Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: eagl on November 18, 2005, 12:32:37 PM
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2 quick questions.
I'm in Wichita Falls near Dallas for the weekend, and I need to buy a laptop. Is there any good place in Dallas I could pick up a decent laptop this weekend?
Alternately, I can get an averatec 4100 series laptop on base for $1099. It uses the AMD turion 64 processor (1.6 ghz), has 512 meg ram, dvd burner, wireless, SD slot, and a 13.3 inch widescreen display with the "brite" screen tech that all the new lappies use. Any comments on this lappy? It's not an IBM by any stretch but it's fairly light and seems decent. The only thing I don't like about it is the SiS video chipset, but it's for my wife and she doesn't game. I don't want to drop an additional $500 into a laptop for a vid card my wife won't even use...
Comments welcome, but hurry... I leave back for the UK Monday. Thanks in advance :)
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Originally posted by eagl
2 quick questions.
I'm in Wichita Falls near Dallas for the weekend, and I need to buy a laptop. Is there any good place in Dallas I could pick up a decent laptop this weekend?
Alternately, I can get an averatec 4100 series laptop on base for $1099. It uses the AMD turion 64 processor (1.6 ghz), has 512 meg ram, dvd burner, wireless, SD slot, and a 13.3 inch widescreen display with the "brite" screen tech that all the new lappies use. Any comments on this lappy? It's not an IBM by any stretch but it's fairly light and seems decent. The only thing I don't like about it is the SiS video chipset, but it's for my wife and she doesn't game. I don't want to drop an additional $500 into a laptop for a vid card my wife won't even use...
Comments welcome, but hurry... I leave back for the UK Monday. Thanks in advance :)
Averatecs aren't bad laptops, however they aren't great either. The ones I've seen don't even sit level without the battery in them. However, since you got the model with the brite screen I'm sure that the battery problem is fixed, might want to check into that though.
If at all possible though, you might want to look at something else. Dunno if you hate gateway or not, but they have some nice laptops around that same price range with the same features.
-edit- didn't see your first question, Circuit City carries some of the gateways I mentioned earlier. Toshiba, HP, Acer, Sony, and of course Gateway and Averatec are some others they carry as well. -edit-
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Thx.
I ended up going to Frys and my wife chose a Fujitsu S6000 over a tiny sony. 1.86 ghz Pentium M, 660 gig HD, smallish but bright screen. Nice little lappy :)
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heck next time go to grapevine and have skuzzy build you one
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I do have a bag of popsicle sticks and some old intel cpus that skuzzy could combine with some duck tape to make a laptop, but it was a weekend so I figured I'd give him some time off to go through his backlog of "the arena is inaccessable and my 7 year old modem isn't the problem" tech support emails.
The little fujitsu is pretty damn sweet. The only major gripe I have so far is the use of the crummy integrated intel video. The "brite" display is very nice although at high brightness levels it reduces battery life by about 25%, so it definately pays to fiddle with the power settings. Without messing with power settings, the battery is only good for about 3 hrs without using the cdrom drive. With reduced display brightness, it's good for nearly 4 hrs. I expect it would last for a full 2 hr movie but not much more, unlike my T41p which gives me a no-kidding solid 4-5 hours of battery life even with using the cd drive a bunch.
For a sub-4 lb notebook, I'm very impressed. The last gripe which isn't important now but which will piss me off in the future, is that the 512 meg of DDR2 memory came in the form of 2 256 meg sticks. That sucks. I'll have to toss out one or both sticks to upgrade, and ddr2 laptop memory isn't cheap.
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Here's what I use for work: http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelDetail?displayTab=O&storeId=11201&catalogId=13051&itemId=94987&catGroupId=12871&modelNo=Toughbook-W4&surfModel=Toughbook-W4
Definately not a gamer, but at under 3 lbs with cd burner and 6 hour battery that's not why I like it.
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That toughbook is sweet.