Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Conor Ryan
Mac's are Mac's you know when you want one usually, but it doesn't hurt to research.
If I we're to get a laptop under $2000 I'd be looking at the Acer Ferrari, nothing really parallels it, AMD 64 bit processor, lots of Ram, nice nVidia Go 128mb video card and lots of other stuff.
|
The Ferarri is actually rather expensive (at least the 4005WLMi model). It's like $2050 before tax and shipping.
It looks cool, but there's better values out there. As I noted before, Acer uses the cheap 4200 RPM hard drives. To upgrade to the same size and 5400 is like an extra $80. I've also heard a ton of complaints that the ferrarri series quickly turns into a space heater as soon as you start doing anything graphic/processor intensive.
I took a quick look at a couple websites I considered when buying my laptop last year, and I came across
this(I eventually ended up buying from here. 110% satisfied with my purchase).
after customizing it to the original poster's specs, it comes out to about $1950 fully loaded. The best part is that they don't charge sales tax (outside of nevada), so you save about $150.
As I noted in the thread I linked to earlier, if you don't care about having a name brand computer, I would
highly reccomend buying from a company that sells laptops made by the ODM. For example, you can get any of the laptops Alienware sells, just without all the alienware branding all over it, at a significant discount. Same goes with a bunch of other models from various manufacturers.
You also get the same warranty, with exactly the same tech support as the name brands. They just thank you for calling a different company instead of Dell, Gateway, or what have you.
It turned out that I got even better tech support from the no name brand than from the mass merchants, since they're located about 30 minutes from my home. I had one very minor issue, and I drove it right over and got it back within 24 hours.
When it comes down to it, very very few manufacturers make their own laptops. I believe Apple was one (someone told me recently they don't anymore) and one other smaller company. Might as well pay less and get the same thing, with a different logo on the case
