College Laptop

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Hey guys, is the HP Pavilion dv9700t a good laptop for college?

 

Yes. It has all the basic things and as extra a video card. A fair general purpose machine and desktop replacement. High end gaming is not possible. try to get 4 gig ram, it helps whit vista. if not, a upgrade later is possible.

 

Should I bother with getting the 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS (extra 100 dollars), or stick with the 256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS?

The 4GB RAM is an extra 100 dollars, is it really worth it?


Now, a prebuilt dv9930us has 4GB RAM, 512MB graphics card, and 320 GB storage (the one I am building only has 250), but to add on Windows Vista Student/Teacher, and LoJack bumps the price up 250 dollars over the one I am building. Which do you think would be better? I mean, I would like to play some games, sure, but mostly I just want this laptop to not be obsolete in 6 months...

 

If your budget leave room for it than the 8600 will give more gaming power just across a hardware barrier for 3d gaming. (GT is on other step higher over gs) I dare to say that the 8600 will run Mass Effect good, and Dragon Age most likely but that is gambling whit good odds. Many modern shooters will play good also. Crysis must be turned down a bit. If this is your only pc you might want to do it. If you have a fair desktop for gaming and this one is for school save your money for a desktop upgrade. Laptops are often one or two steps behind in performance whit desktops at a higher cost.

Later you can upgrade the memory quite easily. The videocard is not easy to replace. And you will see the leap in performance whit vista from 2 to 4 gig. Vista is memory hungry. No shame to get it whit xp if you can. Stay tuned for a few days, more will react.

(Most critics say that vista is a in between version of windows like ME. Windows build no 7 is in the make for 2009? 2010? But this is off topic.)

 

My desktop is older and can't play any of the newer video games, so this would be my main gaming computer. Urgh.

I just have to order it soon so I can get it before I go on vacation... thanks for the help so far

 

The HP Pavilion dv9700t is an excellent laptop. Since you can't really upgrade a laptop's vidoecard, you should always get the best one they offer...so get the 512MB 8600 GS. The only thing I don't like about the dv9700t is the videocard. While it's decent, other laptops in the same class offer the 8600 GT or better...and yet HP decided to go with the GS.

As for RAM, I think 2GB is enough...but if you have the extra $100, 4GB won't hurt…even if you don’t take advantage of it now, you probably will in the future.

 

Hmmm, so this is the one I have tentatively decided on:

http://www.shopping.hp.com/store/product/product_detail/FE779UA%23ABA

I just need to add Microsoft Vista Student/Teacher, and Lojack, which bumps the price up another 250...

 

That looks pretty sweet.

One thing I'd suggest is to see if your school offers a discounted/free version of the software you need. I can get MS office 2007, and several other programs for free from my school.

 

Im using the a very similar Asus laptop at the moment for both uni and gaming. It has the 8600 GS, 2 GB of ram and a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo. I find it can run almost anything without too much of a problem. I will definately be taking it to 4 GB of ram in the near future though.

 

I wish I could upgrade the processor cheaply... will 2GHz run anything game-wise?


EDIT: What is the difference between Microsoft Home and Student, and regular Microsoft Office?

 

H&S is cheaper and contains less stuff. You could just get OO.org for free and ditch Office, and save some dough in the process.

 

I agree with DotW. At this point, you don't really need MS Office. Open Office is a very good substitute, and then there's Google Apps, and I'm sure there are other free office suites as well that are just as good as MS.

 

OO.org is complete, regularly updated, does the job just as well (sometimes better) than the M$ equivalents, really, there isn't much point in dishing out a single dollar for Office, at least not in my book. OO.org can save documents in Office-compatible formats, so compatibility is universal. The less M$ on a computer, the better.

 

Open Office works fine, but I only use the textwriter. For schoolwork I do not know.

 

The rest of the applications in OO.org also work like a charm. I did a project for college using the OO.org Impress, and I've found it just as easy to use as M$'s PP. The spreadsheet app also works great.

OO.org should be fine for schoolwork.

 

My ex-boss was obsessed with Macs and everyone else in the lab used PCs. All of them used MS Office, I was the only one to use OO. Funnily enough they all had problems exporting their documents (both text and presentations) between the Windows and Mac versions of MS Office, while I never had a problem opening my OO files (exported into the MS formats) on either versions of MS Office. All my presentations and posters were done on Impress and I'm writing my thesis with Writer. Works like a charm, files are smaller and I find both much more intuitive than their MS counterparts. The only MS Office component I still use is Excel, as Calc still has some issues.

 

Got the new computer today! Works great so far, although I have not tried any games yet. The touch pad is a little odd, a little difficult to use, but I think I will get used to it. Sweeeeeeeeeet!