Having 3 laptops beside me, here goes:

Acer (wife's): 1.5ghz 512mb ram, 60gb HD. Pretty basic. Right mouse button stopped working, and the left mouse thinks it's a right click. Service and support was a nightmare. Still doesn't work right. At a $399 black friday deal last year, I should have spent more.

Gateway (mine) 1.6ghz core2duo, 1gb ram, 120gb hd, xp media center. Absolutely love it. Great layout, battery life, sturdy construction. Was $799 at Best Buy.

Dell (work) 2.1ghz, 1gb ram, xp pro. It's HEAVY! Touchpad scrollers suck. It's decent, but for being over $1k, it's not worth it. It's an AutoCAD *****, and it struggles to run it smoothly.

I was going to build my own, but that's not really an option for a laptop. Best Buy (normally I'd advise against) had the best price on the laptop I bought, and with identical specs, my Gateway was $280 cheaper than a Dell.

 

AAHHH...Just came back from Best buy, Costco, and Comp usa. Now my head hurts. I really don't like shopping for something I have no clue in. I do appreciate all the feedback from yall.

 

If you can count past 2 you can use a mac, much better than a PC, much more user friendly.......No blue screen of death like those Windows.....

 

^^Amen.
I don't miss those days!

 

seriously im telling u i was a pc user my entire life up till 8 months ago... i will NEVER EVER go back to pc... u should go into an apple store and look at a mac. I guarentee its worth it.. plus no viruses =)

 

I have been with PC's most of my life. The thing about mac..They are simply better. The so call learning curve is PC's fault..well mainly Microsoft. They get everyone used to making things difficult. When you buy a Mac you have to think simple. It does it all for you. No driver downloads. Re-booting or all that crap! I have replaced all my PC's and will never buy PC again. TRUST me. Ask anybody who has both. They will tell you buy a Mac. Don't worry about buying another one for at-least 3 years. Plus the ad-ware and viruses are less of a problem. Not waiting for 3 days for my 2.GHZ 1-Gig Ram P4 PC to load is worth the price of a mac,,,,

 

just reformat your comp? why buy a new one if all you got was a virus?

 

i just recently bought a Gateway.. 1.83ghz, 1gig memory, 160gig hd, core 2 duo processor, and 15.4inch ultrabrite widescreen for only 980 with taxes. i thought it was really cheap for what i was getting. i highly recommend it.

also, if you can, stay away from dell and toshiba.. dell as a company and computer overall sucks, and toshiba ALWAYS has problems with there power supplies and pins.

i recommend, HP, Gateway, Sony, or IBM(Lenovo)

 

x2

Ben just showed me this and I started laughing because you are buying a whole new computer because of a virus.

Best Case:
-You run Ad-Aware (free) or buy a new virus scan tool and remove the virus.
Cost: $0-$50

Worst Case:
Your HD is FUBAR and you don't want to mess with digging through your massive HD filled with **** so you go out and buy a new hard drive. You should have operating system disks with the info packet from when you bought your computer. Buy a new hard drive, follow the directions, and install windows (or Linux if you are broke).
Cost: $20-$200 depending on the size of the hard drive

Both options are a helluva lot cheaper than dishing out $1,000+ on a new computer. Take the money you save and upgrade the processor, motherboard, RAM, etc.

 

All this thing does now is...starts up like nothings wrong, then all these error screens come up after the windows start screen and then it reboots itself. I let it do this to see how long it would continue to do this process. Well after 9 hours of this, I figured there was no hope for it.

Whats funny is I'm now using the computer (six years old) that we replaced with the now messed up one (1 year old). Besides running super slow...i t seems to be running just fine and the problems we had before with this one is not happening now. Weird! It's like Hey I'm getting a second chance I better not mess this up!

 

The more little icons you have on your task bar (lower rigt) the slower your computer starting up.

 

well boot it from the windows disk and reformat it. I reformat my computer every 2-3 months just in case there is anything on it. get a external hard drive and back everything up. then reformat it. With a PC you'll notice a huge difference if you do it semi often.