My girlfriend's budget for a new laptop is $1500, so I thought about adding Falcon Northwest's models to the ones to look at. The I/O matches what she wants: light-weight (most important), smallish, good battery life, Windows OS, and pretty (possibly custom) paint on the outside. Price as configured is about $1200: 1.20ghz Core i3, 2gb DDR3, 320gb HDD, Win 7 x64, 3.3lbs and 1 inch thick.

Would she be better off looking at a similarly-priced ThinkPad X-series laptop? Can anyone speak to Falcon's quality and customer service?

3/21/2011 5:38:17 PM

I'll at least give you a free bump.

$1500 windows laptops, you've got the entire gamut to run. If you're looking for thin and light the X series is tough to touch. The 2 I've either owned or played with were amazing. Paired with a docking station I couldn't think of a job it couldn't handle (the station was because I'm spoiled to working on larger monitors.)

For that kind of cheddar I'd be looking at a W series, but that's definitely going to be outside of your size and weight guidelines.

Asus also makes some great machines at that point, but keep an eye on form factor. The out-the-back cooling keeps it slim, but makes it tough to fit in standard cases - might have to go up a size.

3/22/2011 5:47:21 PM

JM YOU HAVE A GIRLFRIEND?!?!

3/22/2011 5:59:55 PM

Oh wow, I did not realize Falcon NW made mid-range laptops in that price range.

3/22/2011 6:51:02 PM

^^It's an epic story.

Looks like she's going to get a Lenovo X201 Tablet, since she gets a discount if she buys through work. It's got much better specs that the Falcon I/O.

3/22/2011 11:55:47 PM

I want one of those for work soooo bad. Carrying a laptop and a sketch pad just seems antiquated. Especially since onenote and evernote are taking over the world.

However the new X220 series with the stock 8 hour battery and bolt-on 16hour battery is sick

3/23/2011 12:37:53 PM

Just to let you know, Falcon Northwest just takes generic laptop shells (made by a Taiwanese company called Clevo), and rebrands them whilst jacking up the price. For example, the one you were looking at is probably identical to this,

http://www.avadirect.com/custom-notebook-configurator.asp?PRID=18783

but here it's $400 cheaper. There are tons Clevo resellers out there, like http://www.avadirect.com, that are much cheaper than Falcon Northwest for essentially the same laptop.

3/23/2011 1:59:55 PM