And I'll probably use a Fedora distro, though not one that includes GNOME3.

EDIT: Excuse me, probably not all of state. Just the Collage of Engineering.

The College of Engineering expects all incoming students to own a laptop or tablet.

And I hate tablets.

Side note - the AMD catalyst drivers for linux are usually awful for any of their newer chipsets (i.e 6000 and 7000 series). Unless you can deal with no linux acceleration of -edit:(3d)- graphics (which I've never really cared about) you'll want to get an Nvidia card.

BS

Guess I should have added "in my experience". I've yet to get an AMD driver to work well in Linux with anything newer than a 4870, while Nvidia drivers seems to just work.

My 5870 has been working just fine for quite some time now - I've been using it with the AMD binary blob since I first got it, when the 5xxx series was the newest there was (although it wasn't completely new - they' been making 5xxx cards for several months at that point), and never had any troubles aside from the time I messed up my multimonitor settings in xorg. In my experience, as long as you're not on the too-expensive-to-get-there-anyway bleeding edge, AMD cards'll work fine on linux. The days of the driver issues that I had to deal with back in aught-six and aught-seven are pretty well over and done.

Also, on the original topic, Can't say enough good about having a strong scratch-built desktop and small cheap-o laptop.

[jr2]

Personally, if you plan to use your laptop a lot, I'd get a ~$1000 Toshiba (if you want an 18.4" screen like mine):

i7 720QM or 740QM, depending on model (1.6 or 1.73 GHz)
4 or 6 GB RAM, depending on model (max upgrade 8GB)
500GB HDD (+64GB SSD on some models)
GeForce GTS 360M (1GB) or 460M (1.5GB), depending on model
Screen res 1680x945 or 1920x1080, depending

That's $1000-$1100 range; throw in another $200-$300 and you get stuff like 1TB HDD, i7-2630QM (2.0GHz), 8GB RAM, etc.

Although that's hardly the height of portability.  Big screen=drained battery (but nice games & videos) .  Drop the screen size down and usually either the price drops a couple hundred or the goodies inside get a little better.

Go to Newegg.com and go to category > Laptop > Toshiba > select CPU type, screen size, and other options that you know you really want, and see what you get.

One thing you may want to drop down is i7 down to i5 or even an i3 (but note the i3 doesn't have Turbo Boost but does have Hyper Threading, while the i5 has TB but no HT -- i7 has both HT and TB plain English article here) -- just make sure it's the mobile variant if you want your batteries to last longer.  Or, you could save $$$ and use a AMD processor instead.

Post what exactly you'll be doing with your laptop regularly (specific games you will probably be playing, any 3D modelling you'll be doing or other resource-intensive tasks) and I'm sure the folks here will likely be able to give you a really good recommendation.

Of course, that's all if you need to use your laptop for everything your desktop can do ... if not, get a beater laptop (a good beater, though... I'd still get a Toshiba, they run just as cheap as the other ones do).

[Kazan]

i7 720QM or 740QM, depending on model (1.6 or 1.73 GHz)

not sandy bridge or ivy bridge... not worth looking at.