I'd like to point out that your processor specification can include some Atom chips but exclude i5's. There's more to processors than clock speed.

If I find the time, I'll find you something. In the meantime, if you want an actual quality laptop with these specifications, take a look at Dell Latitude, Lenovo Thinkpad (or other), and Toshiba Portege (or other). Samsung may have something, but it might be difficult to find a seller. Oh, and check Newegg first. You can get deals and sub-$600 laptops, but most quality ones that I'd rely on would probably be in the ~$800 range. That said, a $400 would likely fulfill your needs. Except for the battery life.

For ~$850, you can customize a Dell Latitude E5420 14" with 500GB, 4GB, SB i3, 1600x900. I've heard good things about Latitudes, but have no firsthand experience; take a look. If battery life is decent and you don't expect to do any gaming, this configuration will probably leave you set for at least four years.

For ~$900, as I mentioned, you can get get the Sony Vaio C 14" with a Sandy Bridge i5 processor, 4GB, 320GB, and a good graphics card. For $1000 you can upgrade it to 1600x900 and 500GB.

Also for ~$900, you can get a Toshiba Portege R835, which is 13.3" and 1366x768 or whatever it is and otherwise the same as the Dell Latitude.

I would expect the Toshiba and Dell listed above to be of higher build quality than the Vaio and have more business-oriented features, but the Vaio's power/price is hard to beat and the build quality should be better than most anything you'll get for less than $600. Anyway, check on these three and the Thinkpad, I'm too lazy to look at that. If you want something significantly cheaper, might as well grab the $400 deal.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Apr 7 2011, 4:27 am by Centreri.

If you're going to get a 2nd desktop, why bother having a 400GB+ hard drive on the laptop? Hell, 100GB should cut it when you stick a few TB drives in your desktop.

Edit:
I just realized laptops are coming with 500GB anyway. Lol. In the HP model, +$10 for 320GB -> 640GB lol

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 7 2011, 5:26 am by Vrael.

>- 7200 rpm HDD 400 GB+
Irrelevant. If you want speed, get an SSD and an HDD. Hard drives are slow, and having a 7200 RPM drive only increases power consumption
>- 4+ hours battery life if possible; it seems to be pretty common
They always overexxagerate this. Macs excel at battery life due to their huge batteries, but are crippled by a toy OS, no right click, and being overpriced.
>- RAM 4GB+ (1066 MHz is enough for whatever that the laptop is going to be used for)
Ram speed is irrelevant. What matters is size, and 2 GB is more than enough for anyone for the next few years. Luckily 4 GB is cheap and common.
>- The processor should be dual-core with at least 1.8 GHz (not the 1GHz underclocked crap found in some netbooks)
Multiple cores is important, but speed is irrelevant. I would recommend the absolutely newest processors which have good power saving abilities. That means the i3 2310M ($700 for a 14-17" model). or wait around for bulldozer which will (hopefully) be faster than sandy bridge by 35%.
- I would prefer a display that had at least 1000 horizontal lines, but 1366x768 seems to be the prevailing resolution for all the smaller dimension laptops that still have the "HD" aspect ratio.
1366x768 is the standard now, but you can find some 1600x900s out there. 1920x1080 is the most you're going to find, and it's probably only going to be on 17" screens, which defeats the purpose of a laptop. On top of that, using a touchpad (which all laptops use because IBM didn't let people use their trackpoint) is stupidly annoying on a 1920x1080 screen. It's s l o o o o w.

>note-taking
the smaller the better, and more battery life too. If you have fat or big fingers, don't go too small, but I type fine on my 9" netbook.
>web browsing
this is standard, nothing spectacular
>light application usage
those aren't light applications. Don't expect them to run well without a dedicated graphics card.
>delay
All you need is an SSD. Literally that's all you need. Any SSD made in recent times (not 4 GB ones you find in eeepcs) will be 10-100 times as fast as a conventional hard drive so long as you aren't limited by the write/read speed (which you are on old SSDs).

Really you'll be happy with whatever you get. But you need to decide on a price. I spent $1800 on my first laptop 6 years ago. Waste of money. If you spend $400 on a laptop, you'll get your money's worth.

I got 1920x1200 on my 17'' 3 years ago. How awesome is that!?!? Seriously though, I think the industry is in one of its bullshit phases where it isnt producing the best technology when it comes to screens, considering I havent seen another laptop with 1920x1200 and a reasonable price tag since mine was discontinued. Or maybe there's no demand for better screens?

