College Laptop?

[JohnnyRules]

I am going to college in the fall and I am investigating laptops. I probably wont buy it until July, but I want to do some research and know exactly what I want. My budget is about $1500 and I am considering either a nice dell or hp laptop or a macbook. I am kind of skeptical about getting a mac. Should I be? I play counter strike source on occasion and I think the mac should be able to run it. Any advice?

[quackattack88]

u should get the dell xps m1330. They light and durable, plus they way much better that mac when it comes to gaming.

[wetwily555]

MAC> all thats all there is to it, much easier, a lot less problems, no virus's period....

/end thred

[Izzy]

Originally Posted by quackattack88

u should get the dell xps m1330. They light and durable, plus they way much better that mac when it comes to gaming.

I have this laptop. Great size, not too small and not overly large that you can't use it on a desk. One thing is that the extended battery does stick out quite a bit. LOL.

And you can get quite a deal on a Dell m1330 as well, since Dell's apparently been doing a fair bit of discounting and $xxx off these past few weeks. $1099 for a fairly nice specc'd one, but I would definitely recommend the LED screen as it's much thinner and lighter.

[ericko_07]

trust me man wetwilly is right. mac ftmfw. . . you can just pick up a copy of windows xp and run it through bootcamp if you absolutely need windows. i work for geek squad and i get dells and hp's all the time that crap out after only a few months or get infected by some sort of virus. with mac the likelihood of getting a virus is slim to none and if you have any problems with it you can stop by any apple store and they can take care of most hardware problems in store. the only downside is that the optical drive is slot loading but i've only had one instance where a disc got stuck but it came out after a couple of minutes. and then I went outside and lol

[Special Ringpop]

To be honest, I have had Dell, HP, and Apple laptops, and the one that has held up the best has been the MacBook (so far).

The HP I had was really nice looking, but it scratched easily (Macbook does as well, get a case or sleeve no matter WHAT you buy), and would get WAY too hot.

I really do like the Macbook, but my recommendation is that you get Office for Mac. It sucks balls without it, because everyone and their mother uses Office.

You can read Word with Pages (what Mac comes with standard), but you can't transfer a .pages to Word.

[nighthawk06Si]

macbooks, battery life last much longer through the day when your at classes all day and there aren't any outlets near you. I see regular mobile notebooks poop out like after a class. mine can last through two classes with chat, web surfing, and occasional videos

[darna]

i have both dell and macbook and they're both nice notebooks. it seems that majority of college kids nowadays prefer mac over pc (based on surveys). nice thing about mac is that you can run both mac os and xp/vista at the same time. but if you spend a lot of time playing games you might wanna consider other notebook because mac does not handle games that well (i'm just being nice, mac sucks on games).

[nayilsi]

Dell Vostro FTMFW

I just bought one.

Bang for the buck!

[mz_rigel]

Macbook ftw!! i just bought mine fully loaded and i it!!

[Spud387]

You can't really go wrong with either the Mac or PC. Just remember, pick what suits you best (price/performance) and not just what is the current fad. Example, don't buy a macbook when a low level HP is all you need or vise versa.

[FBP FG2]

It's my first year of college. I originally was going to get a 13 inch laptop because I thought that I would take it everywhere. To be honest, most of the time you don't. I play cs occasionally as well (mostly gun games). All you need to do to get max fps is just put your graphics card all towards performance rather than quality. You don't notice the difference in quality really, but you go from 60 fps to 100. I originally was going to get a dell m1330, but ended up getting a 15 inch hp. It's a really common one. I think it's the dv6000 or something like that. I have no problems keeping up with my room mates mac book and I spent less than a grand.

To be honest, after seeing what the Mac Book can do, if you have the money, go with it. There's a lot of features like acting as a wireless access point and what really made me like it was the ability to partition the HD to use both Windows and Mac. The only problem is that his computer costs over twice as much as mine and I still own him in CS all the time. (Well, most of the time = P)

I don't know about other colleges, but in pretty much all of my lecture halls, if you look up from the front row, well over half the laptops there have apple logos. Hope this helps. I was in the same spot as you last year looking for a laptop.

[wing_gundam]

Don't get a mac book ..... gross

get a cheap dell... you basically need the bare minimum of what it comes with (prob more powerful than most computers of 2 yrs ago)

a mac will lead to software incompatibilities if you need to install certain progs for class etc or hook up to this or that or send files back and forth.

macs over heat

dell batteries can last 4 hrs - my gf's does that regularly




get a cheap dell - if i didnt get a free new sony after my old one, i would have purchased a $500 dell laptop

[JohnnyRules]

Thanks for all the quick replies. I guess I just have to try and figure out what exactly I am looking for.

[CameronJr9]

Like Izzy said, be on the lookout for Dell deals. They're always running some kind of special. Hundreds of dollars off! They just ended some sort of sale yesterday. I'm sure they'll start something up again soon.

[volvo9]

I would stay away from the Mac just because most software you will run into will be for PC only. Delaing with compatibility issues is lame.

[Izzy]

The extended battery on my m1330, without heavy graphics and processing use, has lasted over 5 hours. *shrug*

I was doing an essay, and I had 60% left after the three hour block. Granted, my screen was quite dim, but everything was still legible.

Check Bensbargains.net or Fatwallet.com or (my favorite) XPbargains.com for Dell/Apple/Laptop deals.

[wetwily555]

Originally Posted by CameronJr9

Like Izzy said, be on the lookout for Dell deals. They're always running some kind of special. Hundreds of dollars off! They just ended some sort of sale yesterday. I'm sure they'll start something up again soon.

they run deals cuz there loosing business to mac, because its better lol

lol just messin wit ya but you gt my opinion

[babaki]

macbooks are nice, but you will spend all of the 1500 on one. You can do just as good, with better hardware for less money with a Dell. Also, if this is for school, you dont need an XPS. check out the inspiron line and customize it to what you like. you wont be disappointed. use the money you save for other things.

[Yodums]

Having owned both MacBooks and PC notebooks, I'll stick with the conventional PC-based notebooks. I think it a huge pain in the ass to go through as many hoops as you have to get a Mac to do something a PC can do so easily. I also prefer the navigation of a Windows OS over OS X.