my sister is after a laptop and since i know sfa about lappies i figured i would ask you guys.

she mainly wants it for doing work stuff on but would also like to be able to watch dvd's etc on it when she travels. she doesnt care about screen size as long as she can do the above mentioned things. shes looking to spend about $1000.

any suggestions?

by what you've specified? anything with a dvd drive.
what is 'work stuff'? word? CAD? photoshop? facebook?

Dell Inspiron

what is 'work stuff'? word? CAD? photoshop? facebook?

nothing graphical like photoshop or cad.

by what you've specified? anything with a dvd drive.

wouldnt it need a decent graphics card too though?

the best laptop you can get from dell for $1000

Knowing nothing about laptops doesn't mean you are braindead, I'm sure you could have figured this out on your own

Maybe she should look at a decent netbook and save a few hundred bucks. The Dells, Toshibas and Acer ones look pretty good and the keyboards are natural to use (sorry, but I stand by my argument that the eeePC keyboards suck).

Oh and it will be easy to carry when travelling.

yeah 3dee but those are s*** for playing full screen movies. My netbook plays at like 5 fps maximised and also I can't seem to fit a DVD disc into any of the holes.

Oh woops missed that part :P

You can get full laptops for around 750 these days. Cheap as chips.

My GF has a dell mini v running windows 7 with 1 gig of ram and it plays movies back just fine.

Yeah I've not really done any serious experiments - perhaps it's just the video or app I tried to play.

Yeah I wouldn't have suspected DVD would give one any trouble. They just need a DVD drive I guess!

Just recently I bought myself an acer timeline 4810t. I mainly needed it for uni and to a less extent for work. I wanted it to be ultraportable with a long battery life in case i need to use it on the train etc, hence it suit my needs well.

It's out of your sis's price tag ($1500), but it's inch thin, weights under 2kg's, has a dvd drive, as quiet and as cool as me sneaking into ya mum's bedroom late at night and has 8+ battery life (with standard use), so it might be worth checking out.

Just don't expect to do any real video editing / gaming with it, because that's not what it's meant for.

You've just read a post from it now!

http://theawesomer.com/photos/2009/04/040909_acer_4.jpg



last edited by The Match Fixer at 16:44:15 28/Jul/09

i have a compaq presario runnning vista and when i try to play a dvd on it, it says the screen resolution is wrong and to change it. ive tried all options and none of them let me play dvd's...
other than that, its a great laptop, and only cost me $700 2 years ago.
if someone can explain the resolution noobness, then i highly recommend it.
i run guitar rig 3 on it, and it cranks !!!!!
so would handle 'work stuff'.....

yeah 3dee but those are s*** for playing full screen movies. My netbook plays at like 5 fps maximised and also I can't seem to fit a DVD disc into any of the holes.

My mum has an EEEPC laptop thing & watches movies on it just fine, they're not HD or anything (who cares on an 8" screen) but VLC plays them at full speed with no skipping. I'm pretty sure she does it while on batteries too.

For that price I'd just get the best specs you can, whatever brand, its a < 1000$ machine, at that price brand / reliability aint going to differ that much, pretty much guaranteed korean parts.

I have an eeepc (9") and I would not recommend it. It is ultra-portable and cheap but I would prefer a larger keyboard and monitor for extended use.

All low res videos play fine on the eeepc. Forget HD video.

i have a compaq presario runnning vista and when i try to play a dvd on it, it says the screen resolution is wrong and to change it. ive tried all options and none of them let me play dvd's...

Install the Combined Community Codec Pack and use Media Player Classic Home Cinema.