Laptops

What is your son going to with it? If not doing serious works then how about an iPad?

Hes on a course at the moment doing art& animation,

He says he needs a lap top

regards

if he has to use Windoze then a Sony would be my choice - if he is not hamstrung by Windoze then you may be able to get an Apple MacBook through Apple's educational discount scheme.

Can only nod in agreement with ROTFs advice. Would just add that as your son is a student then most software programs are heavily discounted. Check out SoftwareforStudents.

Thanks for the info lads

quote:

Originally posted by steviekoi:
Hi
I wonder if anyone can help, personally not knowing a thing about laptops my son has asked for a laptop for xmas. I have around £500 to spend can anyone advise on what model or spec i should be looking for?

Thanks in advance

It's nice to know you are intersted in your Son's education. keep up the good work! Toshiba do some very nice laptops and netbooks if he wants something more portable.

Toshiba NB-305 - around £330.

http://www.johnlewis.com/230987000/Product.aspx

Arr my eyes, my eyes!

just my two cents:
the make is less important.
some like sony's screens, some don't (i don't).
some like toshiba, some like dell etc.

Anyway, the make and model is not something we can decide.
If he wants to seriously work with graphics and animation, he will need a proper notebook (no netbook, both for performance and screen size).

Something he will have to decide on is the keyboard.
Having i found when buying notebooks for myself and helping others find the right one, the keyboard is key.
Sounds stupid, but each manufacturer has it's own layout and feel and unlike desktop computers the keyboard makes a big difference.

a) where are keys like arrow keys located
b) are there function keys located next to the arrow keys (i hate that)
c) will he want or need a keypad (a lot of 17" have it, only selected few 15" do). for me as a student a must have as I have to work with excel or matlab tables etc.
d) what does the touchpad feel like (even though many use mice)
e) does it have a touchpad or those horrible dell buttons

once you have decided which manufacturer has the right keyboard and touchpad you're choice will be limited to maybe 2-3 models and the decision will be pretty easy.

maybe some disagree, but for serious work, keyboard and touchpad (less so the touchpay) are key imho. performance-wise most notebooks will cut it for 80% of the users.

quote:

horrible dell

had to use one for three years - agree 100% - good thing about it was it fell to bits so it got replaced by my employer with a Fujitsu which was much better, but I still prefer the Sony of any laptop I've used - Apple range excepted of course and this which is still my favourite luggable

I think you need to find out exactly what he needs it for. If it's real serious graphics work some sort of Mac is probably going to be required. In the college where I work we use Macs for that sort of specialist stuff. The rest of our 2000 or so users work quite happily with PCs using Windows (what the feck is this windoze carry on all about? How old are we? 12? Time to grow up chaps.)

Most of our general purpose laptops are high quality non "name" stuff like Acer and Asus. We've found them to be very good value for money and very durable.

But it all depends what he needs it for.

quote:

If it's real serious graphics work some sort of Mac is probably going to be required.

I love Macs and own two, but it's perfectly possible to do real serious graphics work on a PC and lots of professionals do just that. And a new Macbook is way over steviekoi's budget.

Very likely that an art and animation student would like a Mac though - unless he wants to play games. PC games are much more plentiful and much cheaper.

steviekoi, I think you need to get your son to talk to his lecturers and find out what spec he needs for the software he needs to use. If you haven't already done this of course.

I wouldn't go with a Mac.

a) he will have difficulty switching between computers, and in europe, most people still use windows. at my university everything is windows or linux
b) his friends will most likely have windows
c) there are far more free programs for windows than there are for mac. this is a serious advantage. most really great tools are windows only, sometimes linux, hardly ever mac. unless you are willing to pay for them
d) mac lost it's advantages over windows pcs years ago. current windows laptops and desktops have long cought up with macs

Which university is that? I was a post doc in Information Systems at a UK university and almost everyone there preferred a Mac. I needed a Mac because a PC did not meet my requirements for serious research in distributed programming, a Linux machine was a cheaper alternative but a Mac gave me everything.

There is no shortage of free and or cheap and useful applications for the Mac

Checkout
Cnet nee Version Tracker

Its just not fair to say there is 'mor free stuff' for PC. The fact is most of it is utter shit.

You don't even need to establish what you want a mac for, everything is available from free through to paid for.
Anyone stating otherwise just does not have a clue, sorry.

Gary,

quote:

You don't even need to establish what you want a mac for, everything is available from free through to paid for.

