Best time to buy new laptop?

[SWE]

When is the best time to buy a new laptop?

When do they start phasing out this year's model at a discount to make room for the new models?

I'm thinking of buying a new Dell. There always seems to be one Dell promotion after another. Will the promotions get worse or better as the end of the year/holiday season approaches?

[bmetz]

For Dell, the best deals are usually available at the end of their fiscal quarters. I don't know what those are, particularly, but I've been around the hot deals forum at fatwallet.com enough to know that the best deals can be had around these times. But then again, you may wait 2-3 months for one of these 'great' deals, but it's for a laptop that doesn't suit your needs.

Good luck

[Blarg]

Dell is pretty famous for horrific customer service.

But more directly to your question, you have to say and say completely -- really think it out -- what you want the laptop for. Is there anything particularly unacceptable to you, like a screen resolution too small, or anything that's a must, like X hours/minutes of battery time?

The reason you have to be really as anal as possible is that notebooks vary so much in what they give you. And the reason that pertains to your particular question as to timing of buys is, there are some enormous changes in laptop technology coming about in short order.

If you are going for a cheap, lower end laptop, now is a great time, because those are being phased out and the price is plunging. Regular sales are happening every weekend lately, dropping hundreds of dollars from the prices of name brand laptops.

But if you are going for something more expensive and powerful, well, here's a brief and spotty but I hope more or less correct idea of the developing technologies I've been reading about. Try notebookreview.com for excellent forums discussing these things in exhausting detail.

First, PCI-Express is coming. For certain notebooks -- the ones using regular pentium 4 CPU's, next month! If you are going to get this type of notebook, wait until that happens, and maybe a month after that for inventory to be slightly less clogged up and prices not as completely hysterical. Alternatively, at that time you probably buy this same type of notebook at a significant discount, because it will have just been outdated.

Pro's of this technology include the ability to address up to 4 gigs of RAM in 4 different slots -- which means for many tasks you'll never have to slow down your performance or build up heat reading a hard disk, and 120 gig hard disks, and just faster operations in general, plus a huge one -- the ability to change your graphics card by yourself. I don't know what you know about computers, but graphics cards are what put your picture up on your screen and make it move. Laptop graphics chips till now have been almost always soldered right into the computer's motherboard, so you couldn't update an outdated, slow graphics card without really going through some major work on your computer. Now you will be able to just snap an old graphics card out and a new one in, kind of like taking a piece of toast out of a toaster and putting a fresh slice of bread in. This will be an enormous help in keeping your laptop an expensive investment that has some longevity to it.

Further, there are new graphics cards that are coming out that are a step or two of the best graphics cards presently in laptops -- the ATI 9700 128 or 256mb card(Dell alone has access to a much better version, the 9800, for a month, exclusively). The new graphics card is said by some to likely be no better than the 9800, but it will be swappable! and most others say the new swappable cards offered by most manufacturers will actually be quite an improvement over the 9800.

Either way, though, both the 9800(which cannot be swapped out) and the new swappable graphics cards are vast improvements over the 9700's which are presently top of the line. Give it a month or so for these new graphics cards to come in if you want to help significantly future proof your computer. This times perfectly with the release of PCI-E for standard Pentium chip-based laptops.

However, those computers have pretty bad battery life; usually only 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Whether that's acceptable to you is up to you.

PCI-Express, the really big innovation, will sweep into other computers at a slower rate. But it's the wave of the future. PCI-E laptops will have some very strong advantages over today's laptops. But not for a while, for the other two kinds of top consumer laptops.

Pentiums also come in versions that give great battery life -- up to 5 hours and more. These are Pentium-M's, sometimes called Centrinos and Dothans. These CPUS's generally run cool so they won't burn up your palm or your leg when using them, and fan noise is generally better with this kind of computer. They are also much lighter than the other two major contenders(I'll get to the last one shortly), weighing 5 to 7 pounds compared to 8-ish to as much as 15 pounds for the others. Their speeds in current incarnations go from 1.5 to 2.0, significantly slower than regular pentiums, which go up to 3.4 ghz. But, they have a lot of internal memory that actually makes them perform just as fast as the highest Pentiums in many tests. In today's laptops, graphics cards are the bottleneck in performance more than CPU's. Given better graphics cards like the ones coming into the pipeline very soon, these Pentium-M's may start to show their shortcomings in some tests compared to their brethren. Another thing -- Pentium M's may not come with 17-inch screens, as one of the big points of having a Pentium-M is their great battery life, and 17-inch screens suck down a lot of power compared to the standard 15-inches of a normal notebook. Also, they tend to run on RAM that's a hair slower, but don't seem to suffer much for it.

Now the point of all that description? IF this is the kind of laptop you want, as I understand it, the PCI-E version will not be out till probably the middle of next year at best. This means buying one of these today is realizing that your upgrade path and future-proofing will be limited. As will buying one before the new graphics cards come out, a double whammy.

