Buying a new laptop

Kasor

Go with iMac, Mac Airbook or tablet laptop. They are great. Don't got anything higher than 14" on size. Otherwise, you need a desktop not a laptop.

I will recommend anything between 12 to 14 inches.

Ahriakin

Kasor wrote:

Go with iMac, Mac Airbook or tablet laptop. They are great. Don't got anything higher than 14" on size. Otherwise, you need a desktop not a laptop.

I will recommend anything between 12 to 14 inches.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-SUu4epa-g

c0d3_w0lf

Sadness...*sniff sniff*

Dell had a pretty sweet deal on their website for an XPS m1530, however...

I don't qualify for their financing gig. :P So I guess it's back to the original plan of putting away money a little each paycheck until I have enough to pay it in full up front. Darn that lack of credit!

dynamik

I have a great credit score, and they still set me up with 19%+ interest. I paid it off immediately and closed the account. No thanks.

You can't get a CC or anything through your bank?

Also, if you want to start building a credit history, get a secured credit card. Essentially, you give your bank or whoever $100, and you get a $100 credit card. Yes, they hold on to your money, but developing good credit will help you significantly in the future. They do give you some interest, but it's negligible.

c0d3_w0lf

I've got a secured credit card with my bank for $300. Unfortunately not enough for a sweet new rig

I figured it was worth a shot, though. I would've paid it off before the interest kicked in (12 months no interest was the deal...IF I had qualified.)

The guy at my bank said it would take about 9 months of staying current on my secured card to start building up credit. I've been makin' small purchases on it and paying them off right away, but I've only had it a month so far. :P

gonwk

Hi folks,

1st time poster ... I was researching "Sager 2092" and I came across your thread ...
Well let me be honest ... I am like the guy who said when you want to buy a laptop ... just buy one ... stop researching ti to death ... like I have been ...

I am not a "Gamer" ... but you never know ... may be in the future ... What I need my laptop for is "Strictly" for Video Work ... you know the junk with AVI's, dvd's and the freeware used to work them ... So, I guess all I need is a laptop with a Fast Processor ... or pretty decent one.

I have been looing at Sony (because of it's looks and it is "lighter" than most), HP (because used to have "good deals" ... notice I said Used To Have ...), Fujitsu (beacuse I have seen and worked with my friend's and is built "Solid" and works good and Japanese made ... so enough said) ... then I came across a thread someone suggesting the Sager NP2092 with all Bells and & Whistles ... the only thing is I have never bought a Computer or a Laptop without an OS ... how hard is to install OS and where the heck would I find the Drivers & crap for the Sager unit.

@ Schluep ... some Q's for you please!!!

Q1: Are you still happy with your Sager?

Q2:[color] Is the 0 Dead Pixel ... a hit or miss with "Xotic PC" ... or am I guaranteed with that problem? Also, do Large companies like Sony, HP, Dell, Fujitsu deal with the same problem or not?

Q3: I know you are a Sager guy ... but if I am not a Gamer and only need a half decent Video Card ... and the only reason I was even considering having a Separate GPU is because somewhere I read that having a dedicated Video Card might free up your CPU ... so you can Encode Video FASTER and also do Transcoding faster ... IS THIS TRUE!?!?

BTW, Schelup ... also the reason I am looking at Sager is because I get a lot of STUFF for lot less compare to other LAPTOPs.

@ ahriakin ... Loved the YouTube clip ... that was funny about MAC ... how true though

Lookign for you folks input and help.

Thanks,

G!

Schluep

Q1: I am more happy with this purchase than any I have made before. It was the first time I purchased a Sager and the first time I purchased from this particular company but after researching based upon my needs I found it to be far and above the best value for the money. In my case it was the 2090 and not the 2092 purchased but they are very similar. Obviously if it is more than what you need you can scale back on some of the options or purchase from another brand and/or company entirely.

Q2: The default policy for XoticPC is that you will have no dead or lit pixels in the middle 1/9th ofthe screen. Essentially picture draing a tic-tac-toe board across the screen and the center space is gaurenteed to have none and less than 4 total. The extra charge for the 0 Dead Pixel policy gaurentees that you will have none anywhere on the screen. I had 2 dead and one lit pixel on my old Compaq/HP laptop and it did get to be annoying a times, but is nothing major. They don't happen all that often but if you need to make sure you have none the policy to gaurentee this may be worth the price. Everyone I have recommended this company to so far has had none without the policy, but it is still taking a risk. As I mentioned, I had this problem on an HP laptop and had no policy regarding it at all so even though one was in the center 1/9th at the time I lost out. You would have to check with the individual companies at the time of purchase to see if they have a policy regarding them. It is not something I saw when buying my old Dell or my Compaq/HP however that I used before this one.

Q3: There are more things than just games that would benefit from a nice video card. I am not really a gamer either and find great benefit to having a nice video card. You typically have more options in terms of external connectors since the nicer cards usually have more options for connections. There are definitely performance enhancements from having an independant GPU particularly with it's own RAM cache. The benefits of this can be substantial for things such as video editting or working with GIS/Survey Design applications such as AutoCAD, ArcView, Microstation, and so on. You will even see an improvment when you have a lot of windows open and definitely benefit if using a dual monitor configuration. I had an old desktop PC running Windows 98 many years ago that was getting very sluggish on me. It had integrated video and was not even used for gaming or anything of that nature. I was noticing that even minimizing/maximizing windows had a problem and it could not support any more RAM than was already in place. I put in a nice new video card and all of my problems were solved and things moved much more quickly saving me the need to replace it for another 2 years. Obviously with a newer system using much better CPU's and RAM will not have this problem to the same extent, but there will be a performance difference. Video cards are for more than just gaming.

dynamik

I'm really happy with mine overall. One stick of ram was bad in my wife's machine, and the guy is letting me swap it out myself instead of making me send it back (which I thought was awesome). The only real downsides is that the external video is VGA, not DVI. The text is noticeably not as crisp on my 24" at 1920x1200. A more obscure problem is that the BIOS is really limited in regards to what you can tweak, which surprised me since it is a "gamers" laptop, and gamers tend to like to fiddle with things. This hurt me because the BIOS does not allow me to enable hardware DEP, even though the CPU supports it. This prevents me from running VMs in Hyper-V. I have a couple of desktops that I can enable it on, so wasn't the end of the world (and that'll probably only affect .001% of you).

I'm not trying to rag on it, it's great overall, and I'd buy them again in a heartbeat. No dead pixels on either machine. Batter life is excellent, considering the work I make this poor thing do.

You'll definitely get better overall performance from having a dedicated video card. It's not an ultra high-end card, so don't feel like you have to be a gamer to get your money's worth.

They'll put an OS on for you, so I'm not sure what your concern is with that. They give you OEM prices, so the only way you're going to get it cheaper is to pirate it (strongly discouraged). If you really want to install it yourself, you basically just keep clicking next while adjusting basic parameters like the date. The only thing that might give you a problem is hunting down drivers for hardware that doesn't have drivers included on the OS installation media.