The PDF isn't loading for me, were those laptops in general or did they break it down into business and consumer grade because that would make a difference.

It's also worth noting that the Lenovo business class laptops tend to be quite easily serviced and modular enough that you can fix them if you need to. Obviously, not as much as a desktop, but quite a bit more so than most laptops.

Not that I'm particularly biased, I own a Lenovo x120e ATM and I had a Sony GRX-560 back a decade ago. And briefly had a POS HP. And I do have an ASUS Eee PC 900 which was decent except for the battery life being cut into due to a USB hardware bug. The Lenovo is by far the best constructed of the laptops I've owned.

You should definitely get your hands on an Acer one. They are, simply said, an amazing engineering work... I think my cat could have constructed their laptops better.

To get to the damn CPU you need to take out EVERYTHING. Yes, EVERYTHING. Keyboard, buttons, detach the display, remove every single component, literally. -_-

EDIT: Either that, or drill a hole in the plastic and hope you hit the spot.

I'll probably get the chance eventually. I've never had one, but my Dad and my brother both have them.

People tend to scoff at me, but I always get the extended warranty on laptops unless it's an extremely cheap one. In the years I've been doing it, they've typically paid for themselves. My current Lenovo may very well be the exception.

Same goes for the people I know, they also seem to get more value from the warranty than it costs. I suppose I may just know people that are hard on the equipment or with bad luck.

I did it on a machine that only had 2G of RAM. There wasn't any problem...

My monitor right now is the only thing that's decent - 37 inch screen.
What's your thoughts on Windows 8?

Would a fast harddrive be a good idea to use as a scratch disk or would that money be better put into something else?
Currently, I'm looking @ 16 but my friend tells me that's overkill.
I'd like to be able to have HDMI i/o on a gfx card but every forum has the fanboys telling me the others are terrible and theirs are better so I'm at a loss as to which one to believe. What are your thoughts?

4 gb of ram seems a little low to me, would 12 be sufficient if I started with that and then added more later or would that cause recognition issues with the O/S?

I'm sticking with PC. A lot of my clients use PCs and I don't want to dual-boot something that would cost me more just to give me more headaches. Win 7 64 sort of took Mac's place for gf design stuff and I can build a much stronger machine for the same price.

If you're buying a tablet then it's a pretty good choice. Desktop? Forget it.

Yeah, don't got for an Mac if you're serious about video editing. PC, get a good editing program. Don't buy from iBuyPower or CyberPower, they take terrible customer service to the next level. Dell - not that they're great shakes in the customer service department either, but they're better - has some good sales going on now.

lol good to know. I'm not in the market for that. So does the old adage of avoiding every 2nd windows product hold true?

So far it's holding up just fine, unfortunately. To be fair, Windows 8 does look like it will do really well on a tablet. It's just a pain when not on a touchscreen.

More true than ever, it seems. It's got a few good ideas in there and there are some worthwhile improvements. But they're buried under a heavily touchscreen-centric UI and some bizarre and unnecessary omissions. Compared with Windows 7, the cons far outweigh the pros.

All in all it's a hell of a lot worse for desktops than Vista ever was.