I waited long enough, hoping for the after christmas sales and stuff to be good. Who has the best deals on laptops? School me on laptop deals nyspeeders…
Buy my Macbook it has it’s own for sale thread!
what are you going to be using it for? do a search on google for “netbook”
HP, DELL, MSI and ASUS all offer compact laptops between 200-500.00. Probably the best bang for your buck these days
nothing too heavy duty, burning cds, surfing the interweb etc, not too much gaming
Mac or PC
Windows, OSX, Linux
Intel or AMD
Dell, Apple, HP, Lenovo(IBM), Sony
9", 13.3", 14.1", 15.4", 17"
New or refurb?
And how much money to spend?
You really can’t beat the Dell Outlet deals right now, 20% coupons available if you google, if you don’t mind refurb. Spend the money on the extended at home warranty and refurb doesn’t matter.
watch for the HP laptops to go on sale. you can usually find a good 14 or 15" model that is 64 bit with 4 gb’s of ram and a decent sized hard drive for under 700 dollars. those are pretty good laptops. look for a deal on model DV4-1125NR. that would be just fine for what you want to do.
I got one that will nvr turn on again, sell it to ya fo cheap
Dell.com They had some nice deals yesterday. 185 bucks off some laptops
slickdeals.net posts all the dell deals. Techbargains.com posts even more.
HP in the next month will be introducing new batteries in their laptops. Quoting the new battery company (name escapes me) “the battery will outlast the computer”. They can be included in new laptops from HP for an extra $30 according to NPR. Something to consider…I might get myself one.
Ok, i ended up ordering a Thinkpad SL500. Ive had several (755C, 365E, T20, T21) and liked thinkpads…
heres the scoop:
Intel Core2 Duo processor T5870 (2.0GHz 800MHz 2MBL2)
15.4" WXGA VibrantView
Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator X4500
2 GB PC2-5300 DDR2 SDRAM 667MHz SODIMM Memory
160 GB Hard Disk Drive, 5400rpm
DVD Recordable 8x Max Dual Layer
ThinkPad 11b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Express Adapter III
I searched and got a coupon code, so it was $559 with free shipping
Dell had some sick deals too, i was comparing this to a Vostro 1510, which was close in price, but the thinkpad had better graphics and a slightly better cpu, even though the vostro had a bigger hard drive (250gig)
^Not bad at all. I can’t believe how cheap laptops have become.
Yeah no kidding. I was still using my 900mhz p3 T20 until like 3 months ago… and those were like at least 2-4X the price new of the one i just bought.
I bought my mom and HP mini for xmas for 450…good bang for the $ in my opinion
HP makes a damn good laptop…Their desktops on the other hand…
Not a bad deal.
The thing that bugs me about Lenovo is their service sucks. Ever since they changed from IBM, their service levels dropped significantly.
So you might not ever have problems, hopefully, but be prepared to have to fight for repairs.
And the service level I am talking about is at a service shop (authorized) and not just end user.
Follow up:
Well, they had to push back the shipping date by about a week, so ive been using it for a little bit, so here is my quick review of the SL500
The quality for the money seems pretty good here for this machines low cost ($559) it has a fair amount of convienient features, such as a built in sd card reader and hdmi output, and it has the touchpad and trackpoint both. I personally like the trackpoint. I was personally impressed at how cool to the touch the laptop stays even through extended use, as well as how quiet the harddrive was, its almost inaudible in a quiet room, seriously. Also, since ive been using the integrated wireless, the speed has been pretty good but the connection quality was what seems to be excellent, it hasnt dropped out or got sluggish noticeably at all. The glossy cover of the unit shows fingerprints like crazy, i would almost like to have the old black matte coating over the case instead of the glossy shine, although the glossy shine seems to impress friends… The battery lasted about 2 hours just surfing the interweb, but it was setup for maximum performance even on the battery so none of the real power saving options were utilized, im sure you could do better if you tried. Vista on the other hand, i havent been that impressed with, it just seems like a face lift on xp, maybe a little fresher, but alot of crap that i either dont care for or wont use. Plus, the stability seems good but not bulletproof, it still has those little annoying crashes once in a while… i know, its not running linux, and its not a mac…
Pros:
Very nice value/low price
Good integrated wireless
decent quality
stays cool to the touch in normal use
Cons:
Shiny cover shows fingerprints like crazy
battery life is mediocre
Lenovo’s service is meh, took over a week longer to ship than they quoted me