So I’ve been thinking about getting a laptop for the past few months and am getting closer to making a decision on something here soon. I initially wanted to buy one before Vista was released, I would much rather have XP then Vista at this point. Mainly because I’ve been using Vista on my home PC periodically, and given the exact same set of hardware, XP runs much smoother than Vista does, and laptops typically are already slower, that last thing I need is Vista slowing it down even more. Since I missed the boat on getting XP (unless I buy something older from Newegg where many laptops still have XP) I’ve been trying to gauge which laptops are going to work well based on their Vista Performance Rating Score. I’ve to Best Buy and Circuit City and Costco in the last month and the first thing I look at is the Performance Rating and then I can compare them all against some known value. My home PC got a score of 4.4. I can’t remember what the individual CPU and graphics scores were, but my old Radeon 9800 Pro gets a 5.7 and it runs Vista’s overly-graphic UI without any problems. What bothers me about the majority of big-chain laptops (HP, Toshiba, Acer, etc.) is they all have integrated graphics (such as the GMA950) which get a performance index rating of 2.0 or less. I guess I should mention that I’m trying to keep this laptop in the $800 region. Nothing for gaming, but I don’t want integrated graphics, I mean, just in case I do pop in a game, I want it to at least work. So it’s hard to get a good performance rating for that kind of money. In fact, for $1000 most laptops fall in the overall rating of about 3.1, typically with the graphics card dragging down the score the most. Oddly enough, the CPU ratings don’t seem to change much whether it’s a Core 2 Duo T7200 or an AMD Sempron 3500+, which surprised me, considering the cost increase for the better CPU’s is a lot, not to mention the real-world performance improvement. When configuring laptops online, it’s just about the biggest cost jump you can do, next to adding more and faster RAM, or a bigger 7200rpm hard drive. So why doesn’t Vista show that in the ratings? I could be wrong, this is all from memory, I’ve looked at 50 different laptops or so, and trying to remember the specs on them all is harder when I don’t write anything down.
However I will say this, I’ve been watching the deals going on at Dell.com for a while, and from what I have seen, Dell offers the most hardware for laptops in the $800-$1200 range. This isn’t always the case, OfficeMax is selling super cheap Acer laptop with an older AMD MK-36 CPU, ATI 1150 graphics, 120GB HDD for only $599, which you can’t configure the same laptop at Dell for less than about $740. And a friend at work configured an HP laptop in the $1700 for quite a bit cheaper than he said Dell would have offered. But in the price range I’m looking, I can’t find anything better than what Dell has to offer. But it varies, and it drives me crazy. Every week, or possibly every day, or depending on how you enter the site (through an external link with a coupon code, or a code from the paper) two laptops configured the same way will vary by as much as $200-$300. So I’m worried that no matter what I buy, if I had just configured it differently, a coupon may have been able to be applied, and then it would have been cheaper. So each week, I watch, and I wait. And I’ve actually been tracking the different deals in a spreadsheet to see where the trends are. A month ago 80GB hard drives came standard, now they’re throwing in 120GB hard drives for free and free DVD burners, probably because all the other guys started doing it to, and Dell has to at least keep up with the competition. I haven’t seen the prices come down so much, as I’ve seen manufacturer’s just throw in extra stuff, or free upgrades, which in effect gets you a better laptop for the same money. The X1400 graphics cards are upgrades this week from the X1300 cards of last week. There’s part of me wants to buy something for cheap, like sub-$500 to surf the net in the living room and do whatever just to have a laptop. That was until I played around on a laptop that cheap, it had a Celeron M processor, and I about died while clicking around waiting and waiting for stuff to happen, not to mention it got a Vista rating of 1.0. Sheesh, they should stop shipping older laptops like that with Vista pre-installed and just put XP on it. The end user would benefit much more from a standard OS than something the hardware can’t handle. I would just install Ubuntu if I were to go that route. But I plan on installing it anyway on whatever I do get. Even Dell still offers their Business Laptops with either XP home or Professional.
Anyway, today’s paper came and the deal this week that looks really good, by far the best deal I’ve seen in this price range, can be found by going to www.dell.com/fsitaz and picking the Inspiron E1505. It’s $313 off the regular price and comes configured with: C2D T5200 1.6GHz, 15.4 1280×800, 1GB 533MHz, 120GB HDD, DVD/CD burner, 256MB ATI Mobility X1400, 9-cell li-on, all for $889. I’m about to jump and take the dive on this one, but I’ll probably wait it out, see if something better comes up next week. Which it might, in a case like this, it never hurts to wait. I’d really, really like to get 2GB of RAM, but it pushes the cost over the $1k mark I’m trying to stay under. (OfficeMax has a Toshiba right now for $999 with nearly identical specs but has 2GB of memory. But I can’t stand Toshiba.) So this is one of the best deals I’ve seen for a C2D (albeit the slowest of the C2D, it’s still better than any of the dual core AMD chips) with a dedicated X1400 graphics card. The 9-cell battery is a bonus too, a lot of laptops come with 6-cell or even 4-cell batteries, and almost invariably when you read about these laptops online, people complain about not being to get through one full-length movie without the battery dying. Well sure, a 4-cell battery isn’t going to last long no matter what you’re doing. If you want the long battery life, you have to pay for a decent battery. I don’t want a laptop that only runs for 2 hours either before needing a recharge. Not only that, but I want to get a decent laptop (not just an expensive one), and I really like the Dell’s. For whatever reason that may be, cost, styling, performance, or even the cool factor of owning a Dell, part of me just wants to get a Dell. And once you’re set on something, it’s hard to get derailed from that train of thought sometimes.
UPDATE: 4/16/07 – This deal has since expired, but until tomorrow you can configure an Inspiron 6400 with identical specs but upgraded to 2GB of RAM and XP or Vista for only $903. That’s an extra gig of memory for only $14. Now that’s a deal.
Update 5/14/07 – Inspiron 6400, CD T2350 1.86GHz, XP Home, 2GB, 80GB HDD, 256MB GeForce Go 7300, 6-cell battery all for $699. That’s a $379 savings off the regular price. This is a very good deal for only $700 considering the extra memory, dedicated card and Core Duo processor. Jumping up to a C2D processor and a 9-cell battery is about $110 more.
