Laptop for college..

[gregoriahson]

I am going to be headed off to college in a little under a year and am in need of a laptop.

I do TONS of downloading and uploading so I need a good processor, a good-sized HD and at least 4gb's of ram.

My budget is approximately 2,000 but i may be willing to go a little higher.

I THINK (not 100% sure yet) I want to run Linux Ubuntu so the hardware needs to be compatible.

I have looked at alienware and ibuypower so far.

So what do you guys recommend?

Thanks in advance

 

[agt_27]

Linux Ubuntu

tough call..... I, too, am wanting to make the switch to Linux Ubuntu. I installed it on my desktop and things were running fine until I tried to set up the 3D cube. My graphics card is too old to handle it, so i would first say get a laptop with a good graphics card. Also, if you buy a laptop off the shelf, it is going to come loaded with an operating system- Windows if you get a PC. When you load Ubuntu on to your computer you will have to partition your hard drive for both OS. This is actually pretty easy, but you need to have a large hard drive so you can have ample space to use your new OS. Are you planning on running just Linux or a duel OS system? I would look into getting a DYI notebook with no OS installed so you could load Linux and not have to worry about Windows. I have never tried it before, but I have built a few desktops and they were easy. I don't know if this helped, but good luck anyway.

 

[Sir Travis D]

I am going to be headed off to college in a little under a year and am in need of a laptop.

I do TONS of downloading and uploading so I need a good processor, a good-sized HD and at least 4gb's of ram.

My budget is approximately 2,000 but i may be willing to go a little higher.

I THINK (not 100% sure yet) I want to run Linux Ubuntu so the hardware needs to be compatible.

I have looked at alienware and ibuypower so far.

So what do you guys recommend?

Thanks in advance

Since you looked at alienware, what do you think about them? Alienware will be releasing a new laptop soon, the "allpowerful" (www.allpowerful.com) - It says 90 days, but it's probably a bug because it was 10 days before it changed to 90.

 

[bomberboysk]

For that price... you can get one heck of a laptop, a mobile 4870x2, 6gb ram, and a quad:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220527

Or something a little cheaper with less ram and less powerful graphics:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834101179

Something reasonably priced:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220483

FYI, i would turn away from looking at the alienware systems, they tend to be very overpriced. One manufacturer i would recommend though would be sager, but its gonna be tough to top the specs of that asus with the 4870x2 and Q9000 for the price:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/default.php

If you customize this notebook with the Q9000, 1920*1200 display, 4GB ram, and 320gb 7200rpm hdd then you would end up with a system that would come close to the asus i listed at the top:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=129131

 

[gregoriahson]

Alienware, from what I have heard, are pretty much up there with the best in build quality, technology and performance. BUT you pay for the name to a certain extent.

agt_27- I have heard building a laptop can be quite tedious. I will do some research and see how difficult it actually is. I already have ubuntu 9.04 on my HP Pavilion desktop so I am familiar with partitioning the OS's. I would most likely run windows and ubuntu. Windows for gaming and word processing, Ubuntu for everything else.

 

[bomberboysk]

Alienware, from what I have heard, are pretty much up there with the best in build quality, technology and performance. BUT you pay for the name to a certain extent.

agt_27- I have heard building a laptop can be quite tedious. I will do some research and see how difficult it actually is. I already have ubuntu 9.04 on my HP Pavilion desktop so I am familiar with partitioning the OS's. I would most likely run windows and ubuntu. Windows for gaming and word processing, Ubuntu for everything else.

Well, depending upon your outlook of dell(owns alienware) they are decent laptops. The sager notebooks and the asus are the ones i personally thing have excellent build quality, and great specs for the price. Its actually pretty much impossible to "build" a notebook, you can buy a barebones kit where you need a cpu+memory+os+hard drive, but with those you have msi and ocz(two main notebook barebones manufactureres), and neither at the moment have gpu's in them that are highly specced(both have nvdia 8600 graphics if i remember right).

 

[gregoriahson]

For that price... you can get one heck of a laptop, a mobile 4870x2, 6gb ram, and a quad:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220527

Or something a little cheaper with less ram and less powerful graphics:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834101179

Something reasonably priced:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220483

FYI, i would turn away from looking at the alienware systems, they tend to be very overpriced. One manufacturer i would recommend though would be sager, but its gonna be tough to top the specs of that asus with the 4870x2 and Q9000 for the price:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/default.php

If you customize this notebook with the Q9000, 1920*1200 display, 4GB ram, and 320gb 7200rpm hdd then you would end up with a system that would come close to the asus i listed at the top:
http://www.sagernotebook.com/product_customed.php?pid=129131

Why do you recommend sager? JW.

 

[bomberboysk]

Why do you recommend sager? JW.

Great specs, build quality, i personally do not own one, but i know a few people who have purchased sagers and love them. The asus notebooks are also excellent, and have a 2 year standard warranty, and if you register within 60 days- one year of accidental damage warranty. The sager and the asus also both have esata, which if you want to add some hard drive room to them, esata external hard drives are immensely faster than a usb external hard drive.