Mobile Buyers' Guide, December 2009
by Jarred Walton on December 6, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Lots of Options
There are so many options out there that even with 9000+ words, I feel like I've glossed over many areas. You can see that our focus has tended towards laptops we've had hands-on time with, but we looked at pricing from online vendors like Newegg, Buy.com, and others to try and flesh things out. Even with those efforts, we have undoubtedly missed some great laptops. What we've tried to do is to give you a good idea of the features and performance you can expect with a variety of components.
Grab an Atom netbook and you'll get Atom performance and battery life; the same goes for CULV designs, but there's a huge difference in pricing based on aesthetics and how thin a particular model happens to be. For the higher end options, most users are looking for either better GPUs or better CPUs, or a good SSD. SSDs can be added to pretty much anything with a noticeable boost to performance when you launch applications, which is nice, but even the fastest SSD won't help you improve frame rates on a slow GPU, and it won't magically cause an Atom CPU to crunch numbers faster.
Simply put, there are a ton of laptop options. We've mentioned Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Gateway, Lenovo, and a few other brands where they looked interesting. Still, we have certainly missed some potentially interesting laptops. Take a quick look at the Lenovo ThinkPads and you'll see how many models there are.
Sony has a lot of options as well, with prices that are typically higher than the competition. We mentioned the one VAIO as being the sole high contrast LCD we could find at local retail stores, but that doesn't mean all VAIO laptops have good LCDs – most were just as bad as the other laptops we looked at. Sony also has some odd limitations with how you configure your laptop, like allowing different colors only if you upgrade the CPU and/or GPU on some models. Weird. Still, Sony has some laptops that come very close to the level of Apple design, if that's your thing.
We could spend another couple weeks looking at all the interesting laptops from various vendors, and that's all without running a single benchmark. It you've ever shopped for laptops and felt overwhelmed, we feel your pain. Whether you simply want long battery life or you're after the ultimate in portable performance, we hope we've given you some ideas of what to look for with this Mobile Buyers' Guide.
Open Mic Night
We know we talked about reviews of several laptops in the past month, and those are still coming, but we wanted to detour for a bit to look at the big picture of what's available and how much it will typically cost. With the stage set, we're going to shut up and let you do the talking. Do you have a favorite laptop? Sound off in the comments and let us know. The mic is now yours, so let us hear your input.
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notanakin - Monday, December 7, 2009 - link
Sorry - here's the link: http://pzportal.net/main/2009/11/notebooks-price-l...">http://pzportal.net/main/2009/11/notebooks-price-l...Roland00 - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I seconded this, I just bought the dual core su2300 model, and have no complaints so far about it besides the horrible viewing vertical angles due to the tn panel and glossy.I am very surprised on how fast the processor is for normal every day tasks. It isn't my overclocked I7 but for most everyday tasks you wouldn't care about the difference. This is what my opinon the netbook experience was supposed to be, save the atoms for things such as cell phones, gps, blu ray players etc.
ImSpartacus - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I tried my best to goad my parents into getting my little sister a 1410 for her first laptop back when the SU2300 model was $399 (free shipping) on Newegg. They didn't want to buy it early.Then it ballooned to $409 (no free shipping) and they felt cheated.
They ended up getting a bare-bones SL410 for it's ruggedness.
AgeOfPanic - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
It ballooned by 10 dollars? 10 Dollars is not ballooning, it's 10 dollars.bennyg - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
Shipping.Just to compound your useless comment with another.
GoodRevrnd - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I have much interest in the 1410 and am thinking it might be a good replacement laptop for my g/f. It is ridiculous what you get in this thing considering what I paid for my Vaio Z a year ago (granted the screen on it is to die for).KikassAssassin - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
I'm curious about your statement that "(it takes about three seconds to turn off the discrete GPU and 15 seconds to turn it back on)" on the UL80Vt, because that hasn't been my experience at all. My UL80Vt takes the same amount of time to switch from the Intel to the nVidia GPU as it does to switch from the nVidia to the Intel GPU: About three to four seconds, both ways.The only time I've had it take longer is if I have a 3D game running when I try to switch graphics modes, in which case it forces me to close the game before it'll switch.
JarredWalton - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
Well, I can't even verify the time right now, since after updating the Intel and NVIDIA drivers I can't get the Hybrid GPU feature to work. Need to fix that and then I'll confirm, but I know that it took significantly longer to enable G210M at least the few times where I paid attention. I'll confirm when I get the driver situation sorted out. :)feelingshorter - Sunday, December 6, 2009 - link
Try doing the test with all programs closed since i suspect that your running the flash 10.1 with GPU support, or even programs like the Zune software uses GPU acceleration. These little things might affect it. Maybe even having Win7 Aero on/off might make a difference. Looking forward to the full review of UL80Vt.Now back to studying exams at 4:10 AM...