Two ppl I know want new laptops.

What do you like?

Looking for competitive pricing, durable, good component selection, and good support.

I'm familiar with Dells.

How 'bout Lenovo? They're sponsoring the Olympics.

I'm posting this from a Gateway.  I also have a Dell, HP, and  2 Compaqs.

None of these are newer than 3 years.

That being said, I like Dell for the warranty, but Lenovo has the cutting edge in size.

Go with what you know.  My basic criteria for new purchases...set a budget.  Set a budget and get the most for your buck.

How much RAM does Vista need?

All new laptops will ship with Vista, right?

Rad wrote on Aug 10^th, 2008 at 11:46pm:

All new laptops will ship with Vista, right?

Depends. You can still get XP as the preinstalled OS from vendors, but for Dell you tend to have to do so using the small business store rather than the "home" store (and be buying a model that isn't a "home" model even if it shows up in the business store).

So, an Inspiron you can only buy with a plain Vista SKU; home users stopped being offered XP as a option on most models quite a while ago. However, for a Vostro you can buy Vista Business or Ultimate as the primary licensed OS but choose to actually get XP Pro preinstalled (as a "Downgrade right") and should be able to do that for some time to come.

Vista can run on 512MB RAM but I'd wager it wouldn't be fun.  Get at least 1 GB.  2GB is better if they plan to turn on all the visual effects.

Lots of people I know have had good luck with Dell, and both company laptops I've had were Dell (different companies) and they both performed well.  I pretty much put them through everything.

Lenovo is the computer line that IBM sold off, so its a rich heritage.  Haven't heard any major complaints, other than the battery thing a while back that all the laptop companies got caught with.

Rad, I run Windows Vista SP1 on a HP xw4600 Workstation with 3GB  (2x512MB + 2x1GB) of DDR2 800MHz ECC RAM, and it’s quite fast.

For practical purposes, 3GB of RAM is the maximum you can use with 32-bit Windows (see What Happens when 3 GB or more RAM is installed with Windows?).

I suspect that the laptop would work well with 2GB of RAM - and, remember, you could always try the ReadyBoost approach later, if needed.

What chipset sppts ECC memory?

Thot that was only 4 servers.

The Intel X38 lives in the xw4600; here we're in the process of retooling most of the developers and we're moving to Dell T7400's with quad-core Xeons, and the Intel 5400 chipset in that box supports ECC as well.


Rad wrote on Aug 11^th, 2008 at 1:37pm:

Thot that was only 4 servers.

It's more a question of sheer memory size, and the purposes to which such machines are put; genuine workstations to run serious workloads will be equipped with anywhere from 8 to 32Gb of RAM, and at that capacity and performance level the odds of a bit error are a) higher, and b) more likely to matter than in consumer gear since kit like this is for serious workloads.

For off the dealer's shelf, Toshiba is hard to beat.
I like installing and tweaking them and they seem to need very little service, but when they do, it's readily available.

For a real top-O-the-line laptop, I'd be spending my money on a "Sager Notebook".  I've installed a couple of them so far and they really Kick Butt!

Check'em out at:
www.sagernotebook.com

Happy Shopping!
The Shadow  8-)