The absolute exception to this is gaming. I wish it wasn't so as I'd rather have a Mac only household, but most of the games my sons play just aren't available for the Mac and when they are, they're far more expensive. Perhaps a top spec Mac Pro could run some of the others using bootcamp but the home built PC they use cost significantly more than £2k less and runs them on high graphics settings.

I recently went for the 27" iMac, and I love it!

But if I were buying a laptop, I would absolutely go with a Mac, and quite likely the MacBook or the MacBook Air. True, it's a little more than the stated budget, with an educational discount around £590, but you get what you pay for. And while it's certainly true that many art/animation/graphics pros use PCs, the greater majority use Macs of some form or another.

The argument that "there are far more free programs for windows than there are for mac" is deceptive ... it may be true in a theoretical sense, but, again, you get what you pay for; really well-developed software costs money, and its developers deserve to be paid.

The Mac OS is elegant, easier and much more intuitive than Windows, and a joy to use. I'd at least check out Apple's argument for using Mac vs. Windows ... it's advertising, yes, but that doesn't automatically mean it's not true:

Learn why you'll love a Mac

And, by the way, all current Macs can run Windows, too.

I'm with fred on this one - macs for me every time. Also, do some research into the course requirements in case a pc is going to be essential. If not -> Mac!

Peter

There are around 7,486 free programs for OS X managed through MacPorts alone - really free, not shareware. You can also use NeoOffice which is a clone of Open Office - think of like MS Office with the bugs left out. I agree there are things you can run on Windoze, but not a Mac such as ABC, Actifed, Ada, Agena. AGI-Plan, Ah, AI, AIDS, AIDS II .... Zaragosa, Zeppelin, Zero Bug, Zero Time, ZeroHunt, ZMist, ZMistfall, Zombie.Mistfall, Z0mbie, Zoda and Zohra.

You can easily run any Windoze program on a Mac using BootCamp though I've never found the need I can understand if there is a program (not one of the aforementioned, please) that you desperately need.

The Windows PC has not caught up with the Mac in terms of ease of use or underlying architecture. Apple stole a lead by junking the central architecture of the Mac and moving to a Unix kernel for OS X. This is why the Mac is incredibly stable. Steve Jobs pioneered this move with his NeXT adventure in the late 80s and the creation of OpenStep, which is at the heart of OS X.

The Mac is far far from perfect and the Unix/Linux operating systems are not as wonderful as some say; though Unix/Linux is where the Microsofties dream of being in terms of OS stability; they just won't say so in public. Anybody think Dynamic Link Libraries were a good idea?

Bring back TRIPOS TRIvial Portable Operating System and whatever happened to Dick Pick.

TRIPOS was written in "B" (BCPL to be precise) nowadays it is all "C" and "C++".

Still would recommend a Sony (for a Windows PC) or Mac (for one size fits all computing) to OP.

quote:

Originally posted by ROTF:
"B" (BCPL to be precise) nowadays it is all "C" and "C++".

This brings back fond memories. I used to work for a firm that outsourced some of its projects to a Cambridge-based company owned by a brother of Martin Richards (Cambridge Professor, BCPL inventor) and therefore met this person regularly. All of the software components written by that company were of course implemented in BCPL, great fun.

Fred, as far as I can see the education price for a Macbook is £729. How did you arrive at £590?

My partner has an ACER laptop running Windows 7 and despite being pretty cheap it seems robust and stable. The Dell she had before was terrible.

Just an opinion, but when someone asks for advice about laptops up to £500, isn't that what he should be given?

He was referring to the education price of a 2.4GHz/250GB MacBook in the US - $949 is £588.84 (at current quoted rate).

Thanks Peter. I suppose the whole PC/Mac choice in the US is different, given that Macs are much cheaper and the price differential is presumably less.

quote:

Originally posted by David Scott?:

Fred, as far as I can see the education price for a Macbook is £729. How did you arrive at £590?
...
Just an opinion, but when someone asks for advice about laptops up to £500, isn't that what he should be given?

Yes, as Peter said, low-end MacBook or MacBook Air education price is $949 US ... I could be wrong, but there's no reason I know of that you can't buy from the US online education store.

I agree, £229 more would be quite beyond the target budget, but for only £90 more, a Mac is well worth it.

quote:

for only £90 more, a Mac is well worth it.

And I agree with that - assuming games aren't a priority. I bet the US store wouldn't ship to Britain though, and if they did you'd have that expense to consider.