Recommend me a budget laptop

[Borgholio]

Time to upgrade to a more modern laptop. Don't need much, just enough to play some of my favorite games (don't need to play them WELL, just passably while I'm on the road).

So I'm looking at a 15" screen, dual core chip, 4gb RAM, video card that supports at least Shader Model 4. I see Dells, Acers, Toshibas, and HPs going for between $300 - $400 with the specs I need. Sound about right?

Any brands I should avoid? Anything I should pay more to get?

[Edi]

If you can find a Lenovo with that kind of specs, take it. For the low end cheap models, I'd stay away from Acer, be skeptical of HP and avoid Packard-Bell like the fucking plague.

From what I've seen of Toshiba, they also have some solid stuff. No idea at all about Dell laptops, because we see so few of them here.

[Borgholio]

Yeah at my local Costco (big warehouse chain with reputation for excellent customer service), they have a couple of Lenovos a bit out of my budget but with very nice specs. I might pony up a bit more for one of those if they're a good brand (no experience with them personally). They do have a couple of Toshibas so I'll probably look at them too. What's wrong with the Acers and HPs though? I tend to see above-average reviews for them on Amazon and Newegg.

Oh and Packard Bell? Damn that's a name from the past...they haven't sold that brand here for 15 years!

[Edi]

Lenovos are good, solid stuff. They must have something like 75+% market share in business laptops hereabouts and they don't do much in the way of consumer oriented stuff. Their "consumer" laptops (that I've seen anyway) are halfway business machines and have a far sturdier construction than equivalent HP, Acer, Sony or others that I've handled. So if the premium is not that much more, I'd go for one.

Acer is about the most ubiquitous computer brand in the consumer market, them and HP. Unless you know what you're buying, the results can be hit and miss and if you get a lemon, no amount of sugar is going to turn it into lemonade. If you see something labeled eMachines, go armed with a hatchet and a barge pole. That's basically a sub-brand of Acer for the cheapest shit known to man.

With HP, like with Acer, you need to look closely at the spec and also handle a demo machine if possible, because the quality varies so much. HP business laptops are good stuff, even on the low end of the spec, but the consumer stuff requires a closer look before buying.

As for glowing reviews, depends on what you're doing with them and how heavy use they see. You'd need to know the use case before you can deduce whether the review is applicable for your situation.

With regard to Packard-Bell, be glad you have not seen them in 15 years. They still sell that brand here, though the market share is low. For a very good reason. I have yet to see a Packard-Bell-machine that manages to claw its way past average. Most fall significantly short. For many, you need to remove the nearest manhole cover to be able to see them. I once mistakenly bought a Packard-Bell for a family member and never, ever again. I have also run into my share of them with customers. Not a single one of those customers had a good word to say about those machines. At best, they would say "It will do", or more often, something a lot less complimentary, dovetailing nicely with my own experiences.

[Thanas]

I have owned Acers in the past and it is really all dependent on the model. You can get a great machine for 100$ less than the other competitors if you manage to hit the right configuration, or just get a shitty peace of crap that will break a month after the warranty expired. So do a lot of research. From my personal experience Acer does very well with large laptops like 15.6 inch to 17 inch, but the lower ones are not that good.

Lenovo is unmatched in quality of manufacturing but does not have that much power, so if you want to have stability and not lug a huge laptop around definitely go for lenovo, one with steel hinges, as plastic hinges are the first things that will annoy you after a year or so.

[Borgholio]

Yeah Lenovos did have very good reviews and the did not cost that much more than the other brands. I'll definitely have to take a look at them. Like I said, I don't have a problem paying a bit more if I get a higher-quality machine out of it. I don't need a super powerful laptop but I would like it to last for awhile.

Thanks for the advice, guys!

[TheFeniX]

Dell offers quality "budget" laptops. I've bought more than a few over the years and have had good luck. One issue though is that the Intel video cards they come with are proprietary chips, so Intel won't touch them WRT driver support. You have to go to Dell for that and their driver support is what I would label "worthless." This is only an issue when it comes to gaming and the Intel cards aren't that powerful to begin with anyways. A Dell with a Radeon or GeForce is a solid laptop that won't break your bank, but there are likely better options. I usually wait around for a sale from Dell.

If you got the money, I highly recommend ASUS. I've had issues with cheaper Acer laptops. Those priced in excess of $500 seem to by of much better quality though.

As said, never go anywhere near an eMachine. Not only are they bargain-bin level shit, they also offer next to 0 support and will also flat-out lie about capabilities. My dad purchased one machine with WIndows Me that claimed to be "2000 ready" except the BIOS wouldn't support it (no ACPI support IIRC). The conversation with eMachines after I was told they would not be releasing a BIOS update (it wasn't in their policy), devolved into name-calling on my part. I do recall saying something to the effect of "burning this piece of shit wouldn't be worth the cost in gas."

[General Zod]

I bought this machine back in December for $500 and change after taxes. For a budget machine I can get some pretty decent performance out of it. You won't be able to max most new games out, but I can run things like Deus Ex HR, Dead Space 2, and Borderlands 2 without much trouble. (Modern Warfare 3 chugs along a bit, and forget about blops 2). The construction quality is pretty solid and nothing has exploded on me despite pushing it pretty hard. You can get cheaper Inspiron 15 models without the touchscreen if you really don't want to fork over the extra $100 or so.

