The Shrine

But I don't know what the best ones are. My parents aim to buy me a new laptop for Christmas and they want some technical specs. I don't know much about hardware and don't want to buy a lousy computer, though price-wise I'm looking for something fairly cheap.

I'd want the computer for:

Video and audio editing
Word documents
And have a shit ton of memory so I can download a lot of things and not have the computer slow to a glacial pace.

Does anybody here have any reccomendations, especially for a decent price, or any advice to someone looking to custom-build a computer? I'd appreciate any help you can provide.

A cheap laptop that will be good at audio and video editing may be mutually exclusive requirements - of course, it depends on what you mean by "cheap", and how "good" you want it to be.

When someone says they want a Windows laptop, I recommend Dell: http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops

You can probably find something in the Inspiron or Studio lines. But be aware that the advertised base prices can be several hundred dollars lower than the price of the computer you actually want. (For example, the base Inspiron 14 is listed as $489, but it only has 2 GB of RAM, which I don't think is reasonable these days. Getting 4 GB bumps it to $629, and 8 GB to $814.)

I'd recommend Dell as well. I've always used Dell as have many of my friends and we've always been very happy with them.

I think the $1400 dell xps 16 is pretty baller and could handle most anything you throw at it.

http://www.dell.com/us/p/studio-xps-1647/fs

But its $1400... maybe pay $500 yourself?

Seems more economical to get a good laptop for everyday browsing and Word editing, and use a desktop for video editing. (Audio editing is no problem; no need for huge gear for that.) Of course, if you go for a laptop with 4G (which is standard for most desktops), you're probably going to be pretty good in the video editing dept, anyway.

But, again, a laptop is not designed for video editing.

I'm a big fan of IBM ThinkPads. My t41 has been going for six years and the only thing that has been replaced is the hard drive. Forty gb got old pretty quickly any way. I'm guessing they aren't that great compared to others for audio and video editing, though.