2011-01-06, 11:00 PM
Taxes? For a laptop? That's why you pick either newegg or amazon.....if you live in Cali, grab your laptops from Amazon. No tax and usually better pricing, and usually free shipping.
If you want a workhorse for a laptop, then your budget for $600 is too low. Only better CPU and GPU cause the prices to inflate so much. At $600 your best bet is to wait for a laptop model to go on sale or go with Intel graphics, which is sub par at best. After Fusion's introduction into the notebook arena, those prices will plummet since the Fusion GPU/CPU combo really put a dent on Intel's domination in the laptop arena. Took AMD long enough.
At $700-900 you'd be choosing among entry level discrete GPUs.... for example this Acer
http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AS5745G-7671-...B0041RSEVA
NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M
2.4 GHz Intel Core i3-370M dual-core processor
btw Toshiba has among the lowest hardware failure rates in the business. Yes their customer service sucks, but all probability tells that you'll never have to deal with them.
I have a Toshiba Satellite with GT230M (basically a repackaged 9800GT) GPU and dual core 2.2Ghz since 2 years ago. Never had anything mess up!
If you want a workhorse for a laptop, then your budget for $600 is too low. Only better CPU and GPU cause the prices to inflate so much. At $600 your best bet is to wait for a laptop model to go on sale or go with Intel graphics, which is sub par at best. After Fusion's introduction into the notebook arena, those prices will plummet since the Fusion GPU/CPU combo really put a dent on Intel's domination in the laptop arena. Took AMD long enough.
At $700-900 you'd be choosing among entry level discrete GPUs.... for example this Acer
http://www.amazon.com/Acer-AS5745G-7671-...B0041RSEVA
NVIDIA GeForce GT 420M
2.4 GHz Intel Core i3-370M dual-core processor
btw Toshiba has among the lowest hardware failure rates in the business. Yes their customer service sucks, but all probability tells that you'll never have to deal with them.
I have a Toshiba Satellite with GT230M (basically a repackaged 9800GT) GPU and dual core 2.2Ghz since 2 years ago. Never had anything mess up!