Looking for advice on a Laptop Purchase

Please Don't Thread Crap, or make posts that provide nothing to the thread.

My mother is a teacher and she bought a Dell XPS Notebook about a year ago for school, but I basically took that over so now she wants to get a notebook just for school. She wants it to be real light, thin, (doesnt matter if it even has a dvd or cd drive) doesn't want the screen to be tiny, has to have great battery life and be fast. And the final part is she wants to get it from Best Buy because she wants to get it asap. Thanks in advance guys i'm terrible with computers.

Since you did not give a price range, I suggest a Macbook Air.

well im not positive about laptops, but i would deff say go with more then 2 GB ram. Since most laptops have vista anything less then 2 GB RAM does not suffice.

Maybe a Macbook? They are very light.

[quotebdd589b5e4="referralman"]well im not positive about laptops, but i would deff say go with more then 2 GB ram. Since most laptops have vista anything less then 2 GB RAM does not suffice.[/quotebdd589b5e4]
If you get a PC, I would recommend you install XP because of the performance.
Sure Vista looks nicer, but I'm always a fan of putting performance over looks.
Unless of course it's a mac, in which case it's a win win situation because you get both performance and looks. The only downside is that your pocket will be empty then.

[quote0c6adb540c="samz465"]If you get a PC, I would recommend you install XP because of the performance.
Sure Vista looks nicer, but I'm always a fan of putting performance over looks.[/quote0c6adb540c]
A common but mostly untrue misconception, at least with a modern, beefy (CPU+RAM) PC, on which a patched up and tweaked Vista is actually faster than XP for most desktop-type work. Vista has much improved memory management and a network stack rewritten and optimized from the ground up. It was quite flaky in its early days, but a year later most glaring issues have been fixed. SP1 is due out to the masses next month and makes things even better.

You just need a C2D or better CPU with 2GB RAM minimum -- 3+GB is recommended. Aero performs fine even with current-gen embedded Intel video. I gave my daughter my previous laptop with a 1.6Ghz C2D and 2GB RAM, it runs Vista just fine. My Sony VAIO with T7700 (2.4Ghz C2D) and 4GB RAM screams with Vista, as of course does my quad-core desktop.

There's still around a 10% gaming performance hit with Vista, but I don't buy a laptop to game with (although I do have a couple on mine for when I'm stuck away from home and bored).

[quote51444777ce="dmorris68"][quote51444777ce="samz465"]If you get a PC, I would recommend you install XP because of the performance.
Sure Vista looks nicer, but I'm always a fan of putting performance over looks.[/quote51444777ce]
A common but mostly untrue misconception, at least with a modern, beefy (CPU+RAM) PC, on which a patched up and tweaked Vista is actually faster than XP for most desktop-type work. Vista has much improved memory management and a network stack rewritten and optimized from the ground up. It was quite flaky in its early days, but a year later most glaring issues have been fixed. SP1 is due out to the masses next month and makes things even better.

You just need a C2D or better CPU with 2GB RAM minimum -- 3+GB is recommended. Aero performs fine even with current-gen embedded Intel video. I gave my daughter my previous laptop with a 1.6Ghz C2D and 2GB RAM, it runs Vista just fine. My Sony VAIO with T7700 (2.4Ghz C2D) and 4GB RAM screams with Vista, as of course does my quad-core desktop.

There's still around a 10% gaming performance hit with Vista, but I don't buy a laptop to game with (although I do have a couple on mine for when I'm stuck away from home and bored).[/quote51444777ce]
Go away Dmorris...you know too much.

[quote7bcf80abcf="Daggoth"]Since you did not give a price range, I suggest a Macbook Air.[/quote7bcf80abcf]

MBA are criticized for their LACK of performance. If anything tell her to grab a MacBook Pro, not Air.

[quote49a27e6203="dmorris68"][quote49a27e6203="samz465"]If you get a PC, I would recommend you install XP because of the performance.
Sure Vista looks nicer, but I'm always a fan of putting performance over looks.[/quote49a27e6203]
A common but mostly untrue misconception, at least with a modern, beefy (CPU+RAM) PC, on which a patched up and tweaked Vista is actually faster than XP for most desktop-type work. Vista has much improved memory management and a network stack rewritten and optimized from the ground up. It was quite flaky in its early days, but a year later most glaring issues have been fixed. SP1 is due out to the masses next month and makes things even better.
[/quote49a27e6203]

What are these tweaks you speak of? I still don't like the transfer speed (over network or between folders on the HD), it [b49a27e6203]seems [/b49a27e6203]as though it's much slower than XP.

Sorry for threadcrapping, what does your mom consider tiny? 13.3" widescreen? How big was the XPS notebook? 15.4, 17, 19 inches? If she wants a big screen and for it to be light, then I would suggest she compromises because the two do not go together and especially if you want performance/battery life on top of all that.

A Macbook is a good suggestion and this dell notebook looks pretty good.
Link[=http//www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8647967&productCategoryId=abcat0502004&type=product&tab=2&id=1195598895298#productdetail]Link

And these two HP(5.25 lb)[=http//www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8654048&productCategoryId=abcat0502004&type=product&tab=2&id=1195600207185#productdetail]HP(5.25 lb) and Sony(5.5lb) [=http//www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8674641&productCategoryId=abcat0502004&type=product&tab=2&id=1197075130949#productdetail]Sony(5.5lb) laptops are a little heavier but have bigger screens.

[quote9dce90323a="csurge"]What are these tweaks you speak of? I still don't like the transfer speed (over network or between folders on the HD), it [b9dce90323a]seems [/b9dce90323a]as though it's much slower than XP.[/quote9dce90323a]
The possible tweaks are numerous, there are lots of sites that discuss them. One that I personally find valuable is disabling UAC, but don't take that as a blanket recommendation. Depending on how the PC is used and the technical level of the user, it serves a purpose to help people not shoot themselves in the foot. But for us geeks, it gets in the way and causes all sorts of issues. However -- and this is crucial -- if you're going to dsiable UAC, do it immediately after the Vista install. Don't wait until you have a lot of apps installed, and likewise don't re-enable it after lots of apps are installed with it disabled. The filesystem virtualization that goes along with UAC will really screw up a lot of applications if it is enabled or disabled after they are installed.

Regarding file transfer slowdowns, I don't notice it. Granted, I upgraded all of my hardwired machines to gigabit about the same time I went fully Vista, so a subjective comparison wasn't really possible. But I do use my Vista notebook to copy stuff over wireless and I think I would have noticed it if it was significantly slower. However I am about to rebuild my wife's XP machine, and will try to remember to do some impromptu file transfer benchmarks between my Vista machines, her XP machine, and my file server.

Yeah canning UAC was the first thing I did when I first starting using Vista last summer. I did some registry hack that was supposed to reduce the wait time before a tooltip popped up to 1ms, but that's about as far as I went.