New Laptop

[Cory]

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