Fruit Machine Chat

Evening all...

Any suggestions? I'm toying with the idea of going the whole hog ans lashing out over £1500 on Dell's top spec XPS machine, but, it is over £1500!!

I've not played many games for ages (the DVD drive on my current Dell is very temperamental!) but would love to get back into it - and my current machine can just not push the pixels through the pipes fast enough...

What I currently use my lappy for:

-Programming
-Photshopping
-Music Production (Processor Intensive!)
-Emulation (Fruits / C64 / Amiga)

So of course, I want to keep that up, but would love to play some of the newer games out there - they look stunning!!

So, anyone had any good experiences?

For games get a Toshiba Satellite X200.

Rock laptops are awesome - my latest is a Rock Pegasus spec'd up

very very fast and handles CS3 and high demand stuff like no ones business

Weird - I just posted about this on another forum.

I'd say you get what you pay for. People baulk when I tell them I spent £1000 on my last PC (which I built myself) but the thing'll last me five years with little or no upgrading. That's only £200 a year, or about £4 a week. I stick that in a jam jar weekly so it's ready for the next one.

I always say never ever compromise on hardware you intend using for a while - you will regret it.

Oh, and stay away from Acer. Their kit is decent for the price, but their support tools and staff are utterly moronic. Toshiba and Dell are good brands, laptop-wise, you should be okay with them. If you're considering a Mac, don't - they're still flat-out not worth the money even though they can now run XP. Style over content.

And if they offer you the choice of XP over Vista, take XP. Vista will not be ready for a while yet. Certainly a lot of audio apps are not Vista certified yet, if that's what you want to do. Ditto most tablets if you use one with Photoshop.

ive got a sony vaio and that seems to run everything, look sexy aswell

Thanks for the heads-up guys... Will spend this lunchtime perusing various Laptop-related sites!

matt what on earth is that french poem going on about, it's annoying me now!

And where are the missing apostrophes and accents?

B- ... see me after class.

LOL!!

I straight copied and pasted it from a lyric site (I'd at least put a space after each comma!)

It's actually from a very cheesey song which is growing on me, (even though it's old!) - The Enigma Project. My new 'thing' at work is to listen to music to get me through the day, and this sort of 'guff' seems to have a good effect on me.

I'll swap it for a large-chested lady soon-enough, I'm sure...

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On the Lappy front, I'm currently looking at the (badly named) Sony Vaio AR51E, which seems pretty damn good for a shade under £800 notes...

have you considered apple mac?

Sue - I 'hadn't', and...

If you're considering a Mac, don't - they're still flat-out not worth the money even though they can now run XP. Style over content.

...sort of helped me to not consider it any further. What would you put forward as an advantage of Mac-ing it? I know that they are 'standard' for a lot of high-end music production, which I (like to think) I'm reasonably good at...

Don't get me wrong, Macs are lovely machines. They're just too expensive for what they are, and Apple make no bones about the fact that they charge you more for the image.

Example: I priced myself up a new gaming rig recently, and the bits required for me to build an XP-powered PC from scratch came to about £1200. A similarly speced Mac came back as £3100 from the Apple site, and that was with a less powerful graphics card.

I'm not massively up on audio apps these days, but I presume all the standard apps (Cubase, SoundForge, GigaStudio, etc) run under Windows as well, hence me saying a Mac was probably not worth it, but with the Vista certification caveat.

EDIT: Actually, I should change it to: If you know what you're doing, avoid a Mac, because the cost savings are considerable, even allowing for my "You get what you pay for" warning.

actually i'm underqualified to have any opinion about computers.
don't mind me.