IMO, if you are just going to use the laptop for Tuning and Logging, you could probably pickup a good refurbished laptop from Dell. Many businesses lease laptops for 3 years then turn them back into Dell. I know the company that I work for does this and many of the laptops turned in were in excellent condition and are strong enough for tuning/logging, surfing the web, and email.

 

Cool..

One thing i dont want on it is vista.. i absolutely hate Vista!!

 

I've actually found vista premium to be pretty decent as long as you clean it up and slim it down a bit.

 

Vista is not that bad as long as you have plenty of memory... My laptop came with 1gig and I doubled it and it ran soooooo much better.

BTW I got my new dell 1501 for like $450, just keep your eye on the sunday paper for he specials, or check their website..

 

Installing the latest service pack for Vista also helps it out. It does like alot of RAM too. My work laptop is a Latitude D630 with Core 2 Duo processor and 3GB RAM. I'm running Vista Business and like it much better than XP, mainly because I got a laptop strong enough to run it. Upgrading to Vista on a machine that orginally came with XP is generally where people run into issues with Vista. I'm going to see if I can get a few laptops from work, we have some Latitude D600s that we are replacing and these aren't leased. The Latitude D600 would be perfect for tuning, logging, web surfing, and email.

 

One other thing, those prices from Best Buy and Dell that seem so cheap is because they only come with a 1 year warranty. If you upgrade to the 3 year warranty it will generally increase the price about $270. IMO, it is well worth the $270. Just imagine buying a laptop for $450 with 1 year warranty and right after the 1 year warranty is up, the LCD goes out and it will cost you prob about the same price you orginally paid for the laptop.

 

just think that in 2 years those laptops will be obsolete so for the most part the warranty isn't much worth it, at least IMO.

So basically I can buy a new laptop every 2 years for $350-400 or purchase a laptop for $400+$270 warranty($670) and then probably want to purchase a new laptop at around the 3 or 4 year mark. All works out to about the same $ and you keep more current with technology.

<---never been a big fan of extended warranties when the warranty almost costs as much as the item itself.

 

I also like the commercial Dell's due to them being one of the few that you can still get with a serial port. I know just about everyone has got past needing the serial ports, but I sure had a whole less trouble with them.

 

That also, our company Dells have Serial ports.. and that works great for the LC1 wideband checking.

I dont like Vista cause im use to XP and dont like fooling with new stuff that i have to learn about. Lazy i know.. but i dont like it.

And no Extended warrantys.. Computers go outdated so quick its not worth it to me.

 

My dell does not have a serial port and it was a PIA to program my LC-1... I had to go get a serial to USB adapter, took awhile to get the drivers to work with Vista....