Originally Posted by Submeg:
An update on the situation...basically, the laptop is a piece of rubbish (never buying an ASs sUcking piece of Shit again) and I'm now forcing myer to cough up with the money they owe me. What should I start looking for in a laptop? I'm looking to use it for music mainly...however I may want to play games on it
I used to always like Acer laptops, but recently the specs haven't that great for their price, and the screen resolutions have not been brilliant for the size of LCDs. They are still a good price and fairly reliable though.
But currently I would recommend HP laptops. They have better keyboards, screens and specs for the price compared to most others at the moment.
My Mum had to buy a new laptop last month and I did a lot of searching and looking in stores for her, and finally bought a new HP laptop and it is a great spec for the price. AMD Turion II 2.3GHz dual core CPU, 17" 1600x900 screen, ATI Radeon 4530 512MB GPU, 320GB HDD, Lightscribe DVD-RW, 4GB ram, 1.3MP Webcam, HDMI, Firewire, Bluetooth, WiFi, Windows Vista 64-bit with free upgrade to Win 7 64bit. Costing about £560. The model was a Pavilion DV7-2110sa, which is now replaced with the DV7-3020sa.
A higher up model in the same range adds a blu-ray drive and cost about £670.
Normally I would avoid AMD CPUs in laptops and go for Intel Core 2 Duo, but I've been impressed with these new Turion II processors and they are more than a match for the mobile Intel ones.
Regarding HP/Compaq. I've used many over the years and they have always been really well made and solid. In the past though they have always been more business like that home entertainment in design, but these new ones are very nice. Great screens, lovely piano black glossy cases with metallic inside. Nice keyboards and touch controls above for volume etc. The specs are also great for the price.
Originally Posted by Buleste:
If you ever get the opportunity avoid Asrock lick the plague (yes I know they are a subsiduary of Asus but with all the good points taken out.) I had a mobo from, then earlier on in the year and it made my 3.4 CPU go at 2.5, it couldn't handle my graphics card so I got another, crapier, graphics card that it could handle and ruined the performance of that and after 2 weeks the mobo died.
I've got an AsRock motherboard in my emulation PC and have been very happy with it. Great specs for the price. I bought it after my old main system's Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard died after 3 years use, and had all the parts (ram, CPU, GPU etc) from the dead system and decided to resurrect them with a new motherboard, and that system is now my new emulation system. Surprisingly too, for a ASRock board costing under half of the original Asus one it replaced, it actually had some better specs, allowing for much better overclocking, full bandwidth for ram when all 4 sockets are in use, and generally an all round very nice motherboard. Only having 4 SATA sockets is a bit of a limitation, and only 2 PCI slots, but as it has everything already built into the motherboard I can always use one of the PCI slots for an extra SATA card if needed.
I've also used AsRock motherboard to replace dead ones in a few systems I've repaired and not had any returned.
ASRock did used to be very budget originally, but in the last few years they have really stepped up their game and now produce some nice boards at the lower half of the price range.
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