Laptops

[Wab]

Rule of thumb I use is that any recent processor should suffice but spend as much as you can afford on RAM and a graphics card.

If money is no object Dell (Australia) has a gaming laptop which, when fully tricked out will set you back more than $7,000.

[maxdakota]

I have heard that the money back policy of Dell is not responsive and at some places it can not even work !! But, I have no bad experience like these. I am using Dell's Inspiron 1545 since a year and there is no big trouble which has happened to me since the purchase. The customer support is also good.

[calicojoe]

I recommend Toshiba followed by Compaq.

The Satellite range have all run pretty well so far, excepting one where the wifi card died.

The Compaq CQ62-215 will set you back $379, and does come with an AMD120 cpu with 256mb dedicated video ram. The CQ62-238 ( a special edition) was able to play Batman: Arkham Asylum acceptably and without video stutter on cut scenes and main play.

You can right click on the desktop, select Screen Resolution and Advanced Settings to see how much dedicated on board video ram you have. (Windows Vista and 7 only). You can use dxdiag for Windows XP.

[Schlubalybub]

I wonder if anyone can help me

I have a Dell Latitude D610 running on Windows XP, and everything was fine until today. I tried to watch a youtube video, and there's no sound. I can get the volume control up fine, but no sound comes out. I've tried plugging in both an external speaker and a set of headphones- nothing, so I assume it's an error in the system as opposed to the internal speakers conking out (headphones usually work if that's the case...)

I've gone into the device manager from the control panel, but I can't see anything wrong. Does anyone know if I need to update a driver or anything?

EDIT: Never mind, it was a driver issue, I downloaded one off the Dell website on the off chance, and it fixed it, no problem!

[Fawkesfan1]

Don't EVER get Gateway laptops from HSN. Found out the hard way. Love the laptop, it works ok. But now it's been crashing recently. Not due to viruses and the like though, did 2 anti virus scans and they both came up clean. Think it might be due to the Gateway Wild Tangent games that are on it. They showed up as 'unstable' during a Norton reputation scan.

Edit: Just took in my laptop to be repaired. Hopefully this will solve any issues it was having.

Edit: Just got it back and found out it had some viruses and a Trojan horse (or two) on it . Turned out to not be anything I had on it though, since I also had my flash drives scanned and the computer people found nothing wrong there. Sounds like it might have been an instant messenger I downloaded, since Meebo is gone and/or it was there from when I first got the laptop. Similar issues have happened to other people's Gateway laptops from HSN... so that's why I'm thinking it might be related. Their computers all messed up around 2 months, like mine did. Glad the computer people were able to (from the most part) were able to solve/fix the issue.

[rich_505]

I've been very happy with my Asus laptop, heading for 2 years old - I upgraded it from 4GB RAM to 8GB a few days after buying it; it felt fast with 4GB, 8GB made it run like the wind (bullseye).

Prior to that I had an Acer Timeline 'ultrabook', ie super slim thing with uber good battery life, it was a great little machine but developed some undesirable hardware issues (keyboard and track pad, then hard drive, then RAM) hence coughing up for the Asus.

Slightly off topic (sorry!) My work machine is a Mac these days, 21" late 2011 iMac with 20GB RAM and a snazzy Core i5 processor. Great little work horse, handles everything I can throw at it and I would imagine a whole lot more if I got creative with it! 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, it's my companion; over the last year we've developed something of a bond. And it's schexy tech after all, it does look rather good!