If I am building a desktop PC I know that GB or HSI are good brands of motherboards and I go to Corsair for PSUs. Does the common wisdom of AD point to any particular brand of retail laptop that stands out for quality and reliability? I am a number-cruncher, not a gamer, though a decent GPU would obviously be a plus. Dick
It really doesn't matter who makes the laptop, it's basically the same s**t in every one of 'em. Unless you buy a high-end laptop, which would be a bad decision considering you're not going to play with it.
Alienware was once something special...before Dell bought them. For cheap laptop reliability I like the HP...not because of particularly good build quality; just because you can have RAID1 data security in a laptop under for about $600...of course, if you drop your laptop in water or off a bridge or whatever you still loose everything. I can't think of any laptop brand that is equivelant to what Corsair is to memory and power supplies, or even what Gigabyte is to mainboards.
This is what I am currently looking at: Lenovo IdeaPad Y550 (324156U) NoteBook Intel Core i7 720QM(1.60GHz) 15.6" 4GB Memory 500GB HDD DVD±R/RW NVIDIA GeForce GT 240M. The idea of a 2.80 GHz four-core Hyper-Threading i7 and CUDA-capable GPU for under $1,000 does intrigue me. If it works out well and I get a decent tax return next year, I could even upgrade the HDD with an Intel X25 SSD. That will also give the SSDs a chance to come down in price, since a $500 SSD for a $1,000 laptop seems a bit lopsided. I'll be gathering information until the first of the year, so if anyone has any specific recommendations or other comments regarding this or other laptops, please share them here. Dick
This isn't the most expensive one, but still quite a lot for a laptop: http://www.techdepot.com/pro/product.asp?productID=6609810&info=Tech#tabs
Very interesting. In comparing it with the $1K Lenova I'm leaning towards (above), the Toshiba has 6GB of memory instead of 4GB and two disk drives (one HDD, one SSD) instead of one HDD. The Toshiba also has a larger screen and bigger GPU. While the SSD and bigger/faster graphics seem more geared toward the gamer, the computational guts seem to be identical (quad-core hyper-threaded i7-720, 2.8GHz(OC), 1333MHz memory). Since I'm not a gamer, it looks like I might grab that Lenovo and run! Thanks for the comparison. It was very helpful. Dick
hp are good apart from the 9000 series sony vaio are great only had one in and that was ID10T error thats it every thing else is fairly regular in our shop power sockets are the worst offenders, screen almost as bad
