looking for a new laptop

[animefreak99]

So I am looking for a new laptop one That'll be under 400 or less mostly will be used for watching streaming Vids and reading manga and downloading.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

So I am looking for a new laptop one That'll be under 400 or less mostly will be used for watching streaming Vids and reading manga and downloading.

Unfortunately you won't be able to watch a lot of HQ streams to let you know due to the hardware accellation requires to process the graphics after it downloads it from the preferred streams. Although I don't specialized in streams so I don't know much about how videos are processed on the system in full. Maybe I'm wrong though about that.

However, the ones I tend to like to advise a lot of new purchases is to lean toward the ASUS motherboard brand of laptops, This is more due to the reliable nature to not screw up or fail on you. But that's my real experience with dealing with Gigabytes and ASUS only products. I'll post my thoughts on 400 USD purchases later after I have my meal and finish teaching my young ones how to use a social media site.

 

[larnkarn]

Look for toshiba laptops low end satellites they are cheap and reliable (low failure rate 16%) or asus same low failure rates as toshiba as long (both companies have the lowest failure rates in the market) as you give them the proper care and maintenance like any other quality electronic device, streaming is more dependent of broadband than gpu or cpu power unless you need to apply alot of filters for sharp quality, not an issue if you are watching HQ streaming already.

On the other hand if you want to encode a video or switch formats thats another topic and you will need a better cpu gpu combo to speed up the whole process.

 

[animefreak99]

Never even knew about the failure rate. what abouts Sony? I know hp and dell would have high fail or rate.

 

[HatoriTakaya]

[MENTION=30897]animefreak99[/MENTION]:I'm back and sorry I was typing some patches preview for my blogs and stuff.

Anyway here's a Laptop that is Toshiba with is around the range of 400 USD.

Toshiba Satellite C55-A5308 15.6" Laptop PC - Intel Core i3 / 4GB Memory / 750GB HD / DVD±RW/CD-RW / Built-in HD Webcam & Microphone / Windows 8
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Satel...e=UTF8&qid=1395241832&sr=1-29&keywords=laptop

This basically can do all what you can ask and has the following specifications (from what I can tell):

• Brand: Toshiba
• OS: Windows 8
• Screen Size: 15.6" Screen widescreen, HD TruBrite® LED Backlit display
• CPU: Intel Core i3
• RAM: 4GB DDR3 SDRAM Memory
• HDD: 750GB HD
• Opicicial Drive: DVD±RW/CD-RW
• Extras: Built-in HD Webcam & Microphone

Toshiba Main Website for this laptop:
http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/satellite/C50/C55-A5308

Well I hope this gives you an option of purchasing something that is reliable and decent.

Side Note: By the way, I have previously owned two Toshiba Laptops. I dropped both of them at knee and a bit height by accident a few times on carpet. Needless to say, all laptops are fragile but these fair well as long there's not dropped with a high force to the ground. They are resilient to certain amount of force like any technological gadget. If taken care of, they can last a long time and it's worth it. I'm still using one of my Toshiba Laptop to this day which is over 3 years old. And still can play light weight MMORPG like Elsword on it (with lowest graphics) and watch YouTube videos as well.

As Office applications, it runs perfectly fine as long you not expecting super fast speeds like a desktop. My old Toshiba can still run them fine. As for software and applications that requires more better hardware, it's not expected for my laptop to run them at the moment. However, I have seen my Campus Desktop Computers run Photoshop fine at 4 GB of RAM. This is pretty tight in my opinion but I'm not the one managing the Campus Systems at the time.

 

[larnkarn]

Well about failure rates, here you can find the failure rate over 2 and 3 year periods of the most popular brands of laptops manufacturers http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/17/laptop-reliability-survey-asus-and-toshiba-win-hp-fails/, that’s the 2009 rating but you should not expect much variation of failure rates at this point ± 0.5 at most.

Well in my job we work with dell machines, and with receive every year from 40 to 80 desktops, laptops or mixed batch of both of latitudes and optiplex dell brands and i have to say we have some hardware failures every year, with an average of 17% failure rate, but they have a good customer support at least in the enterprise level that was hard for HP to match, about sony support and failure rates i can’t say anything since i have never worked with a large amount of sony's laptops and never owned one.

Anyway HatoriTayaka recomendation:

Toshiba Satellite C55-A5308 15.6" Laptop PC - Intel Core i3 / 4GB Memory / 750GB HD / DVD±RW/CD-RW / Built-in HD Webcam & Microphone / Windows 8

is a solid laptop since you never mentioned that you are doing gaming or video and photo editing with the laptop