Laptop recommendation?

I've got a coworker whose daughter is about to be a sophomore in high school, and she's in need of a new laptop. It's going to be typical word processing & such, and she's saved up about $700 (her mother is going to help out with the difference). They're wanting this to last until she starts college in a few years.

She has a preference for thin laptops, but from what I've seen the thinner they get the more expensive they get too. Any recommendations? I usually recommend Dell Vostro for friends & family, but I'd like to hear some of your suggestions. They'll probably want to keep the price under $1,000 (not including MS Office, I guess they'll go with the 2010 version). Thanks in advance!

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Comments

Darian929

I really like Lenovo's laptops. Very durable and as far as money for what you get I think they are good also. Give them a look.

arwes

Thanks for the recommendation, I'm checking out the Lenovo u550 right now.

Darian929

Yea does 550 are great. We personally had one at a repair shop and im telling you that computer went through such a beating. Still worked 100% even after falling.

arwes

Well, I ran a few past her and I think they're going to go with a Asus UL50VT at Best Buy. She's going to pick one up the next time she's in Baton Rouge, and will probably get Office 2010 this summer.

brad-

Laptop brands are just personal preference IMHO. I've owned HP and Dell laptops, and they were both just fine. I'm slightly partial to the HP though, for no reason other than its look.

I looked at lenovo,toshiba, and sony at the time of the above purchases, but they were all higher in price. Pricewise, the best deal i got was the HP.

TechJunky

Best deal out there for performance/money are the asus laptops right now.

msteinhilber

I absolutely love Lenovo's (the good one's, not the low end stuff which is just as cheap as anything else).

My biggest attractions to Lenovo in no particular order:

Squared edges, no silly round designs here - just solid bad ass looking plain old squared edges. Looks mean, look professional, looks sexy.

Flat black finish. Once again, no silly chrome, blue, red, etc. Just plain old professional looking flat black with a hint of bad assedness.

They generally feel very solid/rigidly built. A lot of other notebooks I play with, even some of HP's business class, feel a bit flimsy when working with them - rarely do I run into that with a upper end Lenovo.

If those are out of the question, HP's EliteBook line seems pretty decent too.

wedge1988

we have a few Lenovo N200's and N500's and they are both terrible products. Not only do you need to integrate drivers into the windows disk for both versions of the laptops to get windows installed, they both break easily and over 6 or 7 we have wont boot until the 5th attemp.

Either a faulty batch or crap build, but Lenovo are near the bottom of my list. Now i havn't had any issues with Dell machines

and we have over 150 of them...

msteinhilber

wedge1988 wrote: »

we have a few Lenovo N200's and N500's and they are both terrible products. Not only do you need to integrate drivers into the windows disk for both versions of the laptops to get windows installed, they both break easily and over 6 or 7 we have wont boot until the 5th attemp.

Either a faulty batch or crap build, but Lenovo are near the bottom of my list. Now i havn't had any issues with Dell machines and we have over 150 of them...

Well those are basically rock bottom Lenovo's. Pretty hard to qualify reliability when you buy the cheapest stuff you can get right? If you don't care to slipstream drivers (which isn't a bad idea to do if you're deploying anything in quantity) then you can disable AHCI mode on the SATA controller.

wedge1988

yeh you can disable AHCI mode, but doing that on each laptop becomes tedious stuff. I agree with the slipstreaming drivers; but even that isnt easy if you don't know how to do it (SCCM works great for this stuff)