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Cheap Laptops?
Ok, it pains me a little to do this, but my sister is in the market for a *cough* Windows laptop. I have never before purchased such a beast so I have no idea where to look for the best deals. She's looking entry level, simple, basic, dependable, and cheap cheap cheap. Of course, it would be best if it weren't fall-apart cheap, but you know what I'm saying. Bells and whistles she's not looking for. She wants to run MS Office, surf, and do email. That's basically it. She might use it w/her digital camera, but that's not super-crucial. So where should we start shopping?
Posted June 5, 2005 07:36 PM | life generally
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I'm sure you thought of this...but how about an iBook with the student discount?
Not that I have a windows laptop, but Dell seems to have great deals all the time and seem to be pretty reliable. I know last week they were offering something like 30% off their laptops.
Posted by: tony at June 5, 2005 08:18 PM
Good call w/the iBook, except that my sis has a Mac already and what she wants is a PC for work compatibility reasons. For lots of reasons, I think it would be the best thing for her. I dread the nightmare of possible viruses and whatnot she might have to deal with, but even so, it's probably maybe a good idea for her to have a Windows machine. I guess we'll see.
I looked at Dell but their best deals don't seem like very good value for the money. Still, that might be the best I can do...
Posted by: ambimb at June 5, 2005 08:30 PM
For cheap, reasonably well performing and decent looking, it's hard to go wrong with an Acer.
I pickd mine up on the cheap for 750$. It's not as nice as my Vaio or Satellite, but for under a grand it ain't bad at all.
Posted by: Jeremy Wright at June 5, 2005 09:04 PM
In general, the Dell laptops are a decent deal for the money--the machines are fairly well built. Having owned two Dell laptops myself, another for work and my wife has one...
Now, I don't own one, so caveat emptor, but I have heard okay things about both Acer notebooks. And Newegg.com (which I use all the time) have them *cheap*. Cheap as in Celeron machines in the $599-799 range. That is hard to beat. And if the's just surfing the internets and running office, a Celeron would be more than adequate.
They also have Asus notebooks for a little more, but I hear good things about them as well.
Posted by: Dave! at June 5, 2005 09:21 PM
i've always been happy with thinkpads. worth the money, they last a long time, etc ... a little money up front goes a long way.
Posted by: jose at June 6, 2005 07:58 AM
Depending on how crucial this laptop is to your sister, I would really suggest you look at used Dell laptops. For example, the winbloze laptop I use currently is a Dell Cpx500 with 256 megs of ram/30 gig drive. I bought it a few months ago on ebay for about $200. Its a 3 year old machine now, but at the price it does all of the above and more. Runs XP flawlessly (if such can be said), works with my digital camera, fine wireless speeds, perfectly capable word processor/email machine.
In any case, seriously consider the used market for Dells, they are dirt cheap and sound like they would more than meet her needs and still be nearly 'throwaway' cheap.
Posted by: Chris at June 6, 2005 09:59 AM
Chris: I think you read my mind. Used seems to make sense for this machine. My sister can best be described as an occasional computer user, so it would be silly to spend much on a computer she might barely use. Do you (or does anyone else) have any thoughts on any of these machines?
Oh, and when you bought your 3-year-old machine, I assume you got no warranties or anything. I guess that's working out ok? How did you make sure you didn't get a dud or something that had been beat around and was ready to die?
Posted by: ambimb at June 7, 2005 06:54 AM
I've never bought a laptop from those types of refurb places, but plenty of folks I work with/know have, and they seem to be decent if a wee bit (~$100) more money than comparable machines you can find on ebay.
The downside to buying off of ebay is as you mentioned, no warranty, no promise it will work. I got lucky with mine obviously, but the upside is that unlike Apple laptops, you can buy a mainboard for these machines for around $50, you can get a replacement LCD for around $70, keyboards can be had for $20. In other words, even if you get a dud, at most you might spend $100 or so dollars on parts to fix the problem (if you don't mind working on laptops - these things are much easier to work on than apple laptops, they were designed to be taken apart and put together again by trained monkeys ;) )
Posted by: Chris at June 7, 2005 10:03 AM
