...Lenovo and Asus are recommended then? I have had Dell and Toshiba and they've each burned their bridges with me. Honestly I feel like every brand is going to have some kind of boneheaded design flaw. (Also, Asus still seems to be making some Win7 machines.)
And one more question... good reason to spend on Office over something like OpenOffice if I'm just doing personal use and mostly only use Word?
I looked at a lot of laptops in stores. I didn't like the mousepad on the Asus models. And their faster Asus laptops would misinterpret my hand near the mousepad as an instruction, and begin doing something I didn't tell it to do.
I ended up getting a refurbished,
Dell 4600 desktop (circa 2003) through a charity for
$25. (A lot of later Dell models were absolute crap. In fact, any "small form" desktops, which were cheaper and popular for college students and businesses, run VERY hot, due to all that compactness. AVOID them! Some have an 80% failure rate, capacitors burn out, etc.)
My
Dell 4600 desktop has 100 GB hard disk drive, a Pentium 4, Windows 7 (which is much better than XP that came on them originally), CD & DVD, and 1 GB memory, which I want to upgrade to 3 GB. It came with the free
Open Office. This thing runs MUCH cooler and quieter than my Toshiba laptop. For your high video and CD usage, you could use the extra memory. Maybe a newer processor too.
OpenOffice is okay and it's free. For some Word-like documents, if I copy something off the Internet in OpenOffice, it sometimes puts all these grey marks in between characters. It's annoying to have to delete them individually. The OpenOffice spreadsheet doesn't seem to recognize the use of CTL-C to copy and CTL-V to paste, requiring the use of the buttons. I own
Office 2003 in disks, so I will copy it over from the disks at some point.
Also, for about $7, you can get a
Inland Pro USB 2.0 HDD Enclosure (or something like it). You remove your old laptop hard disk and put it in this thing, and copy your files to your new computer... Even though my laptop is dead and cannot be powered up, the files can still be recovered. So don't throw away your old computer!
