Buying a laptop

What are things to look for when getting a laptop? The price range would be around $500 or lower, and i would need it to run a couple websites.

 

best things to look at performance wise would be, the RAM and the processor... for gaming, a good video card is important too!

 

Battery, Screen Size, Hard Disk and Graphics Card. It really depends on the use of the laptop.

 

Thanks. Do you think you could be running websites from a laptop under 500?

 

Be careful. If you leave it plugged in...... The battery will only have a life of 20 minutes....


I would just get the walmart type....

 

Running a website doesn't require very much as far as specs go. Enough to get you online and run a few low-usage programs is enough. You probably want to be able to run XP. You should easily find a laptop for your price to run a website. The problem is, if you are traveling with it (whats the point of a laptop without traveling) then you probably a lighter one. The lighter, the more expensive they get (typically newer).

 

besides performace...

The weight (if you travel a lot) is important... battery life (go 9cell if avail.).

Screen resolution for us techys is important too..

 

you wont find many laptops anymore with XP. The ones you will find for under 500 would all come with vista and would have no business running vista.

If you up that budget to around 600-700 you should be able to find plenty of multipurpose laptops that would work for you.

 

and what is the difference between XP and Vista, is there a disadvantage with vista? i'm not too computer savvy.

what brands should i look into?

 

Acer and HP make laptops around your price range that would be worth it.

There is a bit of a difference in the look of vista and some of the functionality is different. also vista requires a lot of memory to run so make sure you get a laptop with atleast a gb of memory and preferably 2gb.

 

thanks for the help bro

 

People have run websites off of Commodore 64s and even an Apple Newton handheld, that's not really a challenge. If you're going to leave your laptop on all the time make sure to take the battery out and have it plugged in. Other than that, just look for one that comes with XP. Vista should not be running on budget machines, because it demands video processing that integrated video cards found on budget laptops can't handle.

 

:O I leave it in all the time while plugged in, no problems yet (2 years), and i leave it on 24/7

 

For me the most important thing would be if it is Vista compatible and have enough memory to run my applications.

 

I think you should give your attention for this things:
- processor (Thats the way to say this ? I hope you understand my english :\)
- Hard disk
- Memory (RAM) + Memory technology (DDR/DDR2 and more...)
- Screen size
- Weight
- Battery
- Graphics Card

 

for that price i think you may get an asus... but´s really low end laptop

 

If you plan to travel then get laptop
otherwise desktop computer is better choice

 

This is very true. We just purchased last week an acer aspire and the cd included was for vista, no XP. The laptop also was packaged to have linux on it (can't remember the exact name), and I have to install XP, logon to acer website and download all the drivers, very annoying!