Cheap notebooks

[2soon2tell]

Greetings,

Has anyone seen any great deals on notebook computers? I've been checking the Dell outlet site for refurbished computers as well as their new notebooks. In many cases it seems like it's cheaper to buy new.

Thanks,

2soon

 

[NotSoonEnough]

With CompUSA going out of business there may be some deals after Christmas, when I checked my local store this past weekend they were only advertising a 20% "store wide" markdown.

CompUSA closes shop | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

 

[REWahoo]

Be very wary of the "bargains" you might find at CompUSA and be sure to compare the bottom line prices. In many cases a third party liquidation company is hired to manage the merchandise sell off. Marking up prices before discounting is a common tactic, so be cautious.

 

[W2R]

I got a pretty good deal on my new Toshiba notebook a few months ago at Office Depot. The deals in the store, and the deals they offer on their website, are different - - so you need to check both.

They also seem to change their sale items frequently. I just happened to walk in when they had what I wanted on sale for around $450-$500 (if my memory is correct) after rebates. They send their rebates quite promptly. They wouldn't give me an additional rebate offered on their website at the time, though.

 

[samclem]

I, too, found the best prices through the Sunday sale inserts. Check OD, Best Buy, Staples, etc. Be prepared for the PITA of filling out the rebate forms, but there are bargains to be had every week.

 

[MikeD]

Be prepared for the PITA of filling out the rebate forms, but there are bargains to be had every week.

I bought an HP laptop about 6 months ago that came with a "free" printer. I had to pay for the printer and fill out a rebate to get the money back. They screwed up the rebate (everyone's, not just mine) and I had to fax my rebate form and all supporting docs (there were quite a few) to HP's rebate center. I then got the original rebate check plus another one a few days later for the faxed rebate! I will refund their money as soon as they ask for it back (after 12 - 16 weeks for processing the request).

Mike D.

 

[Moemg]

I also bought a Toshiba notebook at Office Depot .I bought it online so I got both of the rebates plus they accidently sent me the wrong model and they gave me $50.00 for my trouble after much talking to customer service.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I will refund their money as soon as they ask for it back (after 12 - 16 weeks for processing the request).

Make sure you lose the first rebate return request, and ask them to fax you a filled out form (which is no longer available on your web site and requires a written request for you to send it out), the submitters UPC code (which they'll need to have tattooed on if they dont have one), and the original receipt you sent them.

Two of my last four laptops were staples/office depot sunday clearance specials but they were "last years model", not a current product. One of the other two was a dell "on sale special" and the last was a dell outlet machine.

You wont get anything good out of the outlet without setting up a proxy script.

You may not get one of those office supply store clearance specials without standing in front of the store 20 minutes before they open.

What was it that you were looking for size and capability wise, and what were you going to use it for, and how long were you expecting to own it.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

If you go through fatwallet and register for a fatcash account, you can get a dell 15" machine well loaded for $549 and a 14" with a big battery for $599, plus 1.5-3% back in fatcash, plus 1-1.25% back on your credit card rebate.

I occasionally see a decent laptop for $499 or less, but not often, they're hard to get, and frequently they're a piece of crap.

Dell Small Business coupons and cash back

 

[2soon2tell]

Thanks for all of your repsonses.

CFB

I will use it mostly for web surfing around the house with occassional travel. I am looking for a 14" or 15" screen with decent resolution and relatively light weight and a price of not over $600.

Thanks,
2soon

 

[Martha]

2soon, both Wahoo and I recently bought Dell Vostros from Dell Small Business on bunny's recommendation. Cost was just under $600. Seems functional, speedy enough, and sturdy, but not super light weight and is a bit bulky as compared to my Thinkpad.

 

[RunningBum]

We're buying a desktop for our parents and Office Depot has some good specials (from the Sunday paper flyer) on those too. So Office Depot seems to be a good source these days.

 

[REWahoo]

What Martha said. I got my Vostro 1000 from the Dell Outlet website ('previously ordered new') and paid under $520 delivered. Works great for what you say you'll be doing with it.

 

[Khan]

Disclaimer: I have no experience with this, but it caught my eye:

Green doesn't have to make you Blue!

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

This might do
The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

14", about 5lbs, $599. Current processor and system board, plenty of memory and disk, good feature set. 9 cell battery should give you about 5-5.5 hours of run-time unplugged.

Still be a good machine 2 years from now and have a decent resale value 2-3 years from now. You'll be able to get 250-300 for it then if you want something new.

