Good Laptop to play HD Contents

[dhyane]

hey all,

i don't know much about computer hardwares like RAM,Processors,Motherboard,Graphics/Video Card,etc but i'm planning to buy a new laptop so i can finally watch my collection of BluRay Discs i bought.

i was wondering what kind of processor,RAM and video card would i need to ensure smooth playback without any freezing or stuttering..any brand in particular that is a safe bet??

thanks..i would appreciate any tips or suggestions...

cheers:thanks:

[DJ Bobo]

A laptop with a blu-ray drive is guaranteed to play blu-rays just fine, so just pick the cheapest you can get.
A friend of mine got an Acer Aspire 6530G-704G32BN for about 730€ only, and it comes with a blu-ray drive. The laptop was delivered with a demo blu-ray disc, which plays just fine.

Here the specs of the Acer if you're interested:
CPU: AMD Turion X2 RM-70 (2GHz)
RAM: 4GB
GPU: ATi Mobility Radeon HD3650
HDD: 320GB
TFT: 16" 1366x768 Glare-type
It comes with a lot of extras, like HDMI-output, fingerprint security, Dolby sound system w/ intergrated subwoofer, webcam, etc
The graphics card is even good enough for casual gaming.
Design is superb too.

[dhyane]

hey DJ Bobo,thanks alot for the info!! yup,acer laptops are within my budget..but i've heard bad things about acer,like it's not durable or it crashes easily...how does your friend find the laptop to be??

cheers !!!

[DJ Bobo]

I personally own an Acer laptop since about 2 months, I'm not experiencing any crashes. The only thing that is not very stable is Internet Explorer 7, but I blame Microsoft here, not Acer ;)
I can't say much about the durability since, as said, it's a recent purchase, but a cousin of mine also has an Acer laptop, which he bought may be 2 years ago or something and the only thing that proved to be not so durable was the touchpad, which doesn't react well anymore. I don't know if this is Acer's fault or my cousin's fault, since he leaves it sometimes in the hands of some (naughty!) kids, may be THEY tortured the touchpad...

[davidmoore]

If you get a multicored processor in your laptop make sure you pick up CoreAVC for decoding h.264. FFDShow is good, but is single threaded so it only utilizes one core of a processor which could hinder playback. CoreAVC on the other hand is multithreaded, so you won't have this issue.

[DJ Bobo]

FFDShow is good, but is single threaded

That's not true. Older versions may be, but not anymore.
CoreAVC is better of course.