Buying a Laptop/Notebook is hard work

... but I finally decided to get a Dell Inspirion 9200.

Dell Inspirion 9200

I set it up for 1 Gig of RAM, default processor speed (Pentium M 1.6 GHz), 60 Gig drive with 7200 rpm, wireless internal card and the default screen (people were actually saying the more expensive display was very faulty with tiny resolution and not worth spending money on).

The processor isn't as fast as the Pentium 4 chips for laptops out there, but I heard they are much more efficient in battery issues, overheat a lot less and make the casing a lot smaller. My other choice was one of the Area-51 laptops from Alienware, but it would have been 300 bucks more for a similar setup. It had a lot of pros (Area-51) like a tougher casing made of magnesium alloy, and it would have been able to play some good 3-D games with the Pentium 4 chip with HT technology... but reviewers said the battery life is very short (only 1.5 hours during regular use) and it had a tendency to heat up fast. Also commented on it's weight (10 lbs compared to the Inspirion's 7 lb weight).

I have mixed feelings about Dell, though... I heard online that the customer service is horrible, but I also had a friend in town that had a great experience with them when his HD fried only a 1/2 into his warranty. My sister has an Inspirion 8500 and my mom has a Dell desktop she purchased 4 months ago... and it has had weird problems with software and hardware. My mom's desktop has had weird error messages, the CD and DVD drives are picky as hell and her external wireless card craps out on her half the time. My sis' laptop gets really hot really fast. I hope I don't have to put up with that crap. I hope I don't regret this decision.

I ended up only spending a shade over 2000 bones (2012 to be exact), but I'm hoping I got the right computer for my needs. I'm a graphic designer who needs to use the Adobe CS library and Corel Painter, and I would also like to branch out by using the Macromedia stuff (Flash, Dreamweaver). The Alienware laptop would have costed me over 2300 bones, but maybe it would have been better quality. What do you guys think?

If you're going with graphic design, I personally think you should've gone mac. Those things run like a dream with enough ram, and you almost never have to worry about reliability. I'm putting my g4 ibook through hell and it's holding up like a real trooper. Programs like Photoshop, Dreamweaver and Flash run wonderfully for me, and I'm only on 512 MB RAM. I'm no fanboy either, I run on Windows, Mac and Linux. Apple may be a little on the expensive side, but if you're mainly concerned with graphic design and reliability, then mac may be a road you should consider.

I have a friend who got an Alienware and it's a fucking beast, but as
with all laptops - in six months, it'll be obsolete. It can still whip the
shit out of doom 3 and HL2 though.

Couldve got a nice powerbook for that price

15.2-inch TFT Display
1280x854 resolution
1.33GHz PowerPC G4
512K L2 cache
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
60GB Ultra ATA/100
ATI Mobility Radeon
9700 (64MB DDR)
Full size keyboard
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire 400 & 800
AirPort Extreme built-in
DVI & S-Video out

Of course you'd need to spend a few more dollars to get that ram up to 512 for better performance.

You know... buying a Mac did cross my mind at one point... but I have never had great experiences with a Mac. I've used them when I was in high school about 15 years ago... up to just a week or so ago when I was a graphic designer for a health organization. I just could never embrace them. I've had issues with available RAM and apps unexpectedly quitting on me then and now. And the ones I used during my time with the health organization... they were the best Macs I have ever used. They still would crap out on me once in a while.

Don't get me wrong... I love some of the things a Mac has. I love the toolbar dock and I love some features with the OS X system (screen capping is so much better on a Mac). However, I was born and raised a PC person, and I can maintain a system fairly well by defragging and optimizing to get rid of unneeded programs. I have no idea how to do that with a Mac. That, and I seem to have no problems with stability on my Adobe software on my family's PC. Internet Explorer is another story, though... it ravaged this computer, and that's why it's only a shade of what it used to be (before I switched to Firefox).

Alienware was really tempting... believe me. I was close to getting it, but the Dell discounts (saving over 300 bucks) and the much-longer battery life sucked me in. I may not be able to play Doom 3 as intended, but at least Half-Life 2 isn't out of the question. That, and my goal was to have a great portable computer for a 3-4 year span, which could handle Adobe CS products with ease. I may move to Japan, and this may be my only means of communication and business (with freelance work or personal work).

If I was rich, I would have gotten the Alienware or Mac laptop. Instead, I got the Dell. I figured, if I go to Japan and came back in 3 years, I could build the Death Star desktop I always wanted and play whatever the hell I wanted. I hope I made a decent decision, and the Dell works out for me. Like I said, I have had heard mixed opinions on Dell, but I heard they're great on the laptop end of the business.

shir0 said:

I have a friend who got an Alienware and it's a fucking beast, but as
with all laptops - in six months, it'll be obsolete. It can still whip the
shit out of doom 3 and HL2 though.

Click to expand...

I thought AW has the upgradeable graphics cards...
I want a Sager 9860: it's not designed to be portable (13 lbs, not including the 2.1 lb power brick!), but it runs games like a mother, thanks to the GeForce 6800Go PCI Express card.