As we approach the 2009 holiday season many are concerned with gadget trends. ICD staff has no access to a crystal ball however early indications appear to be a buyers market for notebook/laptop purchases.
If you can go without a few features, $299 and possibly lower is possible.
Netbooks should be coming in around $250.
For those who prefer a bit more oomph keep an eye out for laptops with dedicated graphics. Most laptops below $800 share the main RAM memory with video and the video chip is more integrated to the main board which is not as powerful (reduced function on full 3d gaming and graphics.) however above the $750 to $800 threshold are a number of laptops capable of decent 3d action.
Also in the “Oomph” category, keep an eye on the Core i7 processor laptops. Quite a strong processor for a laptop. I recently witnessed a $999 price at Costco for an i7 processor laptop which of course included dedicated video with its own v-ram. For high end performance that is hard to pass up. (listing for $1099 right now and click on the actual product for accurate reviews of 4+ star, over a 100 reviews. Impressive)
I am often asked, what should I look for. First I’ll list some basics, then I’ll paste in some price research I did recently. Hopefully the links won’t go dead. I’ve seen a lot of changes on website leading up to Black Friday. I used Best Buy as a reference price point. I don’t promote buying from there necessarily and in my opinion avoid Geek Squad setup. They will charge you hundreds for backup disks, anti-virus software and service that you can set up for yourself, free and cheap (or call up ICD Solutions, Inc. at 859-694-1111 in the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky areas (or we can help you remotely anywhere in the country.) and we’ll charge a nominal fee, in most case $50 to help you get the basics out of the way):
- Core2 Duo or AMD X2 is fine in most cases especially the Turion processor
- At least 3GB or RAM, I prefer to see 4GB
- 250GB hard drive or larger
- 14″ monitor is tolerable but 15″ can be a bit nicer on the eyes. Notice that if you can sacrifice a little processor speed you can sometimes land a 17″ with other nice features. I would worry about video playback in streaming on weaker processor though until Flash gets it act together on streaming video.
- Those are the basics. the rest is optional
The monitor is a little small on this one but $580
Core2 similar to above for $600
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