Can you guys direct me to some good laptop brands. I've been thinking of investing in on a laptop for school/designing. Oh, and nothing too pricy. Just a decent one for a good price. Thanks!

This post has been edited by microscopic^earthling: Aug 27 2005, 06:14 PM

Hehe - seems like all I've been doing since I signed up was babble about laptops. Okay. If you look at a bunch of my other, very-recent posts, you'll probably see that I've covered at least some of your question elsewhere. But just to make things easier for you, I'll hit a couple of basic points.

First: what are you designing? I HATE-HATE-HATE to say it, but Macs are usually really good for graphical design. I hate to say it because I dislike Mac ... and yet here I am recommending it. But if it's what works best for you - and you can afford that outrageous investment - then check into it at least. (Yes. They *are* more expensive than IBM-compatible things like Dell, Acer, Compaq, HP, etc.)

If you're going to design with graphics, video, non-HTML Web coding (for video and animation type things) .... you're probably going to be making a decent investment. So don't be too shocked if you can't find a $700 notebook that does everything that you want/need it to do. Then again, there have been some very good deals going around lately, particularly with everyone here in the US going back to school.

So ... like I said, see some of my other posts, as they might actually be mildly helpful. And I'm sure that the other people who reply to your post will have lots of great advice.

If you have to buy now, get an Apple iBook. I've had mine (a G3 700 no less) for 3 years now and other than that logic board issue, I've loved it. (I should note that Apple did replace the board 3 times free and I got OS 10.3 free and an upgraded combo drive free of charge also). It will be retired next year when the Mactel notebooks are released.

If you have to go PC side, get a Sony Viao. Sony builds good stuff.

If you can wait about a year I would. Why? Apple will be switching their laptops over to Intel Mobile chips next year. These should offer better performance and even better battery life (which ibook battery life is pretty dang good now).

As far as Mac's "Being good for design" is really a by-gone myth these days. All major graphics programs are tuned for Intel chips. A few high end rendering systems (Mental Ray) are tuned for the AMD64 platform. Adobe started coding the CS programs for Wintel first to retaliate against Apple's Final Cut Pro. (although I personally blame Adobe for releasing the POS known as Premiere 6 on both Windows and Macintosh for the reason FCP became defacto standard in small video shops)

There are some other technical reasons why the x86 architecture kills the PPC in 3D animation rendering. Flip side, PPC kicks the crap out of x86 when rendering things like audio and video output (like from FCP).

Well, from experience, I would recommend a Toshiba Satellite. They are great sturdy little laptops and have pretty good specs for their price. I have the A-35, and the only qualm I have with it is the integrated Intel graphics card. Buuuuuut, most laptops now are being sold with ATI's card in them so you shouldn't have to worry about that. Good luck with your decision.

Ok... Here i go!

Asus Notebooks are excelent, but their value can be somewhat pricy...
Toshiba Notebooks are good, but also expensive...
Acer Notebooks can apear good but some suffer from manufacturing defects and some may leed to trouble while waiting for replacement.
HP Notebooks are... well... Compaq... the matrix usually gives in after the warranty expires...
Sony Vaio are very good notebooks, for portability as well as desktop replacement, but prepare to pay a lot...
Clasus is a portuguese brand that has 3 year warranty, its a good performance/value aquisition.
Mitac (portuguese again) is not to be bought, period!
Aopen barebooks (notebooks that you can costom build) are very good and a good way to get a good and cheap nootbooks

there are more brands, but these i know....

Sk