The 1400 is about 1.5lbs lighter than the 1000/1500 that martha/rewahoo have. Its still a bit heavy for what it is, but it does have a pretty stiff/strong chassis with no flex and will take some travel.

 

[donheff]

I sent $400 to Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child. I get one laptop and one goes to a third world kid. I will tell you how mine works when it arrives. With its green keyboard, if nothing else it will probably be a conversation starter at Starbucks.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Or how about the same machine with only 1GB of ram for $549?
The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

 

[MikeD]

Or how about the same machine with only 1GB of ram for $549?
The Dell Online Store: Build Your System

Be careful about the RAM req's if you are going to run Vista which apparently is much happier with 2 gigs.

OK - now is the time for all the MS bashers to chime in.

Mike D.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

I've run vista with both 1 and 2gb. I see that in the 2gb config it happily laps up about 1.5gb. I'm not seeing any visible performance benefits after the upgrade to be honest. Perhaps if I was using microsoft office or multitasking 5-6 apps at once, maybe when I get around to doing some video format conversions for some of the brazillion AVI movies of Gabe.

However, I dont recommend getting a machine with vista. I'd strongly recommend getting XP instead. There are some minor advantages to vista and in a year or two it might get a recommendation out of me. Suffice it to say that I curse at it daily and its come close to getting changed out for XP on several occasions. I see that in some benchmarks that XP with the new service pack 3 can be up to 30% faster than vista.

XP runs good in 1GB. Dell, IBM and a few other companies still offer XP as an option. Most of the retail units however come with vista basic or vista premium. If forced to a vista decision, get premium, not basic. Basic has nothing of interest in it.

 

[W2R]

I am happy with Vista, but then I'm odd like that. New software is such fun to explore! I love an adventure! It's neat to see what the developers added and all the little twists and quirks.

One thing I love about Vista is the thumbnail screenshots you get when passing the mouse pointer over minimized programs on the toolbar at the bottom. That way you know which one to click on (if you have 3 MSIE windows going, for example). How cool is that? VERY...

Caveat: I am the only person on the face of the universe that likes Vista. Bear that in mind! Some programs don't run with it but I have had no problems with commercial software not running under Vista, at all. Some freeware didn't run, but for me that was no biggie.

I have 1 Gb RAM and haven't had any problems, but I usually just surf the net with Excel open and maybe PaintShopPro, Word, or computer solitaire or something. Everything that I care to run seems to be quite reasonably fast when multitasking between these programs simultaneously. I like computer games, but not the real-time 3D graphic games that are so demanding on the system - - so they might be slowed down.

When I let Norton do a scan, it does slow things down. I don't remember if that was true in XP or not. Memory is cheap. Get 2 Gb.

 

[samclem]

However, I dont recommend getting a machine with vista. I'd strongly recommend getting XP instead. There are some minor advantages to vista and in a year or two it might get a recommendation out of me.

DW's desktop needs to be upgraded. Is there some way to buy a "Sunday Newspaper" machine (eMachine. etc with 2GB RAM, 300GB+ HD, etc) and get XP through some other (legal) means at a reasonable price and load it on? This could have several advantages:
- I'd have XP on actual disks, which (in my experience) is a good thing
- She'd have a system that runs her software without glitches and is faster than Vista
- Vista --if possible, keep the OEM version on a partitioned portion of the HD--when/if we need it, it would be there and we could get all the patches.

Dang, Vista s on the market and the newest thing. Are there no cut-rate copies of XP available somewhere?

Suggestions welcome.

 

[OAG]

BTW Reference Vista versus XP. I actually have no way to compare Vista to XP however it has been a week since I downloaded (344 MB) and installed Windows XP SP3 RC1 and I am happy to say it runs just like prior to SP3 RC1. I have XP Pro and I am also running Firefox, Thunderbird, Office 2002 Pro, and the usual FREE Anti-whatever (Avast, Spyware Blaster, SpyBot S&D and Adaware). BTW I downloaded it from MajorGeeks.com. I did not intend to hi-jack the thread.

 

[pedorrero]

Not to everybody's taste, but here's what I did recently: I fished on Ebay for an old laptop (win98 vintage) + a cheap wireless card. For about $110, I now have a working (!) old Toshiba notebook with a whopping 64 Meg of RAM, everything works well, good battery, sometimes powers off if you move it while in "suspend",but otherwise ok. My main use for a notebook is to use at wi-fi hotspots such as the library, cafe, etc. Isn't it slow? Yes, sometimes, but works welll as a web browser. All for 1/4 or 1/5 the cost of a new one. Sometimes this frugality gene works well. Sehr gut.

