Laptop Recommendations

[Zulash]

Hey guys, I am hoping someone can help me with a new laptop recommendation,

Basically what I am looking for is something light weight (as I am going to college and back every day) with a better-than-decent battery life. It cant be bigger than 15 inches as that makes it less portable in my opinion. All I am going to be doing with this laptop is college work so I wont be needing a beastly graphics card or anything like that; however, It does need to be fast and responsive. I have been using powerful desktops for the past 5 years and going back to a "dumbed-down" laptop will be torture for me.

My Price Range is at around R7000.00 and I really do appreciate any recommendations you guys have. I have contacts in the U.S. who can bring one down for me if need be so U.S. products are viable too!

So far I am liking the look of this MSI X340 - Only problem I have with it is it lacks a CD/DVD-R/RW, and its only running at 1.4GHz.

Thanks again!
Zulash

 

[dj_jyno]

Fujitsu Lifebook S7110 / S7210 or Dell Latitude E6400 (if you don't mind buying secondhand). Both are light, modular and have good battery life.

 

[zakdoc89]

If you have an old PC lying around, take it to incredible corruption, and for R7500 you can grap the Acer Aspire 5740G, it has the latest corei3 processor, 500GB hard drive, 4Gb RAM, Ati 5470 GFX card. I picked up this and all I can say is I'm impressed!!!

 

[Messugga]

If you have an old PC lying around, take it to incredible corruption, and for R7500 you can grap the Acer Aspire 5740G, it has the latest corei3 processor, 500GB hard drive, 4Gb RAM, Ati 5470 GFX card. I picked up this and all I can say is I'm impressed!!!

Battery life on that won't be great.

For battery life, you're looking at a thin-and-light of some form. Take a look at the Asus UL30VT-X1 or similar.
http://www.amazon.com/UL30Vt-X1-13-...Premium/dp/tech-data/B002XZLURC/ref=de_a_smtd

While the build quality isn't the best, it certainly is better than the MSI (They have terrible keyboard flex. Seriously. I've used one.) and the battery life is fantastic. Also, it has switchable graphics, so it'll either give you good battery life or give you a bit of grunt in the graphics department. It won't max out Crysis but it certainly wouldn't struggle playing back FullHD video.

Ps. At $800 it's under budget and if a DVD Rom of some form really is important to you, you can always use some of your budget on an external one.

 

[Zulash]

Battery life on that won't be great.

For battery life, you're looking at a thin-and-light of some form. Take a look at the Asus UL30VT-X1 or similar.
http://www.amazon.com/UL30Vt-X1-13-...Premium/dp/tech-data/B002XZLURC/ref=de_a_smtd

While the build quality isn't the best, it certainly is better than the MSI (They have terrible keyboard flex. Seriously. I've used one.) and the battery life is fantastic. Also, it has switchable graphics, so it'll either give you good battery life or give you a bit of grunt in the graphics department. It won't max out Crysis but it certainly wouldn't struggle playing back FullHD video.

Ps. At $800 it's under budget and if a DVD Rom of some form really is important to you, you can always use some of your budget on an external one.

That is a very nice asus. thanks for the help so far guys.

 

[divv]

Battery life on that won't be great.

I am actually looking at the 5740 myself - (sorry for the thread "hijack") - Messugga how DO you find the battery life? (don't mind if its not 7 hours but don't want it to be 1 hour...)
I am looking to replace my 6 yr old Acer...
Thx

 

[Messugga]

I am actually looking at the 5740 myself - (sorry for the thread "hijack") - Messugga how DO you find the battery life? (don't mind if its not 7 hours but don't want it to be 1 hour...)
I am looking to replace my 6 yr old Acer...
Thx

How do you find battery life? Simple: You use the computer.
Seriously though, generally the provided figures are with the system sitting there, idling, which makes it useless if you're anything like me and have a minimum of ten applications open at the same time, processor usage averaging 50+% and generally abuse the system. If you really need a good idea, the best way is to do a search for a review on the particular model with the exact same specs as what you are interested in. Any reviewer worth even half his salt will include endurance runs, providing running time with the system on idle as well as performing some relatively resource intensive task like playing back a HD video, which puts strain on pretty much all the components in the system, thus providing you with a good idea of what you'd actually get, battery life wise.

Generally, with budget laptops, one of the first things they cut corners with is the battery, dropping the cell count, which tends to net you less battery life, so that's something to keep an eye out for. They even do this with the same model - a certain range of netbooks spring to mind - so if a machine is R1000 more some place compared to anywhere else while all specs seem the same, this is probably where the price difference comes in as batteries aren't cheap.