Laptop Advice?

[swestrup]

It seems my client is thinking of buying himself a new laptop. He wants something to take on trips with him, and lightness and long battery life are his chief concerns. It doesn't need to be too powerful, as he's just going to be using it for email, MS word, and corel draw. He wants something with built-in wireless, but he doesn't need a huge hard drive or gobs of RAM. He'll be running Windows XP on it. He doesn't care about a large screen either. Naturally, the cheaper, the better.

Any suggestions from people who've shopped for laptops recently?

Comments

[joenotcharles.livejournal.com]

I got an Asus Z63A because reviews said it ran Linux really well. (I still haven't gotten suspend working, but I'm pretty sure that's a configuration problem and not the hardware's fault; the only bit of hardware that doesn't work and never will is the CF/SD/etc reader, which I don't really care much about.)

It's pretty much the opposite of what he's looking for - fairly heavy, lots of RAM, big screen - but it does have incredible battery life. I'm highly pleased with the battery. So he may want to look into other ASUS models.

(Other than the suspend problem that I mentioned, the only thing I dislike about this laptop is that the speakers are terrible - even at max volume, I can barely hear them. But that's what headphones are for.)

[kinra.livejournal.com]

Not meaning to be a wiseass, but here I go: MacBook with Boot Camp! Great battery life, decent starting specs, very light, costs just over a thousand for the basic white one -- maybe $1500 or so for the slightly-higher-end black variant.

The 12" iBook feels like a PDA, honestly, but it still does almost everything I need, and that's even without booting WinXP.

[swestrup]

Nah, he needs something that won't require a techie to handhold for him. Getting him a non-supported-by-microsoft laptop is just asking for me to be the person he runs to whenever something doesn't work perfectly out of the box.

[pphaneuf.livejournal.com]

I'd have said just a Macbook period (not Boot Camp funkiness), but there's probably a hidden requirement of Windows there (there's Word on Mac OS X, but Corel Draw, I don't know).

[swestrup]

Not a 'hidden' requirement. It says in my description that he'll be running windows XP.

[thebabynancy.livejournal.com]

Macbook.


It can run Windows too.


:) N

[thebabynancy.livejournal.com]

new Macbooks actually have a virtual machine built in to run Windblows...

[jes6ica.livejournal.com]

I really love my Dell Latitude X1. It's half a year old now, so maybe not as expensive...but perhaps the wide screen is not something he requires?

[baronscartop.livejournal.com]

Here's the advice I give everyone buying a laptop:

Test drive the keyboard. If you don't like typing on it, you won't want to use it.

t!

[unsane1.livejournal.com]

One thing I liked about my Dell after test-driving a Compaq and others was the keyboard. The setup is just infinitely better, with subtle spacing on the top row of function keys.

[sps.livejournal.com]

Maybe times have changed, but it used to be that gobs of RAM was crucial to battery life....