I'm buying a laptop... opinions?

[lawrocket 3]

Smart move not going Mac if you plan on using it for any law school reasons... I have yet to find any good pleading software for a Mac...

Edited to add: I've been perfectly happy with my Sony Vaio.

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[AndyMan 7]

Toshibas are good.

I agree, avoid Dell. They are simply not durable.

The advice I always give when buying computers is simple: Buy the most powerful machine that you can afford and it will serve you well.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[pilotdave 0]

Well, I think its slightly more complicated than that. Laptops come in different varieties. Even if I could afford a laptop with a 17 inch screen, I wouldn't buy one. I'd prefer a little tiny light one with a 12 inch screen. The little tiny laptops often sacrifice power and features that the big ones have, but if portability is important to you, tht might be the better way to go.

I personally have a crappy dell. It was a piece of crap from day 1. Luckily it was my brother's, not mine. I ordered it for him, and chose to have a floppy drive and CD drive. I was pretty shocked to open the box and find out only one could be installed at a time. Didn't happen to mention that little tidbit on the dell site.

He ended up giving me the laptop when it drove him totally insane and he moved on to a compaq or something. I fixed most of the issues, but now diagonal rows of keys tend to stop working every once in a while, and the touchpad randomly just starts moving the cursor for no reason sometimes. But I don't complain when I'm given a free laptop.

Dave

[scottbre 0]

Check out this goliath of a laptop. It has fricken everything on it, and it's priced well too.

http://pctorque.com/8790.php

"Your mother's full of stupidjuice!"
My Art Project

[bshl 0]

Be careful with Dell; their tech support sucks stagnant swamp water. Also, I practically insist on 3 year warranties on laptops for our users. With desktops if something breaks, you can buy a replacement anywhere. With laptops, if anything breaks, you'll spend significantly more than the cost of the warranty on the repair. Go for it; use it once and it's more than paid for itself. Call it cheap insurance.

Edited to add: For my money, Gateway's the way to go. Toshiba makes a great laptop but I'm partial to Gateways. You'll be happy with either one.

Blue skies and happy landings!

[MattM 0]

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Avoid Dell at all costs - they used to make good laptops (I had one for several years) but have gone downhill lately, and since their customer service was outsourced to India, it's completely horrible - we've wasted hundreds of person-hours at my company trying to get the damn things working properly and it's just a joke.

Oh yea? I am network admin for Eaton Corp which has over 15,000 Dell stations and 200 plus dell servers... no real problems. At the plant I work at there are 200 desktops/laptops and the only problems I've seen with them is Windows! But if you beat yours around a lot get the Gold Support... welll well well worth the money, they fix anything, anytime, no questions asked within 24hours.

Matt

[Amazon 7]

I have a Dell Inspirion.. the Warranty service has bee outstanding...but then again I deal will Dell service alot for Servers and EMC units, so they are used to my alias at a certain company.com and they seem to deal with me quickly.. like sending a DSHL Courier to my house to pick up my laptop when it was getting funky on me.. WITH a special shipping box.. it came back the next morning all fixed.

Any laptop you buy .. get all the warranty you can afford.. you will break it at some point and fixing it can be exceedingly expensive.

[Layton 0]

my wife has a toshiba and it has been a good little puter.has dvd video card bunch of other stuff.i have a little fujitsu and this little thing has been bullet proof.ive had it for 3 years now it was my mother in laws and she gave it to me and it ran for years with out a hitch.didnt lock up crash or anything.we just put a new hard drive in it and thats all that has been done to this little puter.we are puter poor here one in every room and each have a laptop.course my mother in law builds puters for the mother boards up so we have not bought a puter in years.of course my mother inlaw love me and im pretty crazy about her too.i couldnt have found a better mother in law if i went and found a mother inlaw first and then married her daughter.just thought d throw that in for the old mother n law son n law stigma that the world seems to have.good luck on your shopping

[Misslmperfect 0]

i have a zt series HP laptop (very similar to HHs new one), except mine is a little over 2 years old. i have not had 1 issue with this machine other than issues ive caused. im looking into buying a new one and ill more then likely stick with HP.

this post is probably pointless b/c i know nothing about gaming or whether my laptop would be good for that, but in general HP makes a great computer imo!!!!!

Oh Canada, merci pour la livraison!

[TequilaGirl 0]

I have a Sony Vaio, a PowerBook G4 and my office loans me an IBM Thinkpad....I by far prefer the PowerBook - especially now that I have an Ipod....hehehe (I have never had a problem with the Sony - the IBM on the otherhand....thank God for IT departments....)

[PhillyKev 0]

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That's a myth. Apple's laptops are comparable to or cheaper than most PC laptops. Check it out. It's true. Oh, and unlike high-end PC laptops, they get more than 20 minutes of battery life.

I did look it up. And it's not even close.

Check out the one furthest to the right
$1650
http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/cmod.to?seg=HHO&coid=-26376&sel=0&rcid=-26367&ccid=1291021

Virtually identical to the Apple for $2500
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore.woa/72007/wo/zU1EB7pDjUCZ3NMrUtN1VcctgmS/0.0.7.1.0.5.17.1.3.27.3.1.1.0?67,8

[AndyMan 7]

Clowdburner said:

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Avoid Dell at all costs - they used to make good laptops (I had one for several years) but have gone downhill lately

MattM then said:

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Oh yea? I am network admin for Eaton Corp which has over 15,000 Dell stations and 200 plus dell servers... no real problems.

And both are consistent with my 7 years in the IT business.

Dell consistently puts out a rock solid line of Desktops (specifically Dimension and Precision), and Servers, both rack-mount and tower. Their products and support in these two areas are unbeatable. The price:performance is fantastic.

However, their laptops are altogeather a completely different beast. Specifically, the Inspiron line of laptops is totally weak. They're prone to hardware failures, and are extremely fragile, too. The latitude line of laptops is significanlty better, but still failure prone. Customer Support for Inspiron is outsourced to India, and I've frequently had calls where I could not understand the tech. If you are going to buy a Dell laptop, make sure to buy the extended waranty, you will use it extensively.

After 8 onsite tech visits with my old Inspiron 5000, Dell actually upgraded me to a new Inspriron 8200 about a year ago. I'm still having problems, but I'm now out of waranty so I have to buy parts myself. My next task will be replacing the cooling fans, as they're on the way out - after only a year. In the last year I've already replaced the hard disk and motherboard.

_Am

__

You put the fun in "funnel" - craichead.

[Clownburner 0]

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I did look it up. And it's not even close.

I'm not going to get into a religious war here. But an Apple laptop with comparable specs (HD,memory,display) and performance to the Toshiba you mentioned is $1,449.00. And it's about $200 less with an education discount (which any college or school ID will get you). To be fair though, the Toshiba does include a 3-year warranty at no extra charge.

But does your Windows laptop do this?

[/Users/james]$ uptime
11:00 up 21 days, 15:26, 1 user, load averages: 0.42 0.77 0.69

That reboot was an upgrade, too.


Edit: Cuz I kant spel

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