New Laptop For Gf

[djinn]

GF need a laptop.She is studying in university

She uses Word,Excel,Access,Powerpoint,Dreamweaver and Photoshop plus cruising on internet

We have wifi at home

Wish to find a cheap solution (yeap I am a cheap Charlie )

Could she use one of these small like laptops EEE PC????

Alternatively a bigger laptop???

Which brand is reliable????

All hints are welcome

[surface]

EEE PC's are best for web surfing, though they can be used at home with an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. Would be hard to to work with the applications mentioned on the little screen when not at home.

Reliability? Everyone will have good & bad experiences with all brands here, but if she will be carrying it around a lot, you will want a 3 year warranty regardless of brand. Acer and HP both have a lot of service centers around Thailand making them a good choice. Between those two it's basically a matter of finding a model that meets your needs regarding size, features, and price. They both have good deals on their lower end models around the 15k price range.

Go to Fortune (my preference over Pantip), and walk around checking out the different models. Most of the smaller shops will have same/similar prices, so it's just a matter of finding a model you like in your price range.

Again, rule #1, if she will be carrying it around with her even occasional, then GET THE EXTENDED WARRANTY. 3 YEARS!!!

Edited December 8, 2008 by surface

[JetsetBkk]

I agree with surface, but am biased towards Acer because that's what I have . It's three years old, no problems. Even the keyboard is still working, which is one of the parts that often starts to fail on old PCs. Get the extended warranty.

Get more than 1 MB RAM. I now have 1.5 MB. I can run Firefox, Outlook Express, Google Earth, Azureus and a graphics program plus all the antivirus, anti-malware and firewall products simultaneously, no sweat.

Acer have lots of service centres, but I haven't used them to fix problems. I did get a second internal drive from one of them, but that was for use as part of my backups strategy.

One poster liked a PC that was "carved out of a single block of aluminium"! (Sorry whoever you were, but I still find that hilarious ).

If you want value for money, have a look at the Acer range.

[Guest Reimar]

Running an Acer 5t93 for 2 year 2 month now without problems.

Beside of my very old Thinkpad 701, which I still use for works on Novell Netware, the acer ius the only one I had and have without problems. HP, Spny and Fujitdu, others I had in the past, all had problems starting after 6 month.

But as surface wrote, go for the extended warraty just for to be on the safe side. If you don't need that warranty within 3 years, fine and you "loose" that money but if you need, you save maybe a lot, it's really worth to pay for that.

JetsetBkk:

Maybe your laptop has GB of memory instead of MB?

Cheers

[JetsetBkk]

...

JetsetBkk:

Maybe your laptop has GB of memory instead of MB?

Cheers

Absolutely right Reimar!!

(I remember when we used to measure it in kilobytes! Whatever happened to the 640k boundary? )

[Guest Reimar]

...

JetsetBkk:

Maybe your laptop has GB of memory instead of MB?

Cheers

Absolutely right Reimar!!

(I remember when we used to measure it in kilobytes! Whatever happened to the 640k boundary? )

My good old Thinkpad 701 is running on MS DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and has a total of 16 MBytes RAM! But the OS (DOS) is running on 640 kBytes and the rest run as EMS memory (4 MBytes) and RAM Disk (11 MBytes). And the good old Windows run with Lotus Symphony much faster as the todays uptodate Laptops with Vista and 4 GBytes of memory!!

Cheers.

[ozymandious]

The Asus Eee's are too small and underpowered for dream weaver and Photoshop. (also there's not enough screen realestate for those programs to work on that machine)

I think you're going to have to go 14in + or have an external monitor.

also go for at least 1GB of RAM

[Veazer]

The Asus Eee's are too small and underpowered for dream weaver and Photoshop. (also there's not enough screen realestate for those programs to work on that machine)

I think you're going to have to go 14in + or have an external monitor.

also go for at least 1GB of RAM

I use an Asus Eee 1000h for lots of photoshop work (CS3) and it works surprisingly well. I put 2GB of memory in the machine which helps for PS and the Atom's hyperthreading helps to take advantage of photoshop's multithreading. It's not a screamer, but it is sufficiently fast for the vast majority of photoshop work. It would be a pain to only use in on the Eee screen (1024x600), but it handles external monitors well. I usuall keep my browser and email open on the Eee screen while doing photo and design work on the external. Works well for me.

The screen real estate iissue will be more of an obstabcle than the processor performance. If she's intending to do lots of work on the machine itself, i would get her something larger.

[jasreeve17]

Acer's are crap! (but not too crap...)

I'd never buy one, I'd spend 25k plus, but for 20k you can buy a very well spec'd Acer & it's likely to work well for a couple of years. I agree with the silly Acer supporters that you need more than 1 Gig RAM, perhaps the cheaper non-Intel laptops are OK too.

Asus are better than Acer.

The little screened machines have crap CPU's and the screens are too small to function well.

The black coloured Acer's with AMD processors and higher RAM are gonna be fine - wouldn't buy one myself (spending 5 extra k for a HP is well worth it in my humble opinion.)

I like Reimar as a poster, but he has consitently given me the worst possible advice on laptops - I reckon he's an Acer agent...

(Yes I do have a degree (Beng) in electronic engineering, much higher than silly IT (BA) degrees, before he gets 'anxious'.)

[djinn]

Thanks for your advices guys.

OK the small pocket machines are a no no.

I must say I had with friends in europ very bad experiences on Acer.On 5 laptops,4 had main problems ......

Now I have an ASUS here in Thailand and perfect (3 years old now)

An other question:I have seen a nice HP but with Vista.And I don't want this OS.Is it possible to put XP and throw away Vista.....

[JetsetBkk]

Acer's are crap! (but not too crap...)

I'd never buy one, I'd spend 25k plus, but for 20k you can buy a very well spec'd Acer & it's likely to work well for a couple of years. ...

Actually, 3 1/2 years so far and no problems.