Since laptops are becoming more and more popular these days, I decided to finally do a comparison on laptops as opposed to desktops. I’ll compare two laptops from Apple, Dell, HP, and whatever other good deals I can find.

To be more fair this time, I’ll start with Apple and set a budget accordingly, since Apples cheapest laptop at the time of writing is $999. I’ll start with that one.

The $999 Macbook has a 13″ screen and a 2.26Ghz C2D. Not a bad CPU for a laptop. It has only 2GB of RAM, which can be upgraded to 4 for $100, but seems substandard these days. Unfortunately, already being at the budget, I couldn’t get any upgrades.

Looking at Dell’s lineup, everything starts at under $1000 in the studio line. They have an i7 version of the studio 17, which would almost certainly beat everything else, but it was over budget. I decided to start with the basic Studio 17. I took an upgrade to 4GB of RAM and an upgrade to a 4650 from an Intel GPU. Getting an 802.11n card put me $75 under budget, so I upgraded to CPU to end up at exactly $999.

Now for HP. I went to “high performance” and started with the dv7t. I upgraded to 4GB of DDR3, took the free upgrade to a 320GB hard drive, upgraded to a 4650 1GB, and got 802.11n+bluetooth, which put me at $989.

On to Lenovo. The Y550 was under $1000 and had discrete graphics, so I went with the top model. It was $688, so I had some room to improve it. Also, it was clear that it was better than the other systems in some areas. I upgrade the wireless to 802.11n, upgraded to 4GB DDR3, and had $220 left to spend. I got a 500GB HDD, bluetooth, and still had money to spend. I upgraded the CPU to a 2.53GHz C2D, but this put me slightly over, so I downgraded to a 320GB HDD.

For the last laptop, I decided to go with a Sony. The Vaio SR started at $819, which should leave plenty of room for improvement.

As you can see, the Macbook has poor RAM capacity, but makes up for it with a decent graphics card and CPU. The Lenovo, Dell, and HP seem to be the best overall, whereas the Sony seems to have lack in certain areas. No DDR3, slowest CPU, and smallest hard drive. Overall, all the laptops seems to be more even, and it’s nice to see Apple doesn’t seem to be doing the usual price-gouging routine, at least not as much.

Note: this is not intended to be a buying guide. This is just for showing which brands will give you the best computer for your money.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 8th, 2009 at 23:13 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.