ultpaladin wrote:
Hey everybody,
I'm tight on funds right now but I wanted to get a new laptop and printer and I saw this deal at Walmart:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Student-Home- ... r/10966053I know this stuff is a step behind the best stuff but I need to save some money. I'm trying to pick out the right balance of processor speed and memory. Choosing the best processor is a little more complicated than it used to be. Also if there are other features anyone thinks I should put precedence on, please let me know. I've kind of become reconciled to a 250 gb hard drive to save some money so that is probably the least important thing. I really don't want to cross $500. I would really like to hear the advice of some members here since most of you here are probably more computer savvy than me.
I've had good luck with refurbs, and I rather like this little number here...
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... -R&cat=NBBI would narrow to a few target models then shop Amazon, Tiger Direct, Computer Geeks, and Newegg. Believe it or not, the same exact models get milked up on eBay because people get into a frenzy of trying to win there and don't do thorough searches and spend enough time waiting for a good deal to come along. Also, I once found a really good deal at Newegg, then one of the other kids wanted the exact model. The special was expired, but Newegg still had some in inventory. I was able to talk them into the lower price.
Once, I found a good unit at half price, but it came with a rather small HDD. For less than $100 I bought an HDD that tripled the capacity, snapped a backup of the load on the installed HDD, burned it over to the new HDD, swapped them out, and voila! I had a laptop with 1/3 TB of storage that still came in more than $200 below retail. Memory is also cheap.
If I were in your position, I would be patient for a big sale on units that fit into my general target group, preferably combined with the extra incentives of free shipping and no sales taxes. This means that in my experience, I tend to save a lot of money shopping online. Agreeing with TF, I would also recommend the best current AMD chips (i. e. fully loaded Athlon series), but I'm also getting pretty good service with Intel's Core2 Duo.
If I were to single out the two greatest factors in finding an amazing PC or Notebook bargain, I would number them (1) exhaustive
searching and (2)
patience. Good luck!