I am in the market for a new or refurbished laptop, and am wanting to spend less than $400. For that price I can get a pretty decent system (4GB RAM that can be upgraded to 8GB, 300-500GB hard drive, good processor, etc).
However I don’t know which brands are good or bad. I am mostly looking for something that will not break or fall apart for 4+ years. Does it matter if a laptop is Toshiba, Lenovo, Acer, HP, etc?
A new HP Pavilion g6-1b60us is on sale at Staples for about $350, plus with a $25 off coupon I can save even more but some of the reviews on amazon say it starts to fall apart within 6 months. My acer aspire cost me about the same and lasted me 4.5 years w/o problems and only recently started having problems.
There really aren’t many for $400, but please define durability.
When you said that I thought of IBM toughbooks,
Laptops for the most part are made by 2 companies and then stamped with their info.
If you can spend a more at the $769 price point is a great laptop Sager makes the best I’ve ever had. However, that’s the cheapest Sager.
• 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i5 / i7 mobile processor
• 1GB GDDR3 nVIDIA GeForce GT 520M with Optimus Technology / Embedded Intel GMA HD Graphics
• Dual Channel DDR3 System Memory Support
• USB 3.0, eSATA and HDMI-out Ports Support
USB 3.0 Esata HDMI all awesome things to have on a laptop. You really can’t go wrong with Sager, I have one from 7 years ago (a desktop replacement and it runs most games from today, although it’s huge.)
I think you mean Panasonic Toughbooks or maybe Lenovo (used to be IBM) Thinkpads. They’re really different beasts, in that the Toughbook is a ruggedized laptop designed for extreme conditions, while the Thinkpad is a business laptop with a reputation for quality.
My recommendation for a more durable computer is to buy into the business line of the manufacturer, so Lenovo Thinkpad, Dell Latitude, or whatever HP and the others call their business lines. The business computers tend to be a bit better made, because they don’t need to hit that $350 price point at Staples. They tend to have metal frames and higher quality plastic. The computing guts tend to be pretty similar across all machines, or at least can be compared directly—a 2.1Ghz i5 vs. a 2.4Ghz i7—as opposed to “it just feels more solid.”
You can hit the manufacturers’ refurbished sites and find some good deals on business class machines, but they’re going to be more expensive than the $350 one at Staples. If that is the price range you’re looking at, then I think the right thing to do is change your mindset. You’re not buying a durable computer that needs to last 4 years, your buying a cheap disposable computer that you’d be happy to get 2 years out of, and then spend another $350 on another one in 2 years.
That being said, always backup your data. There are only a couple of companies which make hard drives, and they all fail. They also all can get stolen. Your data is not backed up unless it exists in multiple places.
Durability = the ability to last 3+ years without a mechanical failure that requires repairing or replacing parts of the laptop.
According to this
Toshiba and Asus are the best, their mechanical failure rate is about 16% after 3 years vs about 21% for all brands on average and about 26% for the worst brands. HP and Gateway are among the worst. But even among the worst brand, HP, the malfunction rate was only 25.6% after 3 years.
I’ve used, bought, sold, and on occasion repaired a bunch of bargain notebooks over the years for some very abusive users (my kids). I would never call Toshibas particularly reliable or honestly all that well made. HP’s gave gave me good service and would take a beating, but are a bitch to disassemble and service.
Lenovos had the best fit and finish of any notebooks I’ve run across. Getting a very expensive ruggedized notebook like a Toughbook is absurd unless you are in the field or the military. My advice would be to get a Lenovo and a 3 year service plan.
The things that in my past experiences broke the most often on laptops were hard drives and AC pins. A MacBook air has neither, but it also ain’t cheap. I don’t know that there’s a middle ground.
My 6+ year old Toshiba (purchased for $400) runs perfectly and I didn’t treat it well. Bought a Compaq last year just because and I doubt it will last more than 3 years. Just doesn’t feel as sturdy. Next computer will definitely be a Toshiba.
Consumer Reports ratings of reliability, based on responses of 26,000+ people reporting repairs needed to laptops purchased in the last 4 years, are as follows:
[ul]
[li]Apple 8%[/li][li]Acer, Toshiba 10%[/li][li]Lenovo, Gateway, HP 11%[/li][li]Sony, Compaq, Dell 12%[/li][/ul]
But like echoreply said, many of these manufacturers offer a business line with more durable components. The Consumer Reports listings don’t break these lines out.
What you’re looking for is more about price-point than brand. Any $400 laptop will be cheap, they have to cut corners (everywhere) to make that price point. Any $1000-$1400 laptop will be rugged and well made. It’s the middleground I can’t answer. A $1200 MacBook air will be a solid chunk of aluminum. It’s that support that creates longevity. Likewise, the other brands in that pricerange will have sturdy structures that pretty warping of the motherboard.
At the $600 level? I dunno. $800? Likewise.
My four year old 17 Mac book pro is made like a Sherman tank and still looks like the day I took it out of the box. It was, however, bought by my company, and cost $2600, so ymmv.
I am currently typing on a Toshiba Satellite that is about to turn five years old. I believe she cost $450, brand new. 1.2GHz Dual Core, 1GB RAM, 120GB hard drive, right now dual boot Vista/Ubuntu. She is not fancy, but she does function.
The particularly nice thing about Satellites is that in the event that something does break – or you just feel like upgrading your baby a bit – they all take modular parts out of the same pool. Also cheap. I’m terrible to keyboards and managed to bang/batter/crumb/spill the first one into oblivion after about three years, and the replacement was $20. At four years I needed a new battery, which was also $20.
The bit that surprises me most is that the DVD burner still works. I do a lot of disc burning, for archives and playing videos on consoles and so forth, and even the cheap model from '07 had a drive that burns pretty much anything that comes in the shape of a disc. My early desktop burners lasted 2-3 years tops, but the laptop drive is still ticking along.
If you aren’t planning on carrying it around all that much, you can also try Dell’s “desktop replacement” line of Inspirons. A friend of mine has one of the ones that comes with integrated subwoofer and a million ports – basically, it’s glued to its own docking station. The thing weighs 12lbs, has been dropped from a shoulder bag onto ice, rained/snowed on, hauled around the world, used inside, outside, wired, wireless, cracked, modded, formatted and given a new OS at least twice, cleaned with a set of new sumi-e brushes, had four thousand weird peripherals attached to it, and still works. It was not, however, cheap.
Panasonic’s Toughbooks have an average failure rate of under 3%. http://www.panasonic.com/business/toughbook/why-toughbook-failure-rates.asp Of course you won’t be getting one under $400 unless it is an older model. These things don’t die. I have several and the only reason they get replaced is to upgrade, they are all running. The oldest one I have is about eleven years old, been abused, left in the rain and spent most of it’s life in dirty, hot environment with metal shaving flying everywhere. After I retired it I just hosed it off outside with some simple green and it looks pretty much brand new.