Hello everyone

A mate of mine is looking for a laptop which he can do some graphic bits in his spare time while working away, he uses Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 etc.), Dreamweaver and other web packages. His brother in law recommended the Acer Aspire 6930G, but ive heard the warranties on Acer are pants, so i specced up a Dell Vostro 1720 with 3 yr NBD warranty, which came out about £100 more.

Has anyone got any recommendations on either of these laptops, or an alternative? Both have NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GS 512MB Graphics, will this be suitable?

Thanks

Is it for work?

If it is a personal warranty won't strictly apply and a business warranty may be needed

Failing that buy it on an egg card or similar credit card, a lot of them provide additional warranty now on your purchases (so up to 2 years total)

I was looking at the 6930g series and tbh Dell didn't come close, even a £500 Acer came on dell over £700, and they wouldn't haggle on price, best to wait for the Dell sale if you can

I have got the 6930G and its quite good.. once you remove all the $hite that was pre-installed
Just debating whether to remove Vista and put either W7 or ubuntu on it but that may wait until I have finished Baldurs Gate 2 & throne of bhaal

Which spec one did you get and how much/where from?

also...benchies!!

spec:
Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 (2.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 Cache)
1x 2048MB and 1x 1024MB of Memory RAM
250GB 5400rpm Hard Disk Drive (split into 2 main partitions) + hidden restore partition
16" (HD 1366 x 768 resolution, high-brightness (220- cd/m2) Acer CineCrystal™ TFT LCD, 8 ms high-def response time, 16:9 aspect ratio)
DVD Rewriter
NVIDIA GeForce 9300M GS - 256MB VRAM
Dolby®5-certified surround sound system with two built-in stereo speakers and one subwoofer supporting low-frequency effects
5-in-1 card reader (SD//MS/MS-Pro/MMC/xD-Picture card™)

£520 in feb from CCL
as for benchies youll have to wait untill i get home
Though it plays Civ 4, Baldurs gate and Football Manager 2009 and Counterstrike:Source all perfectly well.

no its a personal one, that he wants to do some bits on outside of work.

What are the warranties like on Acer?

laptops have a standard 1 years international warranty but you have to remember to activate it and you can extend it upto 3 yrs. As for if its worthwhile, so far I have had no problems that require trying it out

You would have to be careful about claiming on a personal warrenty to make sure you dont ever mention you were doing anything professional/work related or thats a nice excuse not to pay out.

Benchies
PCmark2005 4458
3Dmark06 1832
so not blisteringly fast

If you are doing graphic work, then you should be using a calibrated screen... That doesn't come cheap though! They tend to make Macs look cheap.

Are the outputs going to be used professionally or just for fun? If the output is going to be used professionally, then the screen should be calibrated. You can buy a calibration tool, which would be cheaper than a couple of grand on a Lenovo with a quality screen and built-in screen calibration tool, but will still add a hundred or so to the price; and results may vary, on my old machine with cheap monitors, even after calibration, one of them couldn't display grey scales or other colour gradations clearly - I worked on one website with a grey gradient for 3 weeks, before somebody looked at it on another machine and asked why the gradient wasn't there. I showed them my display and said "what gradient!"

Also worth thinking about how you're going to maintain your colour profiles throughout the process, not just calibrating the screen, but matching it to the output.

Agreed, but Vista supports colour profiles and Adobe CS3 and 4 bring their own along for good measure ISTR.

If you want to see how good laptop GPUs are, there's a good list here

The link only does 3Dmark, which is a pretty useless indicator for professional graphics. The Quadros generate very poor 3D mark results, but have vastly superior performance and stability with pro apps running openGL...

thanks for the responses guys, so the general feeling is that the Acer would be ok? Or if I could find a laptop with the Quadro graphics that would be better?

Just looking though, and you can get a macbook for around £750, would that be a better option? I know he used macs at his last job.

Ta