Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello all, I'm looking for a laptop. Requirements are:

Good build quality.
Word Processing.
Surfing the net.
Email.
WIRELESS INTERNETS BUILT INSIDE (a wifi adapter).
A decent keyboard that someone with long fingers can use.
Reasonable power, but the above is pretty much all I'll use it for.
CHEAP.

Basically, I want something in-between the ASUS EEE thing (too small and pathetic, but a good idea) and the bottom of the line Dell ones.

The reason I'm discounting the Dell ones is because I'm paying a premium to get Vista, when frankly I'm not arsed about Vista.

The main purpose of this lappy is to take to my girlfriend's and basically do my work there when I'm not at home.

We just bought one of these for the gf:

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/136627

£50 cashback, and to my mind it's a perfectly good laptop for an entirely reasonable price

My new Dell XPS 1530 (misprice off HUKD) is very nice indeed -- I'm particularly impressed with the build quality and the extras, like nVidia graphics, 802.11n wireless, bluetooth, 2MP webcam -- but it was £500 even after the misprice. I'm guessing is too steep for you? Go tap "Dell" into HotUKDeals, there's almost always something good on.

Apols if this is too old a thread to bump, but I have been thinking thinking seriously about getting a laptop recently. As opposed to my usual habit of thinking about laptops in a hysterical manner. I was going to get a Macbook because they are cool and solid and I do a lot of iPhone and iTunes. But the price has been irking me massively, and I have one main criterion for purchase:

Which laptop sounds the best?

I will get a special super-dooper sound card if I have to, but am hoping it won't come to that. The situation in a nutshell: done with my CDs, I have ripped them all to lossless files on my 1TB HD. I am going to get a pretty decent DAC for my hi-fi, into which I can stick Sky box, consoles... and hopefully my laptop. That way it'll (theoretically) be a cross between the sound of a pretty damn good CD player and the convenience of a jukebox.

So, what I'm getting at is, are there laptops with good enough sound - and S/PDIF / Toslink connections? That'd be pretty heartening. Hopefully I don't have to pony up the £760 or whatever a decently-RAMmed Macbook would set me back.

Thanks in advance.

The price didn't irk me so much once I had it. Mainly because I realised it was massivly better than anything else and would probably last twice as long.

How are you finding your Mac, now that you've had a few months to settle in with it? It was your first, ja?

The Acer Aspire One.

The keys on the Asus EEE are pathetically small, I can't type on them. However, the Acer Aspire One has normal sized keys (give or take a millimetre or two) and fulfils each of your requirements there.

New Mac laptops coming Tuesday. Rumours say they may be getting cheaper.

I have one, it's lovely. Although, I'm planning to install Xubuntu onto it later/tomorrow, which is when the fun really starts with it.

The only quibble I have is that the buttons of the touch-pad (mice buttons) are awkwardly positioned for my fat fingers, and makes me want to not have to click on anything. But that's really it.

I bought one a month or so ago

I started a thread and everythink!

Fucking annoying and lovely at the same time. Anyone who tells me Macs don't crash as often as Windows is a lying crnt. The kind of people who think pushing their machine is opening two Safari windows at once. I haven't had as many numerous, fatal and pretty crashes since my Amiga.

The Macbook Pro has a minor screen problem (sometimes only half the LED backlights light up) but this is easily solved by a screen reset and a replacement is pointless as all the 2008 models suffer from it. The Mac Pro is great as long as you never tell it to reboot because 50% of the time the fucker will hang.

Don't accidently open Time Machine when doing a big rendering job using all 8 cores either. The graphics card goes abit mental.

But they are generally good. The Macbook Pro pisses over every other laptop I've ever used. Suddenly every other laptop you use feels cheap, plasticy and nasty. I love having built in Firewire 800 for the laptop as well as it's great for editing (even if those fuckers at Lacie charge such a premium for their admitidly good drives).

Parallels is great for running Windows software. Only problem is the sound emulation is seriously shit (also shit under Bootcamp) which is annoying as I prefer Cooledit for sound editing. External USB soundcards play up merry hell for some reason as well. That's the biggest letdown.

Apple need to get better drives for the Geforce 8800 as well. I just don't get the feeling they are getting the most out of it.

My Samsung monitor flickers very slightly on greys as well. No idea why, was fine on the Windows box also using DVI.

But in general it's great. Despite the faults it pisses all over Vista and the fact I can run XP as fast/faster than my 3 GHz P4 in a window on the desktop is fucking fucking awesome.

