School/Work Laptop (1k-1.3k total budget)

sp1337

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Aug 30, 2010
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18,510
1. What is your budget?
--Generally around $1,000-$1,300 after all costs

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering?
--Around 15-16" screen

3. What screen resolution do you want?
--1080p

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop?
--Portable. It's for school/work.

5. How much battery life do you need?
--Towards the higher end of the spectrum would be great, anything 7-8 hours would be wonderful, but 4 would be probably the lowest.

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)?
--Nothing that requires a discrete GPU.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.)
--Internet, E-mail, Office, Music storage/listening

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need?
--Over 750GB would be ideal, 1TB would probably be best.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links.
--None, but I do have a Microcenter nearby, and generally they are cheaper compared to online.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop?
--Quite a few years.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ?
--CD/DVD.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons.
--Only ever had issues with HP melting laptops, and Dell's motherboards being crappy!

13. What country do you live in?
--NJ, USA

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed.
--This is for a friend of mine who is looking to replace his old laptop. He uses it for school. His current rig is a dual core 1.2GHz with 2GB RAM and 200GB HDD.
He wants to get the extended warranty and all that jazz since he's pretty much hardware illiterate. I know quite a bit about desktop parts, but unless I was customizing a laptop, I'm not sure what brands/models are best at the moment.
He was looking at this: http://www.staples.com/Toshiba-L55T-A5290-156-Touch-Screen-Laptop/product_49557
but I told him it didn't seem like that great of a deal, since it's an older generation CPU, and the resolution was the same which he wanted to upgrade.
He was also factoring in Office, tax, and whatnot.

I was looking along the lines of this: http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-Flex-15-Touchscreen-Ultrabook/dp/B00HIY8VMK/ref=pd_sxp_f_pt

Which I'm not sure is the right idea, but I had heard good things about Lenovo.

Anyway, you guys are the laptop experts, any feedback would be appreciated.

Thank you guys very much in advance.

Edit: He also mentioned he would rather spend a little bit more if he has to to be "future-proofed" since his budget won't allow a replacement very quickly. I understand it can never be future proof, but no 1GHz single cores please!
 

LummusMaximus

Honorable
Why not look into the Lenovo ThinkPad T series T440p, 1080p screen, Haswell i5 ('M' series, no ULV here), but the big thing is the amazing battery life: The extended battery can net you around 15 hours of usage. Legendary ThinkPad reliability (Built tough) Plus, it's got that great keyboard of Lenovo's and should have most data recoverable from a 35mph impact (It's really built tough! But after said impact, don't expect anything to be actually usable). Should meet all your needs, just pricier than Ravi's solution.

UPDATE:
Oops , nevermind, just looked up the price.
 

sp1337

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Aug 30, 2010
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18,510
After researching a bit - The HP -does- fit the bill quite nicely, but the screen resolution is the same as his current laptop, which he was complaining about. The specs are certainly perfect other than that though! I'll run it by him and see how much he actually needs the screen upgrade.

The only real eye-catcher that I saw while I was browsing was this
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/itemdetails/59400192/457/96EBC6A8C8EC47A59E95B3D5E300F333

Thoughts on it? The specs all look fine to me, I'm unsure how long the battery will last, but it seems to be on sale due to President's day for a good hunk of change off. The DVD drive only being R and not RW is kind of lame, but it's one of the few laptops I've found that doesn't look to be a paperweight that still fits the spec window at sub-$1000.

Thank you again for taking the time to help out! I'm so used to just picking parts rather than going by brands and pre-customized PCs at this point, I'm out of the loop. I really appreciate it. :)