Looking to buy a laptop for all my internet access. Advice?

[Warhead]

Hey guys, since my steam driven PC is now over eleven years old I'm going to replace it. Laptops are cheaper and easier to move about the house than a PC so I'm seriously considering a lap top. Can anyone tell me what to look out for and what I'll most need and what I can do without etc?

Things I'm looking to do, play some but not many games, probably none or very few on line games of any worth unless they are turn based tactical games, I like those. Internet accessing for buying stuff (Lego) and posting on line, not too heavy. Needs quite a bit of memory to keep all my music on, downloaded from CD's I own... I like to play long lists while I'm online. Oh, and security from Nigerian Internet Hackers.

Oh, and can I use my existing Broadband connection with it or do I have to fuck around?

Cheers.

[tahthing]

If your broadband is wireless using it will be easy, if it isn't wireless then you loss the advantage of the Lap-top.

memory thease days should be big enough, check graphics for the games you want to play, check the RAM and sound cards as well, make sure everything will work on it.

Nearly all laptops will be able to use internet.

[The Shadowscythe]

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/lapt ... e/v14.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk:80/martprd/sto ... oid=-36730

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/produc ... CER-AS5532

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/produc ... NE-AS5810T

. . . To be fair, any desktop you buy would be about the same spec at those prices, but with larger hard drive space.

Although - If you're me and have multiple disabilities - you get one of these brought for you by your university - http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ - and are perhaps the most ossum things evah.

Hope this helps warhead.

[Strana]

i would suggest one of the lenovo line of laptops, and suggest that you take it into an indie tech specialist to get all the crap that you don't need off of it (this is general advice for any comp you get prebuilt) (is also why im still using a pc caus i built mine, and 2 upgradable parts come cheaper as time moves on). also if you can, i suggest getting a lap top that does not have an onboard graphics card so you can upgrade this as necessary. this will preserve the usability of the laptop over a longer period of time, other wise in general a laptop will last 5 yrs. however if you get one of the mini laptops thier max life expectancy (due to the processor) is 2 yrs after which point it will burn out, then again thier only 500 bucks on average and now come with flash memory replacing the hard drive.

[birdman]

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/laptop/range/v14.html

http://www.pcworld.co.uk:80/martprd/sto ... oid=-36730

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/produc ... CER-AS5532

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/produc ... NE-AS5810T

. . . To be fair, any desktop you buy would be about the same spec at those prices, but with larger hard drive space.

Although - If you're me and have multiple disabilities - you get one of these brought for you by your university - http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ - and are perhaps the most ossum things evah.

Hope this helps warhead.

This. Fucking this.

[The Shadowscythe]

Which? Fucking Which?

[ahp77]

Discount what they said. What matters most in a laptop is this:
IT MUST BE SHINY!
IT MUST HAVE A LIGHT UP KEYBOARD!
AND IT MUST HAVE GOOD GRAPHICS CARD!
Oh, and it must have a few billiondy GB harddrive space.

[The Shadowscythe]

Discount what they said. What matters most in a laptop is this:
IT MUST BE SHINY!
IT MUST HAVE A LIGHT UP KEYBOARD!
AND IT MUST HAVE GOOD GRAPHICS CARD!
Oh, and it must have a few billiondy GB harddrive space.

Sooo . . . a mac book pro then? XD

[Magic Soap]

Depends what you want to use it for. For word processing and email/web, any modern one will do. Also, depends how much money. Whatever you do, Don't buy Mac! I recommend any of the custom Dells.

[The Shadowscythe]

Depends what you want to use it for. For word processing and email/web, any modern one will do. Also, depends how much money. Whatever you do, Don't buy Mac! I recommend any of the custom Dells.

Other than gaming (which apple is now making up for slowly and surely with parallels and Mac friendly games) Whats wrong with a mac?

[Magic Soap]

Depends what you want to use it for. For word processing and email/web, any modern one will do. Also, depends how much money. Whatever you do, Don't buy Mac! I recommend any of the custom Dells.

Other than gaming (which apple is now making up for slowly and surely with parallels and Mac friendly games) Whats wrong with a mac?

Wrong. Parallels does not support DirectX.

Also, despite the obvious fact they are more "secure", I have had more problems with mac system failure and have had to backup twice. PC side: one trojan which was deleted immediately before anything happened.

[The Shadowscythe]

The only issues that I've ever had with mac's have been the university network Macs, which are a pile of flaming shite . . . and thats mostly down to the network administrator being unable to allocate decent account security of network hard drive space.

It's wonderful spending 6 hours on editing stock footage for a 2nd year project - only to log in the next morning and find out some foundation course fuckwit's (the gap course for twatheads who failed their A-levels, yet still think their good enough to take a university course) have deleted you're work because they consider their pre-undergraduate photoshop "Make one colour another colour" more important than you're "Major television editing project that counts towards your degree" in a file system they shouldn't have access too for reasons beyond comprehension.

Suffice to say, I already had back-ups of everything on my external hard drive, but it pissed me off every single time - and the network admin shrugged it off . . . when Hampshire LEA brought me my macbook pro (along with adobe student edition, final cut pro, printer and lord only knows everything else) - after getting my mac its the best thing I've ever owned.

Going back to my gaming PC, I found the damn thing to be buggy, slow and generally a pain in the arse. I've had this mac book pro for 3 months now, and have thus far encountered zero virus's - most of the time, I don't even know the firewall is doing it's job until I find a small popup behind Safari telling it that there have been blah blah blah threats it already nuked and sent reports back to apple about - and it ran a security and virus check since with no visible slow down.

As for Parallels, I think that issue has been sorted with the new intel chips - I've not had any issues with DirectX 10 or MSbox (Sins of a solar empire entrenchment, supreme commander, and UFO - enemy unknown respectively) but thats just me - I don't tend to thrash my machines very much.

[piltogg]

if you only plan to use it for the web just get something cheap. preferably with a ton of memory so you can download crap.

[DavidP]

Strana
I would suggest one of the lenovo line of laptops

yeah I'd agree with that I've had my lenovo for 18+ months
there pretty reliable and if you get a virus the rescue system
gives you a chance to save files before you do the recovery.

unlike Hp's or Compaqs which will expect you to have backed
up all your important stuff before you run the rescue disk/s

Note: I have only had a virus get past AVG once (once is enough )
and I hadn't done a backup for 2 months. the main operating
system was locked in a repeditve task. using the rescue button and
a portable drive I was able to retrieve all my docs,vids,pics and dats
before using the rescue disks to reinstall the operating system.
this was the easiest rescue I ever done.