Upgradeable laptop

antemon

Distinguished
Jul 5, 2008
11
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18,560
This is my first time at contemplating at buying a laptop, so please bear with me. :sweat:

First up, I know one could make his own laptop by buying a barebones kit. So I assume it should be possible to buy a decent desktop replacement laptop and upgrading it so that it can handle games.



Can you all recommend a brand/model?


I was thinking of the Acer EX400, but it seems you can't replace the GPU with that particular laptop.


1_What is your budget?

700-800 USD for the laptop, upgrade... i dunno...



2_What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?

14" or 15", larger would be fine if the budget allows it.



3_What screen resolution do you want?

I really don't know...

I'm at 1280*1024 right now and it's a little too small for my taste. two or three notch above 1024*786 I guess...



4_Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?

desktop replacement with gaming in mind later on if it's possible



5_How much battery life do you need?

doesn't really matter.



6_Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?

Yes. Anything within the past year after the upgrade, low-medium settings.

For the base laptop, I guess directx9 online games...



7_What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo / Video editing, surfing the web, playing music, watching movies, Etc.)

music, movies, surfing. Unlikely and you can leave it out of the equation really, but I may want to convert video formats



8_How much storage (H.D.D Capacity) do you need?

Doesn't really matter... at least 120GB?



9_If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post the links to them.

Since I'm from the Philippines, pricing would be difficult. I guess 40,000 PhP (800USD) is the limit for my base laptop, cheaper if possible.

Ah here's an example: the aspire one costs like 350USD on newegg. In local stores it's around 470USD when converted.





http://www.pccorner.com.ph/controller.forward?action=mobilecorner - please disregard the comments made by the webguy/marketingguy. I believe he's either an idiot or thinks everyone that's browsing the site is one. The place has more stuff for sale though than the following link.



http://www.villman.com/Category/Notebook-PCs - not much, but I think they have decent deals and promos. Not so sure on regular items.



http://www.octagon.weblanpro.org/ - I just thought of this. Skimming, it looks like they have the largest collection of laptops. website is ugly and unintuitive though.


if need be, maybe I can probably get a friend in the US or Canada to purchase one for me.


10_How long do you want to keep your laptop?

5 years? This is gonna double as a desktop replacement so I think that's underestimating it.



11_If you would like to mention some other things about purchasing your ideal laptop, post them.

I'd prefer if the base laptop had an Nvidia card since I dabble in Linux, and people say that Nvidia supports Linux drivers better than ATI.

If the laptop has a model that has Linux on it, I'd also prefer that. Matter of price, really.





12_Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.

As I said, this is my first time in purchasing a laptop.




13_What country do you live in?

Philippines, Asia