pbdr

I am looking at possibly purchasing a new laptop for work and am looking for some recommedations. I just rebuilt my home computer (desktop) but realized I know little about laptops...

Here's the scoop.

My current laptop is a 3 year old gateway with 512 mb RAM and a pentium 4, 2.2 GHz.

I work on the laptop primarily doing technical writing and I often will have to have many programs open at once (word, excell, outlook, adobe, internet explorer, and some others), so I think I would need quite a bit of RAM. I don't usually use very labor intensive programs so the CPU doesn't need to be high end. I would prefer a fast 60 GB HDD. A built in DVD RW drive is important and I need multiple USB ports for floppy drive and backup etc.

Lastly, quiter and cool running would be nice (as I sit here listning to my current laptop whizz away 80% of the time...).

All this with a budget of $800 or less including XP Pro (this is a target so slightly above may be OK). Even just some good sites to start looking would be helpful (are big, mass market companies good for laptops?).

Thanks in advance for any help.

goosy22

does it matter if it's amd or intel based?

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pbdr

No, it shouldn't. My home system is AMD, but my current laptop is Intel.

goosy22

well... for $1000, i know it's over the budget... you can get this acer... it's probably not the greatest thing out there but it's got a core duo @1.66GHz (i'd opt for the core duo since you say you run many programs at once), 100GB HDD and 1 GB of DDR2... plus xp pro... you may find something cheaper at dell.com though... but the reviews of this acer say it's pretty well rounded...

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