Looking for a laptop

[04nmr85]

Hello fellow mechers! I've been looking around at laptops for a couple weeks now. I even helped my bro pick out a pretty nice Sony Vaio, a little overpriced albeit, but he had the money so it was no problem. I'm now looking into buying one for school. Something pretty inexpensive because well i'm a college student...lol. My budget is about $1000. I'm going to be using it for school work which includes typing documents, programming, using the internet and listening to my somewhat large music collection. If I could somehow keep the price around 500 or 600 dollars while not sacrificing all that much performance that would be great. From what i've seen tho, it doesn't look possible. I'm somewhat new to notebooks/laptops so I don't really know what brands to look at besides Sony, dell and toshiba. I was also wondering if anyone knew of any places where a student could get discounts on laptops or help with paying for a laptop that is going to be used for school. If you need any more info from me just let me know. As always thanks in advance!

[786ARS]

for under a grand, have a look at dells, if you can get an inspiron 6000 within your price bracket with rebates, it would work well as a mid range laptop, but dell prices vary because of the rebates, so have a look.

[thefultonhow]

The Inspiron XPS M140/Inspiron 630m would also be a good one to look at. It's similar to the 6000, but has a 14" widescreen as opposed to a 15.4" one and so it's somewhat more portable.

Make sure to compare prices between Dell Home and Dell Small Business to see which one gives you the better deal. You technically aren't supposed to order from Small Business if you're a home user, but they will let you As long as you don't explicitly telll them it will be for personal use.

[04nmr85]

The Inspirons happened to be some of the dells I looked at. How good are the Celeron Ms? I Know with desktops I've always avoided celerons, is it the same way for notebooks?

[thefultonhow]

The main difference between the Celeron-M and the Pentium-M is that the Celeron doesn't have any of the power-saving circuitry. If you're going to be using the laptop on battery a lot, I would recommend the Pentium-M, but if you're going to mostly be plugged in, the Celeron-M is fine.

[kram 2.0]

Celeron-M is generally based on the Bainas - an older Pentium-M core. Of course, don't let that discourage you from going Celeron-M - it's made for the mobile platform unlike the other desktop replacement (DTR) CPUs.

kram

[tomster2300]

Keep on the lookout for Dell online coupons which can drastically lower the prices by hundreds of dollars. www.techbargains.com usually has them, but the main way to find them is to just google "Dell coupons". It's fully legit and actually works.

[thefultonhow]

Celeron-M is generally based on the Bainas - an older Pentium-M core. Of course, don't let that discourage you from going Celeron-M - it's made for the mobile platform unlike the other desktop replacement (DTR) CPUs.

Celeron-M 350 and up are based on the Dothan core.

As for Dell coupons, the recent ones have been mediocre at best. They haven't had a really good batch since August.

[mairving]

As for Dell coupons, the recent ones have been mediocre at best. They haven't had a really good batch since August.
I think that Dell is changing things up. They are sending out codes with shorter times more regular. I assume so that people can't get them off of a website as easily. I got one in an email that had 3 codes in it, for 20-34% off Dell Laptops. The email was sent on 2/20 and expired on 2/22. I will start posting them here when I get them. I will probably get another one next week.

[thefultonhow]

Which email list are you signed up for that you get these codes?

[mairving]

Which email list are you signed up for that you get these codes?
It is a Dell Small Business one.

[786ARS]

there are other manufacturers like toshiba which make quality laptops, but with preset configs. Also I have had good expreience with acer laptops, but moreso with toshiba.

[tomster2300]

My other laptop is an old Toshiba pentium I 233 mhz (I think) with 96 mb ram and it ran windows xp for awhile. That thing is a beast and is still running strong with no damage to it but the floppy drive (which I did).

I don't know about the current Toshiba quality, but I know their ancient ones were rock solid (I suppose this doesn't help much) :).

[thefultonhow]

I'ver had bad experiences with recent Toshibas. Unless you get a more-expensive business model, Dells are more reliable.

[not important]

04nmr85
Dell 600M (http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&fb=1&l=en&oc=i600MC1&s=dhs)

[glc]

Yep - and click on THIS link to get all the upgrades you need - and it's still cheap!

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=19&l=en&oc=i600ms2&s=dhs