So I need to buy a cheap laptop for work. It's not required but it will make my job A LOT easier. Because it's out of my pocket I don't want to spend a lot.

The only things I will use it for is MS Word for to fill out reports and tresspass flyers where I will be loading pictures from my digital camera, Adobe for the same reports, Excel for creating my time sheets and tracking my stats and the internet to access the county website so I can issue and print citations.

I was thinking about just a basic laptop with 2GB ram, 320 HDD, 15.6 screen WXGA. I don't know much about brands anymore but Best Buy has a Lenovo for $299.99 with 4GB ram, 320 HDD, 15.6 screen, Office Starter built in (Which means I don't have to buy office!) AMD E-1200 series Dual Core processor, ATI Radeon HD 7310 graphics, 0.3mp webcam, 2 in 1 memory card reader, DVDRW+CDRW multiformat.

For $20.00 more they have pretty much the same model with an Intel® Pentium processor B960 Featuring a 2MB L3 cache and 2.2GHz processor speed and an Intel video card with HD graphics and a 720p web camera.

Which one would be better I wonder? I have always been an Intel fan.

WHAT you want in a laptop is subjective...WHERE to get it is key...

I like tigerdirect...

I don't have a laptop, but I'm using the SAME PC I first built in 2002...I just upgrade and replace the parts as needed...

I'm probably on my 6th hard drive...

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Either would work but the $20.00 difference would make your life a lot better.

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The Intel over AMD? The only drawback is the more expensive one has only a 60 day trial of office and the cheaper one has the limited version that doesn't expire so I would have to go pay another $140.00 for office!

I am probably going to Best Buy. I am a big fan of USB hard drives. I can't find them cheap anymore. I got my last 320GB for like $39.99 at Wal-Mart and would like to find another one or two for work and to back up my current laptop thats dying.

Toshiba or Compaq. We've owned a lot of laptops and these seem to be the best. Bought them new and used at pawn brokers. Never had a problem. Upgraded (or bought as gifts) is only reason we traded or sold our old ones.

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Tigerdirect.com Build your own.



I would have said buy anything BUT a compaq. I don't know if it's changed or not lately, but compaq used to have proprietary parts, which means you can't replace a goddamn thing on it unless the parts are compaq, and those parts are a lot more expensive.

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Not enough RAM for what you're doing. Win7 takes 2 gig just to run, so you're going to be paging all the time. Get at least 4 gig to run MS Office (assuming that you're getting Office 2010) on W7, so based on hardware, go with the Lenovo. Also, that MS Starter is nothing more than a locked down version of MS Office that will time out about 30 days after you register the PC. If you're building your files frm scratch abd not using existing files, then ditch MS Office and go with Open Office. It's free and you can save your files to MS Office formats.

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I assume "cheap laptop" means a Macbook is out of the question?

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