who makes the best laptops?

[Cobi*]

so? who makes the best laptops?

in the following three categories...

1. for school use.

2. for portability (super-lite, extra-slim laptops)

3. overall... (value, performance, portability, etc...)


i'm looking at toshiba and sony's vaio at the moment but i'm open to other brands as well.

[Reality]

Everyone tells me Apple makes the best laptops. My mother owns a iBook and I can safely say it a very well built unit. I'm using it now really. It's small, 15-inch screen I think , uses up little room and has the longest battery life I seen from a laptop. Even my best friend who has a Sony or Dell labtop commented very nicly on it. Really if you mean school by like taking notes or making pictures I think it be the way to go. That is just my take on it though. :big smile

[Pilotwings]

dell is great. affordable, and they have many models.

[mackensie]

apple would be my first personal choice. if i needed a windows laptop, i would go for a centrino powered laptop for battery usage. i personally would NEVER buy a laptop who's battery couldn't even play a 2 hr movie without bombing out.

[Vegetto]

yes I'd go with a dell too

[Havoc2049]

I own a Fujitsu Lifebook. Haven't had any problems with it and the quality is up there with the best of them, imo.

My wife brought home a Sony VAIO laptop from work the other day. It seemed like a really nice laptop and nice and thin as well. VAIO's come with Word Perfect also, insted of the wretched Microslop Word.

If you got the bucks, get one of those cool Alienware gaming laptops.

[Reality]

I wen to Apple.com and looked up what one was my mothers to see what I can find on it.

Her's is a 12.1" Screen Combo Drive iBook. The combo drive means it has a CD-RW and DVD player. Here are the specs.

900MHz PowerPC G3
512K L2 cache @900MHz
128MB SDRAM memory
40GB Ultra ATA drive
ATI Mobility Radeon 7500
32MB DDR video memory
Combo Drive
Built-in 56K v.92 modem
AirPort ready
Up to 5 hr. battery life

Weight: 1.35 inches (3.4 cm)
Width: 11.2 inches (28.5 cm)
Depth: 9.06 inches (23.0 cm)
Weight: 4.9 pounds (2.2 kg) (2)

It also comes with OSX and OS 9. But X is all the OS love you'll ever need.:big smile: With the closing price of $1,299.00. Becuase I'm cheap I look on ebay and see what iBooks are flying around there.

Ok here is the iBook's site if you like to do some more research. http://www.apple.com/ibook/

But hey, if that isn't enough...whatever for ya check these babies out. http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index17.html *drools*

[Drunken Savior]

Psst...It's combo, not cumbo.

I'd say go Apple, I donno if the G4 laptops will go down with the G5 desktop out, but if/when they do, jump on. They are a great way to get educated on another OS if you are unfamiliar.

[insteefy]

apple-san

[Reality]

Originally posted by Drunken Savior
Psst...It's combo, not cumbo.

Hmm? *checks* Opps, my bad. Thanks for letting me know. Another thing might interest you if your like me, you'll be happy to know Apple's web browser Safari has this little spelling checker you can run for things like forums ect. I obviously did use it when I typed in "cumbo" but I use 80% of all my post in forums or e-mails. Hahah, I ran it just now before submiting this and found 9 errors in my post I fixed. :cool guy: It's very handy.

[Cobi*]

thanks everyone! :cool guy:

question about apple...

how's the software selection? i've never owned an apple computer but my understanding is that software selection can be limited and they're not cross compatible with pc's.

[Drunken Savior]

The Most Common Software I use:

