What is a good laptop comp. to buy?????

Morning All, In your opion what is a good laptop comp. to buy for about $500.00 to $600.00 ? Want to buy my mom one for xmas and i know very little about this stuff. I will probably be going to best buy today to look. I have a Gateway at home for my comp. ( it's not a laptop ) and knock on wood i have had pretty good luck with it. Any suggestion's?

All I have is Hp.No problems

Time is short so I can't post the pdf file now but will later. It was a analysis from a pc laptop insurrer rating laptops on three year failure rate. I believe a failure was one component failing to work as designed requiring replacement. Not sure. What I am sure of is the two laptop brands with the lowest failure rates were ASUS and Toshiba.

... and here it is.

Even though i have a HP DV 6200 cheapie which had no problems yet except piss poor battery life,(i use it maybe once a month) and my wife has a Compac (made by HP) laptop, i don't think i would buy either of these brands again. For the price they can't be beat, just don't expect them to be trouble free, read up on how many failures these have in warranty and out. Yesterday at 7am there was a line of people at the local Walmart waiting to buy the $258, or $288 laptop. If that's what price range you need, go ahead, but just be sure to backup all your data weekly and don't complain when it fails after warranty. Yet on the other hand, i think people are crazy if they spend $1000 on a laptop.

What ever brand you decide on, invest in a cooling/fan base to keep under the laptop at all time. Heat is the killer. There are inexpensive plastic units that cost $20 or you can spend up wards of $60 for a dual fan aluminum base unit and the entire fan base will act like a big heat sink.

Edit: my daughter's HP lasted through college abuse with a hard drive failure, DVD burner blitzed and last month the mother board said enough. Lasted just over five years. It saw lots of heat until and it was hard to get her to use the fan base until she lost it all on the HD failure. After that, the fan got used full time.

I have an HP/Compaq Presario M2000? its been a good one for the past 3-4 years.

I know all our work laptops are all IBM/Livono, they seem to work pretty well.

Just bought two of these for business - awesome deal of the century in my opinion of course:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... 445-170024

whatever you buy, go for the following specifications, but keep it under 500.00 Dollars

15 inch screen
Any Pentium but not Celeron
Most new models have everything else, like USB 2.0 DVD reader/writer SD card reader and high speed interface, blue tooth, ETC
PMCIA Card interface is a plus, and so with another video port.
Better yet if neither the WiFi is built in nor is the webcam.
Try the speakers to see if they are loud enough

The best way to test it, is to have an unedited HD movie from a digital camera, make sure it's about 3 to 5 minutes long, and it's usually about 1/2 a Gig. Plug the SD card into the laptop and see if you can play it smoothly.

if you don't have an access to an HD movie, try this link and see if you can play it smoothly without skipping or jitter in the 720 HD mode.
Enjoy



Have fun