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General discussion

Please Help Me...

Feb 10, 2005 5:40PM PST

Hi, I'm buying a laptop for my church, but I have no idea where to start. We rent a building, so I need something portable. We had a desktop, but I think that all the moving around every week damaged it. I need it to have enough power to hold hundreds of songs and have the basic Word programs...Please tell me whether I should buy it online or at a store and how much space do i need on my hard drive and Ram...I'm clueless! Thank you, I would greatly appreciate it!

Vanessa

Discussion is locked

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Re:
Feb 10, 2005 8:47PM PST

Hello Vanessa,

Well, I'm far from being an expert, but the uses you've described are really basic, so almost any laptop as far as i know should be enough. I'd go for a light weight computer, 40 or 60GB of hardrive are more than enough, Processor could be very basic and 512MB of RAM are also sufficient. Further a CD-RW/DVD-ROM could come up handy.

About buying, with my experience shopping online is mostly much cheaper and my service experience is also positive, but i live in Europe, so about that you'd better get some advice from someone in the US.

Good luck, Boaz

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What sort of budget do you have
Feb 11, 2005 11:30AM PST

This is very important, of course. I do some volunteer work for our church school in the computer lab and am aware of how tight this can be. I agree with the other response that any newer laptop will probably do. You say it needs to hold 100s of songs. Do you mean recorded music or sheet music files? As a reference, I have over 2000 songs recorded in highest quality mode in about 40 gigs of space. Most laptops today come with 40 to 60 gigs. This should be quite adequate for your purposes. There is plenty of portable expansion available for a good laptop. I would go with a decent brand. If you have a local outlet with plenty of stock, go check a few out to get some basic idea of what features you will want. Do you want to make music disks? If so, get one with a burner. I must admit that, right now, I am partial to IBMs. these I have not seen except by on line purchase. They are more sturdy than what I have seen in local stores. They will cost a bit more but you can get plenty for under $2K. It sounds as if you want XP with Windows standard Office suite. Hope this helps a bit but please feel free to ask more questions or post more needs. Good luck.

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Buy an AMD processor based system
Feb 12, 2005 3:17AM PST

AMD processors give you a remarkable value compared to Intel's lineup, and they perform exceptionally well, indeed beating Intel in many performance comparisons.

Probably the least expensive laptop out there will do what you need to do, so don't fall for the hype. Try pricewatch.com for a great value on laptops and all things computer related. I have bought from there many times and have had excellent results.

Good luck.