AMD-based laptops face only a single whammy in the immediate term of not getting PCI-E for, well, the foreseeable future. However, they will be made to take the new graphics cards as soon as they come out. AMD-based laptops also run at 64 bits, though, unlike the other two categories I've discussed above, so they are already future-proofed in a significant way as far as software goes. Windows runs in 32-bits, not 64 bits, but AMD is compatible with both the present version of Windows and the 64-bit version that Microsoft is presently at work at. 64-bit is the wave of the future again, but for right now it doesn't matter much. So you have an interesting mix of future-proofing and not in this type of laptop.

You also have tremendous power. These chips are hot, in both senses of the term. As in, they can really heat up your leg in some designs. But they don't eat as much power as the regular Pentium chip computers(not the Pentium-M's), and can commonly get a half hour or an hour more battery life than those computers -- pretty important to both.

Both regular Pentium laptops and AMD-based laptops can be easily found with 17-inch screens, at resolutions up to 1920x1200. Plenty to multi-play 4 poker tables at once.

So, hold out a month and depending on what you likely either get very important and ultimately money-saving graphics cards because of the upgradability you will be purchasing(and paying a premium for), and on certain laptops you will get PCI-E too, which is a little much for me to get into. Or wait until the middle of next year to get both in a Pentium-M if you like the great battery life, etc. Or wait a month and get a much-improved AMD, but if you want PCI-E on your AMD, you'd better be prepared to wait an awfully long time. Or buy now and take advantage of the great deals going on everywhere now. Or...wait a month and see if prices don't plummet even more - you never know.

Anyway, there are fantastic laptops you can buy today that will have years worth of productivity in them, but be aware of what you're getting yourself into. An AMD buyer won't lose much by buying next month, but a Pentium-M buyer might have some regrets around the middle of next year when PCI-E comes out for Pentium-M's.

Anyway, I think I got the gist of things right, though these things are argued over a bit. Hope some of that helped.

[SWE]

Wow!

Thanks for giving a very detailed reply. Currently checking out notebookreview.com site. It looks to be very informative.

Cheers,

[Blarg]

You know what? It was notebookforums.com that I had meant to refer you to. The forums there are much better than at the site I told you about previously. There's an awful lot of info there, and the forums are quite active.

The first site is a good place to check for coupons etc, though, and they do have some forums.

[Chu]

I think you have some misconceptions about the notebook world. PCI-E on the notebook is not being phased in until december, if at all. Also, the new centrino PCIE chip has been put on indefinte hold -- after all there is no real need. All modern video cards still have native AGP versions or are using AGP/PCI-E bridges. Also, look at PCMIA for goodness sakes! 16-bit ISA based and still around after all these years despite countless attempts to kill it.

[Blarg]

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PCI-E on the notebook is not being phased in until december, if at all.

[/ QUOTE ]

Eurocom.com has a notebook posted with PCI-E with a projected sales date of the end of this month. That date is taken with a big grain of salt by most, but I have seen other vendors talking about coming out with PCI-E before December.

[Chu]

Here is my advice btw:

1. The absolute most important bar none most important thing in a laptop is battery life! Because of this, you really want a centrino. Some centrino laptops have up to 7 hours, which asolutely slaughteres even the best P4M's.

2. A laptop is probably the only electronic advice I would strongly reccomend getting the extended protection plan.

3. As for the best time to buy -- I would say keep an eye peeled on the fatwallet.com hot deals forum for laptop deals. About once every 2 months an insane deal pops up.

4. Manafactures. There are only about 8 factories in the world that actuially make laptops, and everyone else rebrands them. Of the major names -- only IBM and Dell make their own laptops, everyone else rebrands. Try to figure out what laptop you really have, in the future it can save you a lot of trouble when you need to search out information. For example, I am typing this on a vprMatrix laptop that is simply a rebranded Samsung. Knowing this saved me $60 on a battery and $20 on an AC-Adaptor since I was able to google all the other companies that rebranded this model and buy the cheapest accessory of them.

5. Dell makes surprisngly good laptops these days. They've come a long way . . .

6. The one thing in laptops that holds them back is the hard drive. A 5400rpm or 7200rpm hard drive is a HUGE plus. My P4 1.4 Willmette laptop feels faster to most people then a P42400+M simply because most laptops these days ship with a 4200 or 5200 RPM drive, and I upgraded mine to 7200. Modern 7200 drives don't suck up any more battery power either.

7. Decide if you want a portable or a desktop replacement.

8. It's 4 am and i'm tired . . .

[Just The Facts]

[ QUOTE ]
When is the best time to buy a new laptop?



[/ QUOTE ]

Before all the back to school sales end. I saw several Hp's for under $1,000.

[Eder]

You would have to pry my Dell out of my cold dead hands...bullet proof for 2 years working out of my pickup on construction sites...use my compressor and air hose to clean the dust off it every day...now if only my dell printer in the back seat was as indestructable haha...but but your laptop now...budget 2x what you think you're willing to spend,,,once you go mobile you never go back