Thread: new laptop recommendations

I plan to buy a new laptop and I was wondering if anyone had any good advice.
I am looking for something small and lightweight and with good battery life. An external DVD drive would be ok.
I have a Dell Latitude D430 which has been fine but I fancy trying something new.
Any ideas?

Don't buy a Fujitsu Siemens.
They are shite.

Much as I don't wanna help you after you reded me (perhaps with some cause...), I will offer an olive branch and say:

DELL.

I have two; they are great in every way. My two are inspirons: a 13" (cost 26k)for the missus; a 14" for me (32k): both over two years old now, bought from Pantip (next to the Toshiba shop on the 3rd floor).

^ that's a good add of why NOT to buy an Acer.

Got a Acer 8942g great piece of kit, added an extra HDD for movies and music.
Check out the 8940g specs for a taster...
It's a whopping great big laptop of fun

Agree. I think Acer is the way to go.

Although, I don't think Fuzzy's laptop is what we are looking for. Nice laptop but it is a massive 18 inches. If you've ever seen a 17" Macbook Pro, yea, bigger than that!

acer and dell seem to be the best value at the moment , full spec 15 inch i5's for under 30000 baht

Originally Posted by chupacabra

Agree. I think Acer is the way to go.

Although, I don't think Fuzzy's laptop is what we are looking for. Nice laptop but it is a massive 18 inches. If you've ever seen a 17" Macbook Pro, yea, bigger than that!

I don't recommend acer, I have had an aspire 5530 cost 34k less than 2 years ago and it's already had a few problems. The sound on it is just hopeless, my mobile has more volume. Recently the little used DVD drive went and there was distortion on sound using headphones, almost impossible to use it without them if listening to something. Took it to the dealer who wanted 8k for a new drive and motherboard which I declined. When it came back some nice tech had fixed the sound problem they wanted me to get a new board for and I bought a new drive for half the price they wanted elsewhere. If getting one check the sound out, they are not the best built machines by a long way. I would get a toshiba over an acer, or a Dell. Sony has some nice ones but overpriced.

go to TESCO and get an HP, better looking than the DELL and better specs, all for 20,000 THB with Win7 or XP

Just make sure you buy one that Butterfly and Scampy can afford, as they will feel strangely drawn to emulating your acquisition.

Well, my last two laptops were Dell and actually both were great. I am thinking about an Acer after your advice. I am not a big fan of Sony computers though.
I am on holiday in the UK at the moment so I will go down PC World and have a touchy feely experience and see.
Thanks for all the advice

Laptop Reviews and User Reviews of Laptops at CNET UK

get an i5 mobile chip
get Nvidia Optimus graphics switching
get USB3 ports.

I would get an Alienware , except they lack USB3 ports yet.

A friend asked me the same question recently (not sure why he asked me though) and was looking to buy a Mac.

I said that I believe the Macs to be over-priced and underspecced, but if that's what he wanted to just make sure they put Win7 on it as well.

So, he went and had a look and said that the Macs were indeed about 15 to 20k overpriced compared to most other laptops and when compared to the Sony, looked crap. So he bought a Sony.

Can't go wrong with a Sony

Acer Aspire. Compact size, great features.

Sony overpriced pretentious crap, like apple

I am trying to avoid Sony these days, all their products seem to fail or perform below par

Originally Posted by Butterfly

Sony overpriced pretentious crap, like apple

Not sure where my friend bought his, but it was probably Panthip. He said it was the highest spec for the money that he could see.

Originally Posted by Blake7

I plan to buy a new laptop and I was wondering if anyone had any good advice.
I am looking for something small and lightweight and with good battery life. An external DVD drive would be ok.
I have a Dell Latitude D430 which has been fine but I fancy trying something new.
Any ideas?

In ascending order:

- DELL : cheap, but usually solid. Abandon all hope if you need service.

- MacBook : solid construction, good performance, especially now that the low-end model is a unibody design as well, yet practically indestructible with the polycarbonate top case design. Several lucky Thai girls I know swear by it

- MacBook Pro 13" : ditto, except in all-aluminium unibody design, and better video GPU.

Depending where you can buy them, the best deal is from the Apple Online store's refurbished equipment section; Service, sadly, is hit or miss in Thailand, as the regional Thai Apple reps do not seem to care as much about policing their service providers (the service centres in Siam Discovery and other parts of Bangkok seem particularly bad, sadly).

Acer Thailand | Facebook

Originally Posted by DaffyDuck

- MacBook : solid construction, good performance, especially now that the low-end model is a unibody design as well, yet practically indestructible with the polycarbonate top case design. Several lucky Thai girls I know swear by it

- MacBook Pro 13" : ditto, except in all-aluminium unibody design, and better video GPU.

Depending where you can buy them, the best deal is from the Apple Online store's refurbished equipment section; Service, sadly, is hit or miss in Thailand, as the regional Thai Apple reps do not seem to care as much about policing their service providers (the service centres in Siam Discovery and other parts of Bangkok seem particularly bad, sadly).

Overpriced, average (at best) performance, low on features, Chinky build quality.

I wouldn't touch Mac anything with a shitty stick. Acer I still have bad memories of, ever since they decided they could write their own BIOSes and fucked every PC they ever sold (long time ago, granted). I have an HP at home which was good value when I bought it, and a company-provided Dell 9400 which is a lump but does its job.

But I am simply waiting for an estimate of battery life and a price before my next purchase is probably going to be one of these:




Although the first thing I do nowadays is take out the HDD and put an SSD in (the HDD fits neatly into the DM800 satellite decoder, turning it into a PVR, so it's not wasted). This significantly improves the battery life.

Asus announced the 1215N netbook – though calling it a netbook seems derogatory. Asus have crammed as much new technology as they could possible fit into the 12” frame of the 1215N – a high-res screen, a dual-core Atom, NVIDIA ION, Optimus, USB 3.0 and Bluetooth 3.0, Wireless N plus even more…

You can read the full review here:

http://blog.gsmarena.com/asus-1215n-...tbooks-hearts/