The 17″ Laptop

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Ahh, the 17″ laptop, our old friend! If you’re in the market for one of these beasts, you’re pretty much showing yourself as a person with good taste, if not someone who just has huge biceps from lifting the thing all day! In this post I’ll talk about which laptop brands are offered in the 17″ variety, and where I think you can find good deals on them.

First thing’s first. I don’t care if you’re a Mac person at all, but one can’t do a post about 17″ laptops without talking about the MacBook Pro. This is the flagship of the wide-screen line of notebooks, and for good reason. This computer can be configured with up to a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor (Apple with Intel?), and an armada of RAM and hard drive space. It’s got the usual DVD-R/W drive attached as well, and comes standard with the Mac OSX operating system. Pretty standard for a Mac. Of course, all this performance comes with a pricetag: It starts at $2499 and goes up briskly from there. You can easily spend $3000-$4000 on this system, but if you’re into graphic arts, the large screen and system speed can’t be touched.

The next best 17″ laptop on the market as far as I’m concerned is the Dell Studio 17. This competes with the Mac fairly well, and even includes a lower price tag. This computer comes with a quad-core Intel i7 processor rated up to 2.8 GHz, and up to 8 gigabytes of RAM. At that point, you might as well not even have a hard drive! It also comes offered with 1 gigabyte of video RAM, which makes it a great platform for graphic design, movie production, or any other video-intensive project you might have. Better yet, if you’re a gamer this is the laptop for you. Windows comes standard, which makes it compatible with just about every A-List game that comes onto the market. Unless you were to go with a high-end desktop, you’re not going to get better performance from a gaming laptop. Best yet, prices start at $1099, which blows the Mac out of the water.

So, there’s my unbiased opinion on the matter. I’ve heard wonderful things about the MacBook Pro, but if you’re looking for the best compromise between price and performance in a 17″ laptop, you can’t beat the Dell.

Shopping:

NEW AC Adapter Power Supply Charger+Cord for Dell Studio 15 1535 1536 1537 17 1735 1737 XPS 13 XPS 16 XPS 1640 pp31l
Zotac ZBOX Intel Atom D510 1.66 GHz Dual Core All-in-One Mini-PC with No Memory, No Hard Drive and No OS
Corsair TWIN2X4096-6400C5C 4GB XMS2 PC2-6400 800Mhz 240-pin Dual Channel DDR2 Desktop Memory
Intel Pentium Dual-Core Processor E6600 3.06GHz 1066MHz 2MB LGA775 CPU - Retail BX80571E6600
Apple MacBook Pro MB991LL/A 13.3-Inch Laptop

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2 Responses to “The 17″ Laptop”

  1. 17 Inch Laptop Bag on October 23rd, 2009 5:31 pm

    [...] on the side that adds a little bit of style to the design. Even more important, it will fit a 17″ laptop quite readily, so have no fear. Even smaller laptops will do just well in [...]

  2. Used Laptop on November 13th, 2009 4:52 pm

    [...] You don’t spend a whole lot out of pocket, first of all. Instead of spending $1700 on that new 17” MacBook Pro laptop you’ve been wanting since Christmas, you can go buy it used for half that. Wouldn’t that be [...]

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