Dell Studio line - Thoughts?

I am in the market for a new lappy for my wife. We have a Dell Dimension Desktop that we bought in 2005 and it's still running fine on the original mobo and frankly runs awesome!

I have heard some rumors that Dell is putting cheap crap parts in their laptops. I cannot find anything credible, though I haven't looked extremely hard either. But when looking at their Studio line and considering that most of their video cards start at 1 GB, I would think in the higher end, they would use better parts even if the claims of cheap crap were true.

What are your thoughts?

 

Dell is as good as any other where laptops are concerned,its really hard to separate them,to pick one over the other.I wouldn't buy dell just because you want a Dell though,I'd "well I have recently." get the laptop that has all the features you need, I got the best laptop for my price bracket which turned out to be a HP my brother got one a month or so later but spent £100 more that turned out to be an ACER.

Here's a few things I expect as minimal for a laptop,dual/quad core pentium/I3 Pentiums are by far the best CPU's ATM,4gig of ram,HDMI socket I think this is one of the most important things when buying a laptop now,a video card capable of playing HD content,windows 7,15+ inch screen,I can't over state how important I think being able to play HD content is and will become.

All pre built computers skimp somewhere that's how they make money and stay competitive but it mostly happens in desktops,things that don't show up in the spec sheet like motherboard quality,memory quality,PSU quality ect.

Again I wouldn't worry too much about the brand of the laptop as much the spec's you require for the price.,when you put spec's sheets side by side in a given price bracket it becomes obvious where they have skimped.

 

I have a Dell latitude for work and have had the laptop for 2 years and not one issue. I would suggest Dell laptops or Toshiba laptops all day long.

 

As Rikky said first figure out what you want it to do first. Then look online not only at Dell but sites like Best Buy, Newegg.com, etc., to compare laptops with similar specs.

No company makes the parts for their laptops. So quality wise most bigger brands (HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc.) are going to be pretty similar. 512mb-1Gb video is pretty much standard on most laptops today.

Note that most laptops today with 3-4+ Gb of memory are coming with the 64 bit version of Win 7. Most 32-bit programs run fine on it but if you use a 64-bit web browser there is no Flash player for it yet. But the 64-bit Win 7 uses the 32-bit Internet Explorer by default anyway.

Sam