hey my opinionated techhie friends: Laptop choice

I've been using an apple iBook very happily for the past year and I would extole it to you as an option. If however you want to stick with wwindows (also a good option) I would be wary of sony because the battery life is quite poor. A freind of mine with an IBM thinkpad has had awesome results. PM me if you want to hear more about apples.

 

Well I guess since you're going Windows, I'd just advise away from sony because of short life on their batteries, and state that my friends who's used toshiba has had excellent support when she needed it, and my other friends IBM think pad is durable as hell and has only needed matiaince when the viruses infected it.

Idealy Iwish there was a linux distro that was as usable as windows or apple.

 

Anything that dual cell right now is great.

Remember the bigger the screen size the less battery life you have. I have the cutest 14" laptop that lasts FOREVER on batteries. I think its a pansonic or something.

If you're shopping for close to 1200 I'd look at 17-20" screens.

remember, DUAL CELL

 

From what you say you need to do I'd say just go randomly buy one.. Any of them should be able to handle all that. Buy stay away from shit like Celeron, it's crap.. Go for a Centrino or whatever they're supposed to be more power efficient I believe, and make sure it's got a seperate graphics card.. No integrated graphics or shared video memory bullshit. The actual brand of the computer itself is generally irrelevent, except for warranty and such.. Just look for one with good components.


As far as open source, Ubuntu is pretty damn useable.

 

LIKE DUAL CELL

 

The fuck is dual cell?

 

Dual cell bascially means its got

- longer battery life
- more room on the hardrive
- double the amount of power for the programs you want to run.

I also want to add that if you plan on doing ANY video editing then apple macs are recommended. If you aren't going to do video editing or playing with videos and sound, then stay away from macs. In general they're more expensive, and less compatible with the more popular PC system.

 

For what you've asked, you'll probably want as a minimum-

512mb ram (for something like photoshop, the more ram the better)
At least a 1.4ghz proccessor. Faster will mean a more general speed up for you, as none of your progs are paticularly proccessor intensive.
You'll need a good quality screen if you're going to be photoshopping (I'm not too sure about measuring this though, you'll have to use your own discretion/eyes here).
Like Chaos said : Avoid integrated graphics. If you don't, it'll be the bottleneck of your laptop and slow everything else down quite noticeably. Go for one with either a Nvidia Geforce Go, or an ATI Mobility. DON'T go for something with Intel or Sis graphics, they're integrated and very evil

For wireless internet and CD Writers, you have the choice of integrated or USB. Last time I checked, most laptops come with the integrated CD/DVD writer but not integrated wireless (although if you can find one with both, get it, leaves you with extra usb ports for your camera). USB Wireless dongles come in a few different flavours, but that isn't really an issue UNLESS your internet connection is > 10Mps. In the UK they range from about £20-£50.

As for batteries... well as you said, you're only going to be using them about 5% of the time, so it's a trade off. Batteries with longer life are heavier, most of the time. But.. you can judge for yourself the weight

Hope that helps

 

go for the gateway convertible tablet pc...

http://gateway.com/programs/convert...convertible*programs/convertible/index~~shtml

you will enjoy how easy photo editing becomes with the write on screen features.

 

Boycott sony!!!

Hit'em where it hurts.

 

The new Macs with the Intel chip are supposed to run Windows. I'd wait to hear reviews on the results, but you might be able to get a Mac and use your current software.

I don't know how long it will take to get Linux on the Intel Macs.

 

Linux is already there. It's going to be a quick few weeks for the intel macs. however given the price range, the MBP is out.

Sony included spyware on some Music (and dvd?) disks that reports to them what you're doing with your computer. they favor the idea of renting rather than owning music, and have a long history of using proprietary systems to limmmit a customers options in the market place. They CAN make incredible technology, but the cost for consumer choice is too high for me. I will never again buy a sony CD, Movie, or electronic toy.