Laptop Recommendations:

[Chad L. Magee]

I have had my Toshiba Satellite for 4 1/2 years now. It travels very well. No problems at all! That little laptop has over 400,000 miles on it! 

Just my      Good luck Bro!

I bought a new Toshiba Satellite A215-S7428 on Black Friday last year for $499 after rebates ($699 sale price - $200 rebate check that I just got in the mail) at Office Depot.  Well worth the money in my opinion.  It has the 15.4" screen, 2GB RAM (AMD Athlon 64 duel core processor), 160GB hard drive, wireless card and the CD/DVD writer with Lableflash (only thing missing that I would have added was the fingerprint lock).  Unfortunately, Vista home premium was installed, so I may have to remove that and put on XP....... 

[Todd Wilson]

I really dont know what brands are good or bad anymore. I bought a Dell laptop about 3 years ago and have had no troubles with it. The things to look at with any laptop is what are you going ot use it for. You can get any laptop with a rather hot setup like ram,cpu,video and a high rpm harddrive.  Laptops can come with different RPM harddrives and that can make a big difference in both speed and battery life.

Problem is with speed comes with higher power consumption and lower battery life.  If you are a traveling salesman and you need to log into the mother ship to check email or place orders for customers then you obviously want a unit that has long battery life while say a college kid needs laptop for skool but also wants to play the latest high tech online shoot em up game at night then you may want one of the hotter machines.

A wireless ethernet card is a must anymore with a laptop and if you got the cash to spend for monthly charges you can get the broadband connection and basically have internet anywhere your cell phone works driving down the road. Otherwise you just hope to find open wireless systems when you stop with your wireless ethernet card in the machine and use the internet then. There are tons of open networks all over my town. People are idiots when they get a walmart wireless router.  There are also some business's that offer a free network so you will come in and spend money there and sit down and play on your laptop.

Knowing what I know about you Strat I am guessing you'd want something to take with you when you travel about. I'd get a hot unit and you can plug it in every night as you camp in the Dodge. With DVD drives you can also watch movies and with a tv card/HD antenna you would also be able to pull in TV stations as well. A unit to do multiple thngs while you travel and still be able to surf at the coffee shop when you are home.


Todd

[Troy]

For those of you using Vista - it was designed to get regular/consistent updates vs the old style of one giant Service Pack every few years. This was actually implemented in XP Service Pack 2 - which probably should have been a new OS release since it changed so much. When Windows XP Service Pack 3 finally comes out later this year it won't really affect much if you've applied all the regular updates. This will be the final Service Pack for XP. MS was a couple of years late releasing Vista already so I don't think they'd have held it up too much longer. Businesses want to purchase "mature" software so the OS had to be in use so all the weirdness and application incompatibilities could be worked out before any large company would adopt it. Since Vista was released they have more than doubled the amount of certified hardware and fixed many of the software compatibility issues (mainly in the 150 or so applications that were deal-breakers for businesses).

I just got Vista this week and haven't had any problems... yet. I didn't really have a choice since my machine has more RAM than XP can recognize (I'll post the specs a bit later). I don't do much gaming at all so that wasn't an issue. However, if you are a gamer then DirectX 10 is only available in Vista so you can't get the most out of that new video card under XP. Once more games are written using the new features you'll have to upgrade to play them. If I were building a "normal" laptop or desktop then I'd have stuck with XP Professional since I've always had good luck and I don't need to be on the bleeding edge of technology (stability is usually more important). Also, Vista is a resource HOG so it may not be the best for a laptop any way (although the power saving features are great you need more/better hardware to run it).

I have an IBM laptop for work but I've also used Dell in the past. If you buy a business model you shouldn't really have any problems. I lost all confidence in HP/Compaq and Gateway years ago so it would take a lot for me to try them again. Of course, Acer used to be the utter garbage but now they seem respected so I'd definitely have to do some research if I were in the market now.

Troy

[Duey]

Like JLPiP! said, I'd stay away from HP Pavillion...search the web on DV6000 and wireless.... my wife's wireless has fried twice and she's not alone.

Did you consider a used/refurb, Brock?  I grabbed myself an off-lease IBM Thinkpad/Lenovo T41 for half your budget...2GB Ram and a 120Gb drive is hard to beat....it's running the bulletproof XP SP2, but you could load Vista if you wanted.

http://www.laptopcloseout.com/usa

Cheers,
Duey

[71charger_fan]

My problems started when my laptop fried the wireless and got worse from there. The service guy told me to buy an HP next time.

[bakerhillpins]

Yea, I am in the same park as Troy with regard to vista. I don't see what all the noize is about? I got vista on my new Toshiba and once I wiped the disk and re-imaged it to remove all the bloatware that ships on new PCs these days it has operated fine. Yes, some of the basic user interface things are quirky and take some getting used to but I don't loose data, and I don't have crashes all day long, and I don't have any major issues. Now, Toshiba, that's different. 

Here is a great writeup on re-imaging vista on a PC to get rid of bloatware. Worked great for me and my business partners.   
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

Your Mileage May Vary.