SpudFiles

I'm going to buy a new notebook, but i am unsure on what i should get.
i have aus$640 to spend, and i might be able to get a little bit of money off my parents towards it as well. i was thinking about getting a Dell Latitude D600 which has a 1.4GHz processor, 20GB hard drive, intel pentium M, 512MB ram. that will cost $520. i need it for word proccesing, instant messaging, playing music/movies, web browsing, burning DVD's/CD's.
I'm in australia and can only buy from ebay australia, and my parents don't trust any other sight except ebay...

thanks in advance to all that help to_live.

eBay is your friend when buying computers. I got a computer on eBay for $800 and the next week I saw the same specs on a $1400 machine at Hardly Normals.

yeh but they can also rip you off, my mate brought an IBM thinkpad and a month after he got it, it just stopped working...

True. I would only buy new computers on eBay and only with some kind of warranty, but I also know alot about computers and I can fix most problems, not that I've had to yet.

so what do you reckon about the notebook i am looking at?

It should get the job done. Just don't go playing Crysis on full graphics. What Os are you going to run, Vista will be pretty slow I would go XP.

The only thing I think is bad about that laptop is its hard drive. 20GB isn't much, especially if you are going to be storing a lot of music or movies on it. Although I suppose you could always upgrade the hard drive if you ever ran out.

You might want to get a larger harddrive, or an external one for data storage.
20 gigs is quite small, considering my Ipod has 4 times more storage

i was going to get an external hard drive and use that to store everything and just leave the 20gig hard drive for things the computer needs, as to try and make it run faster.

I always treated portable computers for what they are- portable.

It seems everyone wants these super-high powered mobile desktops, which, as a result are dinosaurs compared to the ones they had 5 odd years ago.

I would just get a cheap one, with a small hard drive, and spend the rest on a nice desktop for gaming/ file storage.

Agreed - although that said I use my PDA now more and more.

I've got one of those keyboards that fold out and ever since I've got that I can't say I've ever used my laptop. The nice thing is that it can stay in your pocket 'til you need it.

Michael

u guys dnt undastand wat im getting it 4, im just going to use it for music burning DVDS/CDS and word processing, im going to run mac coz i hate windows gets to many errors. and im not going to play games on it, bcoz i have my PS2 for that, and i dnt reali play video games nemore...

naw windows is good (i sense a O/S war) you just need to know what causes the errors then you can correct them.

Being from the IT world... These are just my opinions and experiences.

Laptops are harder to customize than desktops, and building your own is out of the question for most people. So, when choosing between brands...

Avoid Dell. Avoid Gateway, eMachines, and Acer also. They're built of cheap parts and aren't made to last. I fix more Dell's than anything else. The screen hinges tend to break. Some people get lucky with them, but I'd never buy one. Gateway and eMachines are probably the worst computers out there except for garage-built jobs by incompetent idiots

IBM makes the best laptops in my opinion. HP's products are also good. IBM's take a lot of abuse. I've seen things done to an IBM that would have *owned* any other laptop (seen someone spill coffee all over an IBM while it was on... seen one fall off the hood of a car onto pavement... they were both fine).

Panasonic and Sony make good products but are very overpriced so I tend to avoid those brands, too.

Spend a few extra bucks and get a good machine that'll last you awhile.

As to OS, it's really up to taste. I'm NOT a Mac OS fan (macs have great hardware but the stripped-down, "glossy", too-user-friendly, not-remotely-customizable interface isn't for techies). Linux is great if you can handle the learning curve, but most people seem to be stuck on Windowze. On that note... don't get vista. Please. Every single client of mine that has converted to Vista has regretted it to some degree. There are driver nightmares, software incompatibilities, security holes.... Microsoft released it way too early. It needs another 6-8 months of testing and patching before it's "stable". The problem is, a lot of vendors don't even offer XP anymore! Hope you have a copy laying around, or can get one cheap .

Hardware: Get the best you can afford. Research everything, read up on the specs and what the numbers mean (such as CAS latency for RAM, which is very important but few manufacturers even mention it).

Just my two cents.

Peace,
Pete Zaria.