Web Hosting Talk : Other Forums : Computers and Peripherals : My friend needs a computer any help?

[Torith]

Okay my friend came to me asking if I can help him which I told him that I can not but WHT could most likely. He is looking for the cheapest price for a laptop.

He needs the laptop for these things only

1.) Wanted to do art on (photoshop and digital uploads)
2.) Music/ movie player & burners/rippers
3.) Storing tons of music & photos & media

He needs a wifi card
good speakers
and basics for the rest of it.


The computer will not be used for games.



I just wrote word for word what he wants. His price range is around $500.00 or less. Though I am not sure where to look? He needs to get it as soon as possible. What type of lap top would he need?

[music]

GOOGE and FROOGLE

[KGIII]

www.pricewatch.com if you're in the USA...

KGIII

[citywidehost]

Have him check out www.tigerdirect.com
They have several nice ACER laptops for under $500. Just tell him to stay away from Celeron CPUs.

I've been using Tigerdirect for years now, and I can confirm the quality of service. A ++
Most everything comes with a warranty as well, even if only 30 days.

[the_pm]

Moved to Computers Forum

[rhenderson]

Try geeks.com

[Disgruntled]

This Sunday's Parade Magazine showed a Dell laptop for $450. It's a Celeron. There are probably hidden costs like shipping and tax. The word processor is probably WordPerfect's basic-basic version. If there is anti-virus, it is probably a 90 day trial version. Besides the operating system and programs, a restore partition will take up some HD space.
Adding linux might add some functions at a bargain price. OpenOffice and K3b could be useful. The new MEPIS 6 supports the Winmodem of my Dell Inspiron 600. To get a good 56K connection, you should turn the speed setting down to 57,000, and change the modem setting from Hardware to Software. When partitioning for linux, I suggest creating a FAT32 partition (1 GB should be plenty) next to the NTFS partition before adding the Ext3 partition. The FAT32 partition can be wriiten to from linux.
Dell usually includes the free trial version of MusicMatch jukebox. Of course it could be downloaded even if not included. Although it lacks the fancier features of the registered version, it doesn't self-destruct. It can convert .mp3 to .wav files or vice versa. Linux can play .mp3 files, but I don't know of any linux programs that can create them.

[Mike V]

Make sure the notebook has 1Gb of RAM, or can be upgraded to 1Gb later. For example, the laptop should come with a single 512Mb chip. Photo editing applications are RAM hungry.

If he's looking to save some money try the AMD mobile chips (instead of Intel), which are commonly found on Gateway and HP notebooks. Dell & IBM to my knowledge do not make AMD-enabled notebooks. A lot of those notebooks are coming with 100GB hard drives standard now, which is just amazing to me.

You'll find Wifi built into almost every laptop these days. I like the Intel wireless cards personally, but it probably doesn't matter what card your friend gets, as I have yet to find a card I didn't like. Just the Intel card comes bundled with awesome wireless management software.

[Disgruntled]

I think 1 GB RAM is a great thing to have, but trying to squeeze that into a $500 budget can be tight. My old desktop computer can run MS Digital Image Pro 9 in Windows XP Home with a 600 MHz AMD Athlon chip and 256 MB RAM. Sluggish? Of course! But it can be done until there is more money for a new DIMM.
When the free trial antivirus is do to expire, it might be worth trying NOD32. It's not necessarily cheaper than NAV or McAfee, but it's less of a resource hog. Since a $500 budget is going to buy a pretty mild powered system, the difference could be noticeable.