Laptop Computers

[lunacycles]

I effing love my Macbook Pro. But I've always been a Mac girl. I think the Air would be a good option if you don't need the disc drive, lighter and slimmer than anything else but a little less expensive.

[Owlie]

If I had the money and wasn't going to be moving around a lot for the next few years, I'd get an Apple laptop and a PC desktop.

The problem (say all my friends with Macs) is that they're less prone to doing strange things than PCs, but when they do, they're much harder to take care of by yourself. They do love them, though.

If you don't have your heart set on a mac and the laptop isn't going to be your primary computer, I have friends with Acer netbooks who are very happy with them.

[KnottedYet]

Mac.

Remember when the whole PC thing began in the 1980's? (sure you do, you're even younger than me) Those were Macs.

I had a Windows computer briefly. Virus city.

Back to Apple. Feeling the love. Even my 6 year old bottom-of-the-line iBook is still doing just fine. Sure, it's so old that it can't download streaming movies from Netflix, but my iPod can do that for me. Apples are tough critters. I have no intention of ever subjecting myself to a Windows machine again.

[pll]

Whatever you end up with, it's a mixed bag. If you go for a Mac Air, have a solid state drive. I currently have a Mac Air (all prior laptops had Windows) without a solid state hard drive and these are my impressions:

• Design: Very sleek, beautiful.
• Utilities: Cute and nice to have iMovie, GaragaBand, etc
• Performance: Terrible. So slow, it gives me that little spinning circle so many times I want to swing it out of the window, and I'm not doing anything unusual to stress it. Performance is so bad that my $300 netbook with Linux works better sometimes.

I'd rather have a Win 7 laptop now, but I will keep this one for at least 3 years.

[jessmarimba]

I love my macbook. I've replaced the battery and the power charger, and I've had it since 2006.

I've been at my company for a little over 3 years and I've been through 5 dell and toshiba laptops. Granted, I think we buy the cheapest available laptops at work, but this is working only on a network with all kinds of security settings. I've had the current one for about a year and it recently decided that it will no longer recognize it's power charger...huh??

But I was biased to begin with, so definitely don't take this as an objective response

[Owlie]

My laptop is a Dell (Latitude D820). It's okay, but not ideal. The model has known power supply problems and the battery life is terrible (three hours became 25 minutes after less than a year). I had to replace the charger as well as it decided it no longer wanted anything to do with the original. I'm the only person I know who had the computer and hasn't fried some part of it yet. Granted, I'm not playing video games on it and only want it to run Office, two other programs and access the internet.

My friend replaced his with another Dell (I don't remember the model) and is very happy with it.

[pll]

Of course, you could also give your old laptop another life by installing Ubuntu on it (no viruses there, either). OpenOffice is great. That'd be an option even if you buy a new one.

[Cataboo]

I got a dell 8200 in 2001 that still works fine, however it weighs 8 lbs and I don't feel like carrying it around.

I've switched to just using a netbook as a laptop running windows 7 starter. $300, 11 hours of battery life, and it does everything I need it to do on a laptop

But I always keep a desktop for photos and the rest of that.

[Roadtrip]

I think it depends on what all you do on your laptop too.. as a software developer I have to have a Windows based machine, but if I were using the computer for email, dic pics, and browsing the internet only, I may very well get a Mac as everything I have read is the user experience is nicer. I'd also pony up for Apple Care to extend the warranty as an extra level of peace of mind. Are you near an Apple Store? There is one locally and that would be a benefit to me as if a problem came up I could just make an appointment and take the computer in for any service that may be needed.

We've owned several Dells (Inspiron 1545 and an E1505) and we've always been happy with then, tho DH uses the older 1505 and is about due for an upgrade and it's almost four years old. Video sometimes gets flaky tho runs smooth on mine, plus he has it maxed out on memory at 2gb, while mine has 4gb and upgraded to it's max and about a year and a half old.

We bought a desktop during Christmas last year and got a really good deal, which is why we ended up buying. They normally do have some killer deals during the Holidays.

Shannon