Budget laptop priorities?

[Edward Yee]

Am planning (hoping?) to get a laptop under $1000 soon, preferably through whatever weekly savings the big brands I use (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City) are running...

Can anyone recommend any 14" or 15.4" HP Pavilion laptops good in both portability and entertainment, or which size of the two is best? (Also battery life, truthbetold. 2 hours doesn't cut it.)

P.S. Is Media Center Edition compatible with XP Professional when it comes to wireless networking? (For some reason, when I had Home Edition on a laptop it couldn't join up with the home wireless network I set up in Professional.)

[General Zod]

Am planning (hoping?) to get a laptop under $1000 soon, preferably through whatever weekly savings the big brands I use (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City) are running...

Can anyone recommend any 14" or 15.4" HP Pavilion laptops good in both portability and entertainment, or which size of the two is best? (Also battery life, truthbetold. 2 hours doesn't cut it.)

P.S. Is Media Center Edition compatible with XP Professional when it comes to wireless networking? (For some reason, when I had Home Edition on a laptop it couldn't join up with the home wireless network I set up in Professional.)

I picked up the HP Pavilion DV6000us, and so far I'm fairly happy with it. If you want more battery life, you can upgrade to their higher capacity batteries, though it'll cost you a bit. The model I picked up came with a 2ghz Turion 64, 512mb ram, a dual layer dvd burner, an 80gb hdd and a 128mb nvidia togo graphics card, Windows Media Center installed. So far it's been a fairly decent machine, and the built in wifi is mostly painless. The type of operating systems you've got matter less than your wifi card, so if you had problems setting up a network, it was something other than the OS.

If you can afford to I'd highly recommend getting a higher capacity battery, (the ones it comes with by default are 6 cell, and iirc they make 12 cell batteries for a nominal fee) and upgrading the memory to 1gb. The system I got ran me for about $750 before taxes.

[Master of Ossus]

Am planning (hoping?) to get a laptop under $1000 soon, preferably through whatever weekly savings the big brands I use (Best Buy, CompUSA, Circuit City) are running...

Can anyone recommend any 14" or 15.4" HP Pavilion laptops good in both portability and entertainment, or which size of the two is best? (Also battery life, truthbetold. 2 hours doesn't cut it.)

P.S. Is Media Center Edition compatible with XP Professional when it comes to wireless networking? (For some reason, when I had Home Edition on a laptop it couldn't join up with the home wireless network I set up in Professional.)

The answer to all of your questions has to do with what you want the computer to use. 15.4" computers are significantly less expensive than 14" ones, but they are also considerably less mobile (generally getting less battery life, as well as being heavier). Media Center has some of the networking capabilities of XP disabled, but I imagine it would work for a home wireless network.

[Edward Yee]

If you can afford to I'd highly recommend getting a higher capacity battery, (the ones it comes with by default are 6 cell, and iirc they make 12 cell batteries for a nominal fee) and upgrading the memory to 1gb. The system I got ran me for about $750 before taxes.

Don't know if I'll be able to buy/get a 12-cell. This week Circuit City has the DV6119US for $700 before taxes, but CompUSA has the DV2120US for $800US with a free (but unneeded) printer.

Master of Ossus, I'm willing to pay more for battery life and mobility, if the difference between the two sizes doesn't (really) affect "entertainment" performance. And what specifically are these lost networking capabilities from Media Center? (Note that I don't use Bluetooth for any sort of wireless in my house.)

Should I wait for next week's weekly ads?

[Netko]

I recently got this MSI notebook and I'm really happy about - so much in fact that I've turned it into my primary computer, which really wasn't the idea when I bought it. There are a few kinks still left to work out do to me using Vista RC1, but they will probably sort themselves out.

Something like that should go for under 1000$ in the US and it works great as a media PC while having an balanced video capability - something that is rare in this class of notebooks (MTWII at almost max setting as native resolution, for example). The only real pain is battery life - I'm getting around 2:30 when doing wireless web surfing and around 1:30 doing playing video from CD under full illumination of the LCD.

[Edward Yee]

Looks good, but I'm leaning towards Hewlett Packard (brand-wise) at the moment.