Shopping for a laptop

I'm in the market (or rather, my wife is in the market) for a laptop. It will be used mainly for Office-type applications, and the net. It will also be used for everything related to our digital camera. Per her instructions, there are to be NO games loaded onto this machine (I'm buiilding my own PC for that ). I have been checking the ads at Best Buy and Circuit City, and came across this one this week:

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Spe [...] on.do#tabs

Compared to some of the others that I've seen, it seems a pretty decent deal. I liked the 17" monitor, 2GB of memory, and 200GB HDD. What do you guys think?

On the other hand, I haven't been looking too long for laptops. Are there better places to look? I've heard that Dell's are problematic, so I've tended to stay away from them without any other justification than hearsay. Can anyone offer some tips on buying a laptop? Much appreciated.

Your needs are very basic so either the Turion X2 or Core2DUo CPUs will do fine. You don't need a graphics card so no worries there. 2gb of RAM is almost a must these days and a large HDD isn't a bad idea when photos and office things are involved.

Check out Dell's, HP's and Lenovo's websites. Many people swear by Lenovo (formerly IBM) laptops.

Lenovo is NOT IBM, they used to be but IBM sold their notebook line like 3 ago now. We were just talking about how the quality has gone down the drain big time. Best to continue to pass them over.

My wife has a Dell and uses it pretty much the way you're wife will and have had no problems. I think hers is something like a 1501 or 1502, 15'4". If she going to be taking it out, the 17" could be heavy and bulky, something to think about. Dell is always having specials. They all come with Vista now I think, not a Vista fan. Supposedly, Dell is reducing the crapware but who knows what that means but all machines come with it. If you can order a Windows disk, I'd do it and reinstall Windows as soon as you get it. Dell's online chat support isn't too bad. Agree, given what she's doing AMD X2 would be sufficient. Probably get 1GB and add another when you get the machine, Dell's RAM prices are high. Worth looking at