[Zaune]

As said, never go anywhere near an eMachine. Not only are they bargain-bin level shit, they also offer next to 0 support and will also flat-out lie about capabilities. My dad purchased one machine with WIndows Me that claimed to be "2000 ready" except the BIOS wouldn't support it (no ACPI support IIRC). The conversation with eMachines after I was told they would not be releasing a BIOS update (it wasn't in their policy), devolved into name-calling on my part. I do recall saying something to the effect of "burning this piece of shit wouldn't be worth the cost in gas."

I thought eMachines went bust ten years ago.

[Borgholio]

There are still some eMachine desktops being sold here...but even in the beginning they were shit.

[TheFeniX]

As said, never go anywhere near an eMachine. Not only are they bargain-bin level shit, they also offer next to 0 support and will also flat-out lie about capabilities. My dad purchased one machine with WIndows Me that claimed to be "2000 ready" except the BIOS wouldn't support it (no ACPI support IIRC). The conversation with eMachines after I was told they would not be releasing a BIOS update (it wasn't in their policy), devolved into name-calling on my part. I do recall saying something to the effect of "burning this piece of shit wouldn't be worth the cost in gas."

I thought eMachines went bust ten years ago.

Nah, they got bought out by one of the big boys years ago, but kept the same shitty quality. That's actually not fair, when eMachines actually worked, they gave you the performance (read: not much) that you paid for and they tended not to explode, mainly because there wasn't any real hardware worth mentioning. However, if they even did send out an updated BIOS, you didn't load it because it was likely going to brick your box.

Basically, buy the thing for cheap and never touch the fucker. And they have the worst PC manufacturer customer support I've worked with and this is including my numerous dealings with Dell after they pushed all their support overseas.

It was only like a year or so ago the brand was completely discontinued. eMachines might have helped kick PC prices down, but companies like Dell did it better.... at least back then.

[Elheru Aran]

I think eMachines may be owned by Walmart or something now. I see them there a lot, anyway, both laptops and desktops. They sell a lot of HP's and Dells at Wally World too.

Needless to say I have a strict policy of never buying a computer at Walmart...

[Borgholio]

Yeah nuts to Walmart. I'm comfortable buying a computer at Costco due to their excellent return policy. I may buy at Best Buy or a big box store if they give me a good deal on a machine that I know is reliable, but I would never buy a computer at a place like Walmart or Target. That's...just asking for trouble.

[TheFeniX]

You'd be surprised what you can find at Wal-Mart or even Sam's. My mom called me years back about a laptop box-deal at Sam's. $500 for an HP Pavillion Athlon64 1GB of RAM with a mid-range Radeon. Also came with an inkket printer/scanner and 2.something megapixel camera. The fucking thing still works and is sitting on a bookshelf behind me right now. Shit, I used the camera for years (still works as well) because I took forever to bother with a smartphone.

We snagged a decent boxed Dell for the wife a few years back. Has an Intel card, but also came with Office/Acrobat and a 17" (I think, may have been 19") LCD for like $450. I couldn't part something out from Dell's website for that price, but Wal-Mart was trying to get rid of it.

You can't just walk into retail looking for a PC, you'll get taken to the cleaners. But you can snag some deals if you're just out and about and stumble across something.

For an actual gaming rig, you have to get stupidly lucky. Like when I got my ASUS desktop for $900 because it was not only mislabeled, but also on sale. I never would have bought a gaming PC from Best Buy, but the GTX260 alone, at the time, was like $300. The i7 and 10GBs of RAM has made the PC only require 2 Video Card upgrades in 4 years to keep everything at Ultra and that's only because I refuse to deal with frame-rate drops. Even with all that, it still wasn't that great of a deal.

[Borgholio]

I tend to build my own PCs, that way they are more future-proof. I only wish my laptop was that way. I currently have a decent Toshiba Satellite but it's just a bit too far behind the times to do everything I want now.

[TheFeniX]

I got caught at a weird point when it came to PC gaming. I had been building my own PCs since I got my first job. My last rig was a water-cooled Athlon 3000+ and I was catching the end of AGP. I extended the life of my PC as long as I could by buying the last AGP card made (GTX6-something-thousand Ultra IIRC) and overclocking everything until it couldn't take anymore. Then the 360 came around and all my friends who would never touch a gaming system were now all CoD players. I can't complain too much as I met Kyle and Rob in L4Dead and have been gaming with them ever since.

They were big about getting into Star Trek Online, so I dusted off my PC during the beta and it fucking cratered hard the second it loaded. At that point, I went to Best Buy as a joke before I was going to part out something from my old supplier. That's when I found that ASUS. As I had always bought ASUS parts (when available), I went with it considering I would be hard pressed to research all this new-fangled tech and also save myself the hassle of an assembly.

You have to go big on a laptop for any kind of longevity. The problem is that they cram a decent amount of RAM into a lot of them, and you can score a decent processor as well, but the mobile versions aren't meant for the long-haul. Even worse, skimping on the video card means even standard program advances over the years are going to strain the system and there's just so much bloat in everyday use apps like Acrobat and Office.

[Borgholio]

Yeah I built my PC rig with a quad-core Phenom processor, PCI-E x16, and plenty of SATA-3 ports...so if I wanted to max out what it could fit, my computer would be better than most on the market currently. And if you spend extra for an 8-core chip thinking you'll actually use that extra muscle...well... *snicker*.

And yeah most laptops I've seen come with dual or quad core chips with 4gb ram standard. Hard drives are bit small...but 500gb is enough for the games I tend to play. Onboard video cards are the weak point though especially since they can't be upgraded.