Rockz, getting an SSD, a SB i5, 4+ hours of battery life will be fairly expensive. I'd expect it to reach beyond $1000; I'd normally recomend it, but if he's going to be splitting his cash between the laptop and a desktop, it might not be worth it.

Also, you can increase cursor speed.

you might want to check out the new samsung series 9 laptop. it's as thin as mac air but more expensive, brighter screen, and worse batterylife. something like 1600 USD

it's recently been getting attention by reviewers as the windows alternative to mac air

http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/samsung-series-9-np900x3a/4505-3121_7-34510063.html?tag=latestReviews

Too weak graphically for his first requirement, too expensive for his second.

there's a 14" i3 with HD 6470 for $700. It will be quite fast, and have better than average graphics for a laptop (think 15 fps on sc2 on medium/low, whatever's not absolutely horrid).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152255

$20 for an adapter to remove the CD rom (I didn't look hard).
http://www.ayagroup.com/product.php?productid=17773

A plethora of SSD drives to choose from, the cheapest being $75/32GB. To get a good one, you should find reviews.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=636&name=SSD&Order=PRICE

So an SSD really only adds $100 on to the end of anything with an optical drive.

However $800 is in the mid-range desktop category:
Monitor=$120
CPU=$140
mobo=$100
case=$30
ram=$40
HDD=$50
psu=$40
ODD=$20
Total=$540
GPU=the rest. $120 GPU with an SSD would give you a computer 2x as fast as the laptop with a 21" screen for almost the same price. $200 GPU would give you a beefy gaming computer.

If you bump it up to $900 you can get an i5 as well, which will simply scream.

@ Vrael
There's a number of factors as to why there is a move to a new aspect ratio. We started out on 4:3 with CRTs, because that was TV resolution. Soon LCDs took over and found a cheap way to make 5:4 screens. Once widescreen came into play, 16:10 came around and dominated the market for a while at 1680x1050, but soon HDTV took off and OEM manufacturers realized that they could save money by going to even wider screen, but still get people to buy the "bigger" screen. A 15" 4:3 monitor is bigger than a 16:9 15.6" monitor, but the average consumer doesn't realize this, and will get the "bigger" of the two. It's the same reason intel sucked before core 2 duo came out: pentium 4 was being sold on a speed basis, so a 4 GHz p4 seemed better than a 2.2 GHz Athlon, but in reality, the 2.2GHz Athlon was faster. The marketing department at intel wanted to design a faster chip in GHz, not a more powerful chip, so they could advertise it. Nearly all the "innovation" in processors now is from AMD, but intel took it and made it better/cheaper/more efficient in their core processors, so now AMD is a step behind.

I really hope Bulldozer creates some competition though. We should know by june, but then Ivy bridge comes out and intel will take the lead yet again.

Aristo, do we need just the tower and its contents or are you in need of peripherals (monitor, speaker, keyboard, mouse) as well?

Just the tower and its contents are fine; a good keyboard suggestion would be nice, though .

As with everything else, you should say what you want out of a keyboard... you'll acclimatize and barely notice any keyboard out there, but if you want something specific...

I've got a decent Sandy Bridge build coming together for around 1100$, I can trim it down if need be but its looking pretty solid. I'll let you know when its all done.

I know about competitive gaming keyboards, and the price goes up to $150-200 depending on what you want. Since you aren't a competitive gamer like I am I suggest just taking a stroll to a nearby hardware store and look at the selection of keyboards laid out on display. Type on all of them, and choose the cheapest//most comfortable one you can find. It will have a rubber pad underneath the keys (which means inexpensive) for creating electrical contact to register a keypress. If you want a mechanical keyboard for whatever reason I would suggest getting a SteelSeries 6gv2 or 7g. But again, if you aren't competitively playing SC2 or something at LANs regularly, you don't need it.

I was also going to post about how I always wanted an uber laptop, then after seeing my girlfriend get one I realised that I much prefer a powerful desktop and a simply decent laptop. I'm going to more than likely purchase an i3 core with a 5xxx range ATI Radeon or something for my personal laptop, with as tiny of a screen as I can find and hopefully a SSD as it's main storage. Then, I'll have an uber powerful desktop for gaming and rough rendering, since it is both upgradeable and actually comfortable to game on. Your laptop should emphasize portability and durability, with the hardware specifications coming as near second priority, while your desktop provides the power you need for whatever intensive applications or rendering you need.

