I've had a college assigned Lenovo for the past 5 years, it's about the 5 year anniversary now, and it is breaking down from extremely heavy use. My keyboard is shoddy, the DVD drive is faulty as sin, the harddrive is going, the screen has a chip in it, and now the battery life no longer holds a 40% or better charge. While it still works just fine, I think it's time to format and retire this as a backup for the family and just get me something acceptable.
Who knows of good online deals regarding laptops? I'm not much of a gamer outside of the console realm so I really only need something that is better than this. This ancient SOB has done me well, with 2 gigs of DDR2 memory, a dual core processor (im sure its old, the model of this lenovo is t60) and an ancient video card.
Advice is awesome, I'd prefer the cheaper the better because it really only is for household internet browsing, the occasional writing assignment and maybe some emulating.
newegg often has sales on 'em, but you can find random sales on 'em and will during summer from guys like best buy, staples, office max, and office depot as we get more 'back to school' stuff. hell, the websites of the manufacturers can often find a deal (e.g., right now HP allows you to build a computer for 600 that has the latest and best chip in the family i'm about to mention).
if you want cheap and good and photoshop isn't something you do, then look for something where the processor is an A6 or A8 out there as many of them are currently going from 300-400 because the newer generation of that chipset is out and priced a bit higher (peaks at around 700 right now, HP has some offerings at $600). you'll be able to game a bit on 'em too (if an A8, quite a bit) as they combined a good GPU with the CPU to get where they're at.
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"Maybe it's a tentacle, molesting the planet itself. - Aschen Brodel.