 

[cute fuzzy bunny]

Suggestions welcome.

Unfortunately you have to wait for a deal on an OEM copy of XP, which on occasion appears for ~75-80, usually bundled with some crappy PCI card or a mouse or something. What I'd do is get a machine with XP on it and in a year or two or three when I wanted vista, buy a vista premium OEM license for $75.

Microsoft and its distributors are still well aware of the viability of XP and its value. In 3 years you might get a cheaper copy.

Problem with an OEM copy is you can install it on one machine and when that machine croaks or becomes obsolete, you cant transfer the license to a new machine. Its "bonded" to that original system and the MS droids will only let you activate it if you explain that you've changed a system board or something that triggered the activation requirement.

OEM Vista installs (what you get in the bargain sunday paper ad systems) usually come with an OEM install disk, you can buy one from the maker for ~$20, or you can make your own by burning a 'recovery disk' from some part of the crapware the manufacturer installs.

Mine for example allows for burning any number of recovery disks from a hidden recovery partition on the drive, or recovery directly from that partition via a key combination through the BIOS on boot time.

My HP machine on the other hand popped up on first boot and demanded that I make a set of recovery disks, then told me I wasnt allowed to make a second set and deleted its recovery partition.

So you COULD burn a set of vista OEM recovery disks, get an OEM version of XP when a sale item comes around (watch Fatwallet and put in a 'automated email reminder' if one comes up), install that and later "upgrade" to vista using the recovery disks.

I havent been as fortunate as W2R. Many of my XP apps that I bought over the years dont run on vista. In some cases I had to wait for a vista version and got that for free; in others I was expected to pay for a vista upgrade version; in others the manufacturer simply had no interest in making a vista version for the foreseeable future.

Ironically, the first app I installed once I had the system configured the way I liked and my data loaded was my backup/restore app (acronis trueimage). Turns out it wasnt vista compatible and didnt work. When I uninstalled it, vista rebooted and told me that it was broken and couldnt boot, but it'd fix itself. It then reported that there were no problems and it'd reboot, then that it was broken and couldnt boot, but it'd fix itself. After 5 iterations of that I quit.

When the manufacturer, who will remain nameless because it was Acer, didnt return my emails (they dont offer a telephone number for tech support, although I later found one and boy, were they sorry...) for several days and the recovery system didnt work and of course I hadnt made the recovery disks yet, I reinstalled vista from an "upgrade now!!!" disk that microsoft mistakenly put in the box with the laptop hoping I'd upgrade to vista "ultimate". I called MS and had them look up my OEM key that I'd already activated and reactivate this "retail" version for me. Not a lot of fun.

Later the system became so unstable that I decided to install XP, but since I decided I might want to run vista someday, I unhid the recovery partition, fixed it and broke the encryption on it, and was able to make a vista recovery disk. Vista upon booting again and seeing the recovery partition, hosed my primary partition and all my data...which fortunately I had a copy of.

Since restoring from the recovery disks I made, vista has sort of been okay. The video driver "blinks" now and then and thats allegedly a bug they're still figuring out; my touchpad periodically 'loses' its ability to do side scrolling; vista periodically decides to take 2-5 minutes to wake the laptop from a suspend...I think you're getting that its a bunch of little BS things that amount to growing pains, iffy drivers and application issues. Unfortunately, the driver and app people decided to wait until a few million people had vista before they'd rewrite their code.

 

[W2R]

Since restoring from the recovery disks I made, vista has sort of been okay. The video driver "blinks" now and then and thats allegedly a bug they're still figuring out; my touchpad periodically 'loses' its ability to do side scrolling; vista periodically decides to take 2-5 minutes to wake the laptop from a suspend...I think you're getting that its a bunch of little BS things that amount to growing pains, iffy drivers and application issues. Unfortunately, the driver and app people decided to wait until a few million people had vista before they'd rewrite their code.

Wow! No wonder you don't like it. I have not had all of those problems with Vista, especially 2-5 minutes to wake the laptop from a suspend, which I would HATE. No touchpad problems, though as in the past I use a tiny notebook mouse. OK, I admit it's blinked a couple of times, but I like having cool software to play with many, many hours a week even if it does blink once for less than a second in a week or two.

My Toshiba laptop came with a vista recover/restore disk in the box. Within 30 minutes of getting it and the computer out of the box I found I had screwed up my password, and couldn't get back into the computer (Duh!). So, all I could do was use the disk and reinstall everything on the hard drive. Piece o' cake, and I was off and running.