Acceptable keyboards:
Model M - buckling spring, better than rubber dome for typing, but can be annoying (CLAK CLAK CLAK). Can be found at yard sales and thrift stores for under $5
Any sort of generic OEM keyboard - cheap, effective. All rubber dome keyboards are virtually identical, some have volume control. Build quality is all the same though.
Backlit keyboards - a gimmick (that I bought into) generally not worth it. If you have it, cool, but it will decrease the life of the keyboard due to paint wearing off.
Scissor switch - Actually viable because of their low actuation. You don't have to push down very hard to get it to work, and they are more durable than traditional rubber dome. generally they are "slim" type motherboards, but can be difficult to clean.
Mechanical - the best, and generally ridiculously expensive. Read more here

I'm going to get a sidewinder x4 at some point in time because it has anti-blocking resistive technology which allow up to 27 keys to be reported at the same time. You can read up on "ghosting" and such on microsoft's sidewinder x4 website. Note the x6 does not have this, but both are gaming keyboards, backlit, scissor switch.

n-KRO is where you have a diode on each key (expensive) which allows for all keys to be reported. Otherwise, it uses a matrix which can lead to errors. For example, if you press wsde, nothing will be reported on most keyboards because the keyboard doesn't know what you actually pressed. A useless test you can do to illustrate this is hold down both shift keys and type "THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG"

Here's the dell I'm on:
HE QUIK BROWN FO JUPS OER HE LA DOG
This is based on the original model M, and most keyboards follow the same pattern, but thinks like macbooks are especially terrible at the test.

The key to making a good system is finding good deals at the right time. I made a pretty good sandy bridge build for $921 (including peripherals), but if you can re-use stuff, that can drop the price even more. If you drop sandy bridge for a phenom (not recommended) you can drop the price down to $700. Right as of this moment is a bad time to buy because newegg doesn't have any promos going on, and superbiiz only has a 10% off $100 coupon. That and bulldozer is coming out.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Apr 11 2011, 4:41 pm by rockz.

Yeah. My Sandy Bridge build for this was about 1100$ after monitor because I wanted to choose components he could keep for awhile and not have to upgrade. I probably went heavier on the GPU. I think the best idea is for him to wait until Bulldozer shows, if he can wait that is.

You can always wait until the next big thing. You'll never buy anything.

Yeah, I can most likely wait until then (not in any emergency need for a powerful desktop atm). The desktop just has to be built at some point before the end of August. I might delay the laptop purchase a bit as well until a better promotional offer shows up, but I got the general idea of what I'm looking for thanks to everyone who replied.

@rockz: I got "TE UIC RWN JUS VER TE LAY DG" holding down both shifts . Running http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16684226/KeyScan.exe and pressing my hand down on the keyboard gave me only one key. Yeah, looks I'd need an upgrade for my keyboard, something with n-key rollover would be nice but I'm not sure if I'd want to splurge for a mechanical keyboard. (I actually read the topic that you linked before, but noticed the massive pricing on most of them.)

I checked out the sidewinder keyboards and I honestly think one of those would do just fine for you. I personally like the X6 better than the X4, but either will do.

I'm on my home computer now so:

Total was $921 when I made it using a combo on superbiiz for a motherboard+i5 2500K for $335. You can get a 560 if you just add $60 or so, or keep spending money on a bigger and better GPU, but I'd stick with nVidia for now. The high end Fermis suck, but the mid range (*60-570) are quite good. They are most of the time faster than AMD's equivalent and have much better driver software.

IMO there are only a few good buys for keyboards:
Cheapo stuff
Generic "rosewill gaming keyboard" which has some keys (usually qweasdrf space etc...) with a diode attached for key rollover on just those keys, with matrix detection for the rest.
Sidewinder X4 (due to key rollover which isn't available on x6, even though the x6 is more "advanced"). As I said before I want one of these.
Any cheapo mechanical keyboard, probably with nKRO. There was a cherry mini for like $65, and a rosewill rebranded filco for just under $100, that occasionally goes on sale.

MSI has burned me three times, don't touch them. And yeah I went with a 6950. Very similar builds.