So my mac is completely finished.....

[DarkGizmo]

I've had a macbook 13 inch 6th gen model (late 2008.early 2009) since April of '09 and the other day it finally kicked the fan. It had been acting up over the past few months and I went to Apple last week to get it checked out they did a 'hardware diagnosis' and said everything was fine but my battery had swollen a bit, nothing serious at this point in time but in the future I would need to replace it for $100. Okay well don't need to deal with that now.. Fast foward to 2 nights ago and my macbook that was running fine after they re-installed the OS starts acting up once more and by now I don't have any files on the system just my music. So i'm like what the hell? Basically what happens is the machine will take about 10 to 15 minutes to boot up and then if i can even log in without it freezing it won't let me do anything on the desktop without lagging or locking up. So i really believe it's hard drive failure as all the symptoms kinda point to that. So i'm in the need of a new laptop and the whole purpose of this topic. I'm not quite sure if I want to go back to OSX for the laptop since they are overpriced for what they give you (spec wise) so i'm leaning more towards a windows based PC. Which do you recommend to use? I've been looking at HP's and Asus. I've seen some nice HP's, my desktop is an HP, and my father's laptop is an HP and both have been working beautifully for a few years now. So what do you think I should do? My friend says to go with Asus over HP but i'm not quite sure....what brand does everyone prefer and who can give me the most bang for my buck? I'd like to get a 15 to 17 inch laptop that can handle at least a few of the newer games like Diablo 3, Phantasy Star Online 2, Guild Wars 2 and perhaps the likes of COD and maybe battlefield 3 (albeit,maybe on medium settings?) What does everyone recommend? I'd like to try and keep it under $2,500 if possible.

[DarkGizmo]

Just an update on this. I was able to restore/revive my macbook since I last posted here. All it needed was a new hard drive so I slapped a 256GB SSD in it and it's working well now. I did also buy a new gaming latop though that I use a bit more then my mac nowadays.

[OhioTom76]

Glad to hear your computer wasn't a complete loss. 

 

As for brands, I would recommend checking out Lenovo's systems. Their Thinkpad systems are built really well, but even their entry level systems give you more bang for your buck than HP's and Dells do. I picked up a cheap $300 HP system about a year and a half ago, and took it back within a week because the fan started running insanely loud. I exchanged it for a $350 Lenovo entry level laptop instead and it was way nicer. I wished I would have just went with it in the first place.