My daughter is just completing the Public Relations course at Humber College in T.O. She needs a new laptop to replace her older Macbook as she looks for an Apprenticeship and a job. The good news is that she needs/wants a PC now.
She'll be using it for word processing, Adobe suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Indesign, Internet of course, Webcam, Skype meetings.
The salesman at Staples suggested the Acer AS5742-6638 ($579 plus extended warranty and setup for a total of roughly $1000 all taxes in)

http://us.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/model/LX.R4F02.275

When I did some research it seems this model has been around since the new year.

Any thoughts or hookups are appreciated.

Thanks in advance guys.
Sam

 

Long term, I think she's going to be better off with a dedicated video card and more RAM.
I'm no expert on these programs (I'm into CAD) but it seems to me that Adobe suite, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver will be memory intensive and should have 8GB RAM, min. I would also suggest a dedicated video adapter 512MB or higher.
If you pickup the software boxes on the store shelf, they will have a list of the minimum system requirements. Or you could also look them up online. Keep in mind that they are Minimum requirements.
In our company, we typically double the hardware for the minimum requirements suggested by AutoDesk/AutoCAD software.

 

I'll keep that in mind Paul. Thinking ahead makes good sense.

 

Any Asus G series laptops are awesome for gaming, graphics etc.

They are Bestbuy exclusives and are priced well for the features.

 

I say shes goes with something more along the lines of these specs....around $1000 too
http://www.bestbuy.ca/en-CA/product/...5e69e0050aen02

the i7 quad is much better than the i5...plus you have the dedicated 1gb video card

 

Your daughter sounds like she's really gonna put the laptop through it's paces, so you should be a bit more picky on what to buy.

I would suggest looking into a laptop with the 2nd Generation Sandy Bridge CPU. Here is a list of the model numbers so you can compare:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget....1293999908.jpg

The laptop you were offered was a 1st Gen. (i5-480M) Dont get me wrong, still a good and fast chip, but if your daughter is going to be doing a lot of rendering and video encoding, every bit of extra horsepower helps.

I agree with the minimum of 8 Gigs of ram. When working with multiple large format pictures and/or video, it's going to be needed. This is going to necessitate a 64-bit version of the Operating System, because the "regular" 32-bit is physically limited to only seeing ~3.5 GB.

I also agree with getting a dedicated video card with as this will also help with rendering/encoding speeds. (We have a user here that is very heavy into making training videos, and when we got him a new, dedicated video card, he said it helped tremendously.)

Hard drive. Videos are pretty big, so get something big, 500GB+ seems to be the norm nowadays. Invest in an external drive to store her work, you can get 1 to 3TB now.

and finally, see if the LCD screen is good. Some ppl overlook this, but this is what youre going to be staring at for who KNOWS how many hours.

This is the site I use to get deals on allll types of stuff, and there are deals on some laptops now:

http://slickdeals.net/

I use this site to do research on PC's/Laptop's/Parts/new tech:

http://www.anandtech.com/

http://www.tomshardware.com/

You can just find a laptop, and skip to the conclusion part.

Good luck!!

PS, if she is going to use the laptop just at home, (which a lot of ppl seem to do) you can get a more powerful computer for less money, but you're gonna have to convince her.

If you have anymore questions or something, feel free to PM me. good luck!

 

Lots of good info here. I really have nothing to add Sam.

Interesting that your daughter is going Mac to PC. (valid choice)
My daughters are both switching from PC to Mac.
The good news is that Dad knows diddly squat about Macs, so I'm off the hook for support.

 

Theres no such thing as support for Mac. If somethings wrong you throw it in the trash and buy another.

 

LOL, you could learn.

 

BashaZ, byte_me77, LordFappington, Thanks for your imput. I'll have to spend some serious time figuring this out. Always impressed by how helpful people on this forum are.

 

I have got nothing but the best support from Apple, be it instant replacement without shipping out broken piece, in store replacement whatever. I've never "thrown out" a single mac computer.

In fact, I have a farm of G3 and G4 towers from at least 10 years ago that still perform as good as they did then and what do you know? I can still buy parts for them. Not to mention the multiple first Gen imacs floating around my work...

 

i use a macbook pro myself, and it performs just as i expects. love it!

if you need a pc, i would stay away with acer or hp. i've heard horror stories with both. Toshiba is not bad, lenovo is rugged design that she will hate. Asus are generally good, but they are generally gaming computers. They also have 1 yr accidental warranty which covers coffee spills etc etc (human errors that other companies void warranty for)

my recommendation would be a i7 26xx processor, 8gb ram, radeon 68xx or 57xx video card or nvidia 4xx or 5xx. That will put you roughly over 1000 though.

over here at our work, our engineers who get laptops always gets the core core i7 26xx processor, 8gb ram and a workstation graphics card.

one site im surprised didnt see get mentioned is notebookreview.com.
they review almost every laptop known to man and has top picks for certain budgets.

Paul, lmk if you need any further help. Definitely have lots of experience to throw your way

 

We have always been a Mac family. Mine is a 2nd gen mini. Love it. She wants/needs more Bang for the Buck and she uses both now.

 

I have to agree, Cant complain, i dont have a macbook but with my ipad any issues there really helpful @ apple store.

 

definitely stay away from hp laptops, they are nightmare and have chronic errors which there is no remedy even u replace or re-format it occurs again.

i am actually in the same ship with you. im looking for a laptop , i like the sony vaio series, i had experience with toshiba satelllite series(which is the one im using now, but it got old but still performs well) but i heard the new series have their own problems.