IBM or Toshiba. Toshiba is what the Mine's use. From experience a second hand one of either of these brands should be ok.
RE: Money (or there lack of), I’d suggest looking at a refurbished model. They’re cheap and they come with a warranty. Ask Jeff (relatively_normal)- he's bought stuff like that before.
I wouldnt buy another IBM. Mine died in the arse after 14 months. I went with a Sony Vaio this time. Not sure what your price range was, but this was just under $2k. So far, i am happy.
I was asking around the same thing for myself only a few days ago - a friend recommended Dell (I was skeptical about the incendiary device potential and Dell in general) but seems that they're among the cheapest - seems like there's one for $800.
But I'll probably get a VAIO as I want to do a few more things than just type assignments and surf the net. (Though I should be doing more of the former).
But please blog about what you find - if there's some good deals out there I'd be curious as to what you hunt down.
you can run win under virualisation using parallels or vmware or on bare hardware using bootcamp.
Now, if you want to get trixy, you can set 'em up to triple boot - macos, linux/bsd, win as well.
Have to say that I find the macbook as close as you'll get to a perfect machine - it's small and easy to carry, has a very nice keyboard, these days quite decent battery life, can run OS X as well as other OSs, and use commodity ram and hard drives - meaning they're no more expensive to upgrade than you're average laptop. My only gripes with them are - I can't fit 4G in them, and i think that there are some limitations on the graphics front due to the integrated video.
years ago i got a superceded top of the line compaq really cheap and paid a bit more to extend the warranty by 3 years or so. alas this is a useless story badly told cos all i remember was that the place was in st leonards but i cannae remember the name
if you are looking at mac then check out www.compnow.com i think it is and they have a list of demo shit cheap
I bought it because it was cheap, upgradable (2 RAM chips means I can but 2 Gig of RAM in there), came with every type of port I could ever hope for, etc. I only really use it for teh internets, work stuff, watching DVDs and editing photographs and it's fine for that. Had it for over 2 years now.
Oh and you could check out some of the places that offer rental plans like radio rentals. Might be able to get something reliable and pay it off slowly.
I've heard ASUS are good for the features for money thing, and are one of the brands I was going to spend a bit of time investigating - but never heard about what they're like on reliability and warranty...
yeah... I dunno - I do like the idea of macs, but I don't know anythng about them - which makes it hard for me to help her if anything ever goes strange with it.
A pc, I can setup once, strip out all the shit, and have running well in a few hours. then ghost the HDD, and give here a reinstall disk. I kinda like that idea. ;-)
Can understand that... Well, kinda... I know how much trouble I'd be in if I ever had to help support win machines - they're pretty much dark voodoo to me because I use them so rarely. (Spot the person who's spent the last 10+ years as a unix sysadmin + middleware/application integration type :-) - though these days I am forced to use - get this - a java based development environment on a win VM because the vendor kinda forgot that perhaps developers of a system that runs on pretty much any platform might like to use the development environment on pretty much any platform!)
Having said that, I've tended to find that modern macs running modern OS X pretty much just keep running - few people bother targetting them for worms/viruses/malware etc - one of the few advantages of running a niche OS I guess.
But generally speaking I'd always feel a little dubious about buying a 2nd hand machine - even one with warranty left to run... especially with laptops, you never really can tell exactly what it has been subjected to.
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Toshiba is what the Mine's use.
From experience a second hand one of either of these brands should be ok.
RE: Money (or there lack of), I’d suggest looking at a refurbished model. They’re cheap and they come with a warranty.
Ask Jeff (relatively_normal)- he's bought stuff like that before.
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:-)
she doesn't have that much $$
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But I'll probably get a VAIO as I want to do a few more things than just type assignments and surf the net. (Though I should be doing more of the former).
But please blog about what you find - if there's some good deals out there I'd be curious as to what you hunt down.
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they start from $1,099.
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you can run win under virualisation using parallels or vmware or on bare hardware using bootcamp.
Now, if you want to get trixy, you can set 'em up to triple boot - macos, linux/bsd, win as well.
Have to say that I find the macbook as close as you'll get to a perfect machine - it's small and easy to carry, has a very nice keyboard, these days quite decent battery life, can run OS X as well as other OSs, and use commodity ram and hard drives - meaning they're no more expensive to upgrade than you're average laptop. My only gripes with them are - I can't fit 4G in them, and i think that there are some limitations on the graphics front due to the integrated video.
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if you are looking at mac then check out www.compnow.com i think it is and they have a list of demo shit cheap
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I bought it because it was cheap, upgradable (2 RAM chips means I can but 2 Gig of RAM in there), came with every type of port I could ever hope for, etc.
I only really use it for teh internets, work stuff, watching DVDs and editing photographs and it's fine for that. Had it for over 2 years now.
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Probably best to spend it upfront while it's there to be spent...
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hmmm....
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ok - so it isn't a pc, but it does run ms office et. al. quite happily, and I've watched more than a few DVDs on it.
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A pc, I can setup once, strip out all the shit, and have running well in a few hours. then ghost the HDD, and give here a reinstall disk. I kinda like that idea.
;-)
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Having said that, I've tended to find that modern macs running modern OS X pretty much just keep running - few people bother targetting them for worms/viruses/malware etc - one of the few advantages of running a niche OS I guess.
But generally speaking I'd always feel a little dubious about buying a 2nd hand machine - even one with warranty left to run... especially with laptops, you never really can tell exactly what it has been subjected to.
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