Business laptop advice

[ilambat]

I need suggestion on buying a laptop. am a kitchen designer part time and want a laptop that has:

top speed (dual core)
excellent graphics/
atleast or more 2gb ram
more than 120gb hard drive space.
and reliable.
and most importantly has to have windows xp professional. i cant use my kitchen design software on any other OS as adviced by the company bought from.

am willing to spend anything for a top notch laptop rice aint an issue. and of a good make. not acer or asus or anything like that.
hp/sony etc.

[crenn]

Dell is the way to go currently. I customised a laptop to your choice and it was $3083

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d830?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab

It's possible to put in a workstation GPU for a bit extra (I included it)

[Nagoshi]

Dell is the way to go currently. I customised a laptop to your choice and it was $3083

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d830?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab

It's possible to put in a workstation GPU for a bit extra (I included it)

LOL

Asus not being a top brand? Im quite sorry there. They're underestimated at all levels. They make good motherboards, video cards, laptops. Better build quality than HP, better priced than Sony its not on the same level at all. Dell ain't got such a great build quality either.

ASUS G1SN-B1 Core 2 T9300 965PM 4GB 320GB 15.4IN WSXGA+ GeForce 9500M GS 512M BLU-RAY Notebook (http://www.ncixus.com/products/29722/90NLCA3133236KQL450T/ASUS/)

Get yourself a copy of Windows XP Pro, and you're ready there. It should also beat the crap out the Dell alogn with Sony, Acer and HP. Granted it does not look too much professionnal, but will still outperform anything in that price range. Even comes with a carrying backpack and a MX518 mouse.

[crenn]

ASUS have battery issuses, not a sign of a top brand ;P

[Nagoshi]

ASUS have battery issuses, not a sign of a top brand ;P

Actually, Ive never heard of such a thing. The G1 batteries have no problem, in probably 30 different reviews Ive read about different G1 models.

If you want to spend a thousand buck more for an equal system, go ahead, but the G1 is a quite good system - I own one myself, the old slower model than this one and it blows. No problems at all, after one year of abuse. This system is probably the best performance/value you could get for now. You won't have issues until some time.

[crenn]

It's possible that not all models are affected, however, Dell laptops have become very good over the years (before they were rubbish). As for laptops, currently I'll stick with my single core 2.13GHz PentM 770 until I see a need for a high performance laptop. Desktops are easier for me for multiple reasons (price to performance ratio is normally high).

[simon275]

Yeah I have heard numerous times about ASUS and there batteries. And I have two friends one whose battery failed and one whose battery and screen failed.

For business I would recommend a Lenovo IBM Thinkpad. They may not look the sexist but they have great build quality if you get a good warranty the customer service will be out of this world. Plus they still offer XP unlike Dell.

Here is Dells only XP offering within your criteria. http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/xpsnb_m1730?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&~oid=us~en~29~xpsnb_m1730_anav2~~

Here is Lenovo's offering which I would highly recomend
http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/catalog.workflow:category.details?current-catalog-id=12F0696583E04D86B9B79B0FEC01C087&current-category-id=1F106632CBC24D2CBD23DF19644D3694
You can customize it and give it 250gb of HDD space, more memory and lots of other options.

[crenn]

Remember, you can get Vista but with XP preinstalled instead, costs the same too!

[Hadronshire]

Personally I have been using Thinkpads for quite some time for buisness use, and they still are quite well made since IBM sold the division to Lenovo (the people who made them to begin with).

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/web/LenovoPortal/en_US/config.workflow:java-configure?x=x&sb=%3A00000025%3A00000311%3A

I built this one to about what your specifications were, unfortunately I can't seem to link it as configured. It came out to approximately $1,400 for the laptop as you requested, not bad compared to the $3000 quoted above.