Newbie @ laptop
 

Interested in some ideas for buying a laptop. Not so much brand(s) but what to look for & what to avoid.
My wife will be the most frequent user. Will be using mostly in her home office but for leisure, not work. She simply doesn't want the bulk of a desktop (limited desk real estate). General computing: email, surf, word processing, etc. Some multimedia as well - watch online videos, view movies, play music/music videos. For size, would like to stay around 15-16 inches unless a larger screen is a must-have. While price is not the driving factor she wants something that can do the job without a lot of bells/whistles/eye candy. Would like some idea of how much power (ie cpu type & speed) is required and what sort of graphics ability.

Thanks

sounds like a light user. an E-350 could quite possibly be good enough for her(can play at least one 1080p youtube vid)

If you set a budget it will be much easier to make recommendations. :)

Ok, price up to $1000 (+HST).

Consider a Macbook (maybe even Air). Hardware wise - all laptops nowadays are capable of doing what you're asking, so it's a matter of personal preference. In my experience Macs are pretty low maintenance if you're only doing basic stuff like what you mentioned. Your wife likely won't be wasting much time battling with it.

depends if they are used to the apple interface or not

i have had friends who got apple laptops and regretted it, only because they had to learn how to use the OS
and didn't notice much of an improvement over using windows

really a budget of 1000
we can get you anything you want at that price point...

honestly i would look at laptops with AMD's A6 or A8 cpu in them.
long life on battery and has powerful graphics to boot

and they are around 500.00 to start

AMD + Laptop is a no for me personally. I think they perform well but the core heats up too fast/too much lowering performance (IME) where as Intel (I5 core would be my choice) perform quite well.

I'm by no means an expert, but I'm am also in the market for a new Laptop and I've been looking at a lot of different options, but I keep 'wandering' back over to the Samsung I5's/I7's.

At the top end of your budget but it might be a good starting place.

Don't mean to start the whole mac vs. windows thing, but in my experience getting used to apple is not a very sharp learning curve. My mom uses a windows computer at work - and her job is rather computer intensive, but at home she has a mac mini and for things she does there - browsing, email, movies - she stopped asking me questions after about a week - and she never used a mac before that.

Who knows, you might actually like it ;).

I also find that women in general are more accepting of macs, especially the laptops (nothing personal against guys, but I know quite a few guys who are very prejudiced against macs, while girls are often more open minded). I'd venture a guess that it has something to do with the very streamlined and minimalistic design of their portables. Non-Apple laptops have been improving in that department for the last few years, but they still have a long way to go. I look at my work laptop (a 1 year old MSI, woe is me) and it's just a cacophony of mismatched plastic parts, makes me really appreciate my macbook at home ;).

for windows i would stick with an asus. lenovo has left a bad taste in my mouth. On the mac front. i have no comment. (well none that are repeatable on the internet:biggrin:)

the new A series of cpu/gpu from amd is cooler than before
and has long battery life, plus the added video power ...

i would agree with you on the older ones