iChat: Apple's AIM application
Mozilla: Ad Blocking Tab Browser
Safari: Apple's Ad Blocking Tab Browser (People say it's faster, but I havn't timed it or anything)
VLC: Media Player plays my .avis, .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, et cetera. Faster to Full Screen than...
MPlayer: ...but if I can't play it on VLC for some reason, I can in MPlayer.
Quicktime: Umm...this is here out of habit, you should use VLC and MPlayer to watch stuff until Apple addresses their MP3 problem with Quicktime player. You can get around it, but why go A-B-C with Quicktime when you can go A-C with VLC or MPlayer?
RealOne: It burns me up that I need a SEPERATE player to view .rm, .ram files.
iTunes: Music Player/CD Music Burner You'll love it.
Toast Titanium: Used for buring CDs and DVDs if you have a Super Drive (CD-RW/DVD-R Drive)
iClock: An alarm clock. It plays music (Playlists in iTunes) and it very reliable.
MP3 Alarm Clock: Virtually the same thing, but you have to load up individual MP3s. But you can set multiple alarms in advance.
iCal: A Calendar for setting up appointments. If you have an iPod, you can UL data from iCal to the iPod's planner.
Calculator: I donno what this does...reminds me of my old abacus. Mmm...that's good sarcasm.
Address Book: Used to store AIM profiles and addresses as well as phone numbers. Handy.
Limewire: My last line of defence in downloading stuff.
Hotline: My second Line of defence in downloading stuff.
iPhoto: I use this to organize the digital pictures I take.
Dreamweaver MX: HTML editor for my webpage.
Microsoft Word: Out of all the Office apps, I use Word the most so it's the only one I have in my dock.*
Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop: Graphic Design and Editing
iMovie/Final Cut Pro 3: Video Editing
Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne: Time Killer

Misc Apps: AOL, AIM, Bit Torrent,
American McGee's Alice, Monkey Island 4.

*Dock is a line at the bottom of the screen that lists icons representing programs. You just click one to open em in case you didn't know :)

Feel free to ask me any other questions you might have about programs :) You can't use .exe programs in Macs, but many companies do make Mac versions of their applications. (Microsoft, Adobe, Real, Blizzard)

[Reality]

Hahaha, Drunken Savior pretty much toke care of all you get right in your Apple Laptop. Some other others like LCD are awesome for me. I never knew such neat things existed and are free. :cool guy: I know a great Mac forum that almost always come through for ya if you need to make something work. For example I didn't want anything Windows Media player on my Mac but some vg trailers are in that formate so they right up front suggested LCD. It's compatible with so many things I'm very pleased to have asked.

Another thing is if you still have some kind of Windows only app there is this software called Virtual PC and Real PC. They are Windows Emulators to run Window apps on your Mac but that is more for hardcore Mac users. Nothing you should never be force to look at with just what your doing.

Now one thing I did want to mention that Savior did not mentioned and I just pretty much discovered how awesome it is, is this Mac app called Sherlock. Here is all this baby does.

1. Internet: Your personal search engine. You type in a search on Sherlock and it gives you the top results from About.com, askjeeves.com, bestsite#1.com, looksmart.com, lycos.com, oventure.com and sprinks.com all at once.

2. Pictures: You every use the image search on Google.com? It's the same thing but uses it's results from lycos.com.

3. Stocks: Well, something I don't use but it gives you free stock viewing on whoever you want.

4. Movies: OOOOooo, now this is sweet. You can select a movie, this gives you Movie Information, the movie poster and the movie's trailer. Plus it goes ahead and looks up what near by theaters are playing the movie then tells you at what times. Or you can look up the local Theaters themselves and see what they are playing. :cool guy:

5. Yellow Pages: It gives you the name, phone #, address, directions and a map on what every you want to find.

6. Ebay: It's um , ebay made easy.

7. Flights: If you travel a lot this will give you all the info you need as if you called and asked yourself.

8. Dictionary: Gives you everything you want from a Dictionary plus a thesaurus. Those are always useful.

9. Translation: It translates from this to English and English into something else.

10. Apple Care: It's help yourself trouble shooting if you need it.

[Drunken Savior]

Wow...I didn't know they pimped out Sherlock. Last I checked, post Jaguar, it was basic and...well...boring. This is keen.

[Reality]

Really? You should check your System Updates and see if maybe you missed something. I wanted to include this in my last post but forgot, any way here is a picture of this while doing a movie search. Sorry if I'm boring ya with this, I just think it so neat. :haha:

[Drunken Savior]

Oh no I had the app already. I just NEVER used it. I just opened it for the first time today :) ...and used it to threaten some guy in Italy to send me my ebay item I won from him.

[mackensie]

yea i've never used sherlock on my mac either, i've always favored going to the sites themselves (but thats just me).

If you have specialized hardware (i.e. mp3 player, certain PDA's, etc), you may want to check to see if they are mac compatible before making the switch.