I'm throwing in the towel--need advice on laptops now

13 years ago

I'm the person who has been trying to get iTunes 10 to load or at least get iTunes 9 to recognize our new iPod.

I give up. Five days of calling Apple, going to multiple websites and trying everything I can think of. (I do thank those here who tried to help me though!) I realize that even if I do get this thing straightened out, my desktop system doesn't have the RAM or disk space to let the iPod touch perform at it's best.

So I'm going to get my daughter a laptop with all the right specs and let her put iTunes 10 on it, so I can have my PC back! She'll be needing one for school soon anyway.

So now I need suggestions for some decent low priced laptops that I should consider for her. Am I looking for trouble if I'm considering laptops around $500?

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Comments (9)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX
13 years ago
no you can find some decent laptops right now in that price range, they will not be the top top of the line but very sufficient for normal use. this is one example for you
Toshiba - Satellite Laptop

HP - Laptop

I personally prefer AMD processors to Intel but that is me.
you would want to decide what display size to get her the 17" is very nice but will be very heavy to carry if that will come in to play. Most will have around a 500GB hard drive and 3 or 4 Gigs of memory.
Just look around still a lot of Christmas deals available.

that is exactly why I refuse to own ipods the Apple stuff is just way way too proprietary and make it hard to do things that should be easy on purpose. There are some other brands of music players that are even better than ipods that cost less and are super easy to use and none of the proprietary crap. Creative makes some awesome players
http://us.creative.com/
homebound
13 years ago
First of all, regardless of who uses it, I can't help but recommend that you max out the ram in your desktop if it hasn't been done already. It's great "bang for the buck".

You can probably get a $500 laptop that will do the trick, but I might suggest a trip to best buy or one of the other dealers and talk to them about it. I noticed that hggregg has some great prices, but their sales folks don't seem to know their stuff so "caveat emptor". Buy one with a dual core processor and at least 3 or 4 meg RAM and you should be fine. (I'd worry less about the hard drive capacity.)

Also, based on my latest experience with HP laptops, I would avoid them. I bought one for my niece a bit over a year ago and the mousepad buttons have come off in addition to it failing to go into sleep mode when the clamshell is shut. They look great but don't hold up worth a darned under normal teen use.
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homebound
13 years ago
Another "thumbs up" for the AMD processors.

I bought a Dell Inspiron 531 desktop package about two or three years ago from walmart w/ AMD Athlon 64x2 dual core processor, 2 GB RAM, for about $550 and this thing is still terrific.
homebound
13 years ago
Raven,
That Toshiba deal is quite tempting!
jane__ny
13 years ago
I always find this confusing. Isn't a large hard drive more important than ram for storing music and photos? I thought the drive is what holds everything and you want a large hard drive. I'm never sure what is the most important aspect of a computer.

Jane
bpgreen
13 years ago
A large hard drive is needed to store lots of pictures, video and music, but a lot or RAM is important for performance.
homebound
13 years ago
They're both important, but when comparison shopping I think RAM is more important than having greater storage (which will still usually be more than plenty). A couple years down the road, storage issues are easier to deal with. And until you get there, you will have a speedier computer.
jey_l
13 years ago
When buying a laptop the processor and graphics card should be the foremost consideration because they are not upgradeable in most machines as they are set into the mother board. Hard drives and RAM are and are cheap and easily installed. Then their are concerns of connect-ability (wireless/bluetooth), drives (CD/DVD burn) and other ports. I wouldn't get anything less than 256 MB VRAM and agree with others on the AMD dual core. 64 bit would be an advantage too unless she is just an iTunes and internet user. If it's not 64bi the ram is unnecessary above 4GB and for a typical user 2 would suffice.
beache
Original Author
13 years ago
ravencajun,

I completely agree with you about iPods/Apple. I've been saying to "no" to any iTunes upgrades for over a year now because they always mess with my PC. But by the time I figured that out we already had 3 iPods in our house, and the new Touch has HD video and is WiFi ready so my DH wanted that rather than a separate Flip video, etc.

Thanks for the advice everyone!

I'm throwing in the towel--need advice on laptops now

Comments (9)

ravencajun Zone 8b TX

homebound

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I'm throwing in the towel--need advice on laptops now

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