Long story short, I have to have a new laptop really really fast. Not like today, but by next week.

The local Best Buy has some decent deals. But they all come with windows fucking vista.

I don't own a copy of windows XP. It pains me to have to buy windows xp just to overwrite shitty ass vista.

I'd give vista the college try, but you need 2 gigs of RAM for that, and I really don't see that as economical.

Anyways, this is going to be used mostly for typical internet usage. LOTS AND LOTS of word processing. It's often neccesary that I have 7-8 pdf's open at one time, in addition to fire fox word and excel.

That being said, my current computer(s) can't seem to handle that, and my laptop is a piece of junk.

I also need a wireless card, and a dvd burner would be very handy.

I do absolutely no gaming, so as long as it's got a good enough video card to show youtubes correctly I don't give a shit about that.

I've got a grand give or take to work with. To attempt to avoid my vista problem I went and looked at macbooks.

For 1250 (tax and shipping included) they are offering the following (yay working at a college and getting a discount):

Quote:

Specifications

2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
1GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM - 2x512
120GB Serial ATA @ 5400 rpm
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth




Not bad, but I've never used a mac before. My buddy that has one says that I'll at least like it the same or better. Still though, I'm nervous about forking out that kind of money since I've had some bad luck using borrowed macs for word processing in the past.

Anyone have any suggestions? I love toshiba as a product line, but the one's on their website are a bit pricey and come with dreaded vista.

Best buy has some decent ones well under a grand, but again...the cursed vista.

Why the hell are they putting vista on 1gig computers? That makes no sense! It's like they want it to fail!

Anyways, ANY suggestions or tips or anything would be greatly appreciated. Online sites that sell laptops and the what not.

For a bunch of PDFs, Word and Firefox, you probably don't need to look at anything that's really top of the line, right. A gig of ram is pretty standard and should have no problem handling that and more. For comparison, I have that and a 2.13Ghz processor and I have about an equal amount of stuff open with no problem, and I can play every brand new game I've tried to run without any trouble too.

I'm not sure what problems you've had with the borrowed Macs, but from what I know, they tend to be pretty stable, and I think pretty much any computer should be able to handle word processing. You can even get Office on a Mac.

Everyone is down on Dell all the time, but when I was in Canada, they were the only company offering financing so they're the only one I've used. I've never had any trouble with four different computers from there. You can customize the shit out of them, so you should be able to get what you need. I'm not sure how much you can customize with other companies, because I have no experience there.

For saving money online, though: dealnews.com and newegg.com

And it wouldn't be a bad idea to look into a company refurbished computer either to save some $$$ and still get a decent system.

I would like to second the NewEgg emotion.

I buy all my shit from them, and their return policy is second to none.

DON'T go through TigerDirect. They are bitches.