Final Cut is great but bloody odd in places. Titling is shit, pisses me off I have to use Motion to do anything half decent and then watch my 1.5k box slow to a crawl while Final Cut tries to render it.

+ The OS really needs to make better use of multicore machines. And so does Final Cut. Compressor works well with 8 cores though and I can do fucking speedy Windows Media encodes.

Hey ho, that enough?

Jesus seen on jet powered skateboard over Skegness. More at 6.

Chinnyhill, are you totally convinced you haven't got a hardware problem, there? They really shouldn't crash that much I don't think :?

It's fine. Problem is that most Mac users don't even remotely push their machines which is why you get all the claims that they never crash. + Motion is horribly flakey which really doesn't help. Terrible bit of coding worth of Adobe themselves.

Fair point, I don't remotely push mine - I only heard the fan come on for the first time in two years the other day, while converting a video.
It's been switched on since I got it though and only gets rebooted after updates which require it..

Anyway, back to laptops. If there really is a cheap macbook I'll be first in the queue

Do Mac laptops have optical outs? In the headphone socket perchance?

I believe they do. This is apparently why there is slight audio distortion problems on the headphone out on the Pro's.

Rumours are that the entry point is going to slide to $800. Of course, the fact Sterling's got the shit kicked out of it recently means the UK will be joining at a much higher price point that it would have done just a few weeks ago.

I'm not entirely sure we'll see a Mac quite that cheap, but then Apple is starting to get a little more aggressive now it's obvious it has a real chance to grab maybe a fifth of the market within the next few years. (Anything higher than that is massively unlikely, but that'd be a healthy chunk to own.)

Also, the credit crunch (hate that phrase) affects Apple worse than many other laptop firms, as they are a premium brand. With the economic outlook gloomy and AAPL sliding fast on the stock market it's a good time to carefully introduce some lower end products with reduced margins to keep market share ticking over. Like you, I'm sceptical about $800, but stranger things have happened.

Well the new Pro's look shit frankly. Only a single firewire port? Apple can get to fucking fuck. I'm sitting here with one drive plugged into the 800 port and another in the 400 port and even the expensive Lacies don't have a loop through.

I'm also sitting here using the computer on an analogue Dell LCD. Apparently (according to what I see on The Reg at least) that functionality has also been removed. Idiots.

Do Apple know what their customers want or do they just get themselves off on telling people how high to jump?

"Yes, we've filled the power supply with concrete and filled the DVD drive with horse shit, but don't worry the fanboys will still buy them".

A-fucking-mazing.

Lucky I got my Macbook Pro in August then!

@richardgaywood: I think Apple could be affected somewhat by economic conditions, but the halo effect is driving people across from other premium brands, and Apple's never cared for the low end of the market.

@chinnyhill10: You can plug the new MBP into a DVI monitor via an adapter, although there's no way to get non-DisplayPort Macs to use the new LED display. Personally, I like the new laptops overall, although the lack of any FireWire on the MacBook is a strange decision.

Glad I got mine when I did too. Can't stand glossy displays.

Not so keen on the dark keyboard either.

I think this is a clear sign that Firewire is dying on its arse, frankly. Outside of digital video it's been eaten alive by USB and eSATA. One day you will find yourself buying a FireWire ExpressCard board Chinny.

In fact I would go so far as to say most normal consumers would be much better served if that FireWire 800 port was dropped and an eSATA port put on instead. Certainly, I would be happier with that.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/specs.html says the new mini DisplayPort has dongles for DVI, dual link DVI, and old fashioned analogue VGA. The Reg is wrong, although there is the extra expense of the adaptor to consider. On the other hand DisplayPort is likely the future anyway (as it supports higher resolutions that DVI or HDMI, and unlike DVI can carry audio) so it's nice to have that as the basic standard.

Granted -- but if the recession bites hard the entire high end of the consumer electronics market will shrink substantially. I'm sure Apple's beancounters have done the maths though.

Really? As you might be aware I work in video production. Everyone I know has Firewire devices coming out of thier ears. Our cameras are Firewire, our drives are Firewire and Apple sells a substantial amount of kit into my industry. I have 4 firewire HD's and 2 firewire cameras, not to mention a firewire DVD recorder.

USB is shit and SLOOOOWW. Might be fine for the punters but the fact is that it's far slower than even Firewire 400.

And trying to make people buy Firewire express cards is going to hack even more people off as the industry is on the cusp of transferring to using solid state media. So it's quite possible people might be using Expresscards in one camera and firewire from another. Nice one Apple.

eSATA, if it had been included, might have been useful. But the Apples are niche products sold into niche markets and part of that niche market is still using Firewire an awful lot.