Purchase Advice - 13.3" Notebook

Terra

Am i right here with such a topic? Don't seems like, but where then?

Anyway, i need a purchase advice. I want to buy a notebook, best would be 13,3" but 15,6" is okay too. At least 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB RAM and 200 GB HDD. Long accu-time would be good as well. Preferred manufacturer is ASUS, but that isn't neccessary. And it should have a cool, black design :D. Optic DVD / CD-device would be great as well. And very important: A SD-card-slot! That's all.

I hope, somebody can help me :)
 
I'm in the exact same situation, except I don't want anything larger than a 14".

I've nailed the selection down to three possibilities:
the Dell Studio XPS 13 with a P9600 processor (2.66Ghz),
the Toshiba Satellite U500-11D,
and the Asus U3SG-3P037E.

And I'd discourage getting and Acer, it's not a very reliable brand. Any help is appreciated for me too :)
 
My only advice would be to avoid retailer own-brands. (Advent from PC World is the main one in the UK, don't know about other countries.) I had an Advent laptop that didn't last very long at all. Whereas I have an ancient Toshiba (about 7 years old) that is still fine hardware-wise.
 
I have a 13in macbook pro and it was an amazing investment, worth every penny so far. I'm definitely an advocate of apple now, as I tried going back to windows and it just didn't work. It really is an awesome machine.
 
It's hard for me to recommend as I'm not familiar with European prices (you two seem to be located in Germany and France), but stay the hell away from HP =/ Nothing but problems for my friends. Horrid build quality.
 
^funny, because I use an HP (desktop, but still). No problems so far. only nitpick is that the pop-up screen that comes up when you insert disk/similar things doesn't work, but I don't use it much anyways, so it isn't exactly a problem. (having XP).

And sorry, but can't help otherwise, I'm not expert on laptops.
 
TERRA#493 said:
Am i right here with such a topic? Don't seems like, but where then?

Anyway, i need a purchase advice. I want to buy a notebook, best would be 13,3" but 15,6" is okay too. At least 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB RAM and 200 GB HDD. Long accu-time would be good as well. Preferred manufacturer is ASUS, but that isn't neccessary. And it should have a cool, black design :D. Optic DVD / CD-device would be great as well. And very important: A SD-card-slot! That's all.

I hope, somebody can help me :)
Click to expand...

errr... considering you already know the specs of the laptop you want, why dont you just go online and find one that fits your requirements? nobody here is going to do the donkey work for you.
 
m0nkfish said:
errr... considering you already know the specs of the laptop you want, why dont you just go online and find one that fits your requirements? nobody here is going to do the donkey work for you.
Click to expand...

help is a thing, who everyone respects. but okay, i don't waste your time then oO
 
Go with the Studio XPS 13. Actually, you could go with the Studio XPS 16 because it's actually 15.6". How convenient.

Dell Studio XPS 13

I would like to point out that I'm pretty much ecstatic that I can read *some* German on that page.
 
Asus is good, I've had an Asus U3S for about a year now and it's a really sweet laptop! Dell is pretty good too.
 
I usually go on slickdeals.net for purchases like this.If I'm not mistaken they have a few deals up right now for some netbooks if you want to take a look.
 
Exarius said:
^funny, because I use an HP (desktop, but still). No problems so far. only nitpick is that the pop-up screen that comes up when you insert disk/similar things doesn't work, but I don't use it much anyways, so it isn't exactly a problem. (having XP).

And sorry, but can't help otherwise, I'm not expert on laptops.
Click to expand...
Um, you can't really judge the quality of a company's notebook computers by looking at their desktops. In fact, the problem with HP notebooks is that they basically ARE desktops, just with all of the components crammed into a smaller box. I bought a dv9000t 17-inch HP notebook as a desktop replacement (I wanted something that I could take with me on airplanes) and the motherboard died several months after the warranty expired. What caused this hardware failure? The fact that I was clocking both of my processor's cores at 2.0 GHz, which is the rate that they're supposed to clock. I had to pay ~$300 to have HP fix a problem solved by their design flaw. I found out later that owners of the dv9000z who had the same problem got this problem fixed by HP for free, as it was a design flaw that caused a lot of power users' machines to die, but because my machine was powered by an Intel chip (rather than an AMD), I had to pay.


Anyway, advice for OP:

My recommendation is to buy a laptop with a minimalist memory configuration and then just add more memory after buying it. When I bought my laptop, getting it with 2 GB RAM would have cost me something like $150, so instead I bought it configured with 512 MB RAM and bought a 1 GB stick for $50. That was two years ago. Last summer I bought a 2 GB stick for $30. Depending on your memory's clock speed, you might end up paying more, but when it comes to memory, after-market upgrades are the way to go.

Similar case for laptop hard drives. I just saw a 640 GB laptop hard drive on Newegg that is selling for $120. Buying a laptop with a puny hard drive and then replacing it with something like that would probably be more economical than buying something with a larger pre-installed hard drive. Several other things to consider when it comes to hard drives: default for laptop hard drives is 5400 RPM. They do also make 7200 RPM laptop hard drives, but these tend to be more expensive and they also shorten your battery life. However, they do offer a performance increase. On the far end of the performance spectrum, you have solid state drives, which are considerably more expensive and offer less storage. If you use a solid state drive, you'll probably want a separate external drive for storing your media. Instead of buying an "external hard drive," just get the drive and enclosure separately. $90 desktop 1 TB hard drive + $20 external enclosure = massive storage for a reasonably low price.
 
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