The Doorses are in the market for a laptop. My PC is rather elderly (I bought it in 2001, and it was hardly state-of-the-art then), and since Aaron likes computers, I want one that I can fold up and stow away. Being able to take it to school is a bonus.
I’m not sure I want a Dell, because my mother has a Dell laptop, and her hard drive died due to a defect in the computer.
Here’s what I’m looking for. I want a machine that has a good bit of RAM, a significant hard drive (40 GB minimum), and a decent CPU speed. And it can’t be a Mac. (Sorry. It’s got to be compatible with the other computers I use, which are PCs.) I also need something relatively inexpensive. Reliability and durability is also a factor.
Get a new Toshiba or HP/Compaq on sale at Circuit City or Best Buy ( 650 - 750 after rebates). Any new notebook will have more than enough horwepower to do everything you need.
When you say “inexpensive”, how inexpensive do you mean? $700 would probably only get you a budget range Dell Inspiron (not bad, but not exactly the sturdiest or highest performing machine you can find). If you’re willing go double that, your options open up quite a bit.
There’s a reason why people call Toshibas “Toshitboxes”. HP/Compaq doesn’t lend itself to such a nickname, but they aren’t that great either.
You’re probably pretty well off with a Dell - they have decent reliability, good warranties, and everything they sell will be powerful enough for your needs.
But keep in mind that you’re never going to find a new, reliable, inexpensive computer. And laptops are inherently less reliable than desktops, and more expensive to fix when they fail. Their manufacturing tolerances are higher, they suffer from more physical and thermal stress, and so forth. Hard drives in particular fail often in laptops because of all the bumping and jarring.
I came into the thread to recommend you get a Mac PowerBook, but since it needs to be a PC… I’ve heard mostly good things about the Sony Vaio series. Sony boxes in general seem to be well-built.
I’m willing to go as high as around $1500. One of the reasons I want a laptop is because I hope to do some freelance work, and I want to be able to operate as a mobile studio. The editing software I use takes a LOT of resources to operate properly, so I know I need to spend the bux. I don’t have the dough to do it 100% right, though. (This means the fastest processor, biggest hard drive, most RAM, etc.
Despite my need for a PC, a Mac would actually be ideal for what I want to do. Unfortunately, I use PCs most of the time, and I need to avoid compatibility problems.
I’d stay away from Toshiba. My laptop’s hard drive died exactly one month and one day after I bought it. I sent it to Toshiba to get fixed, and never got it back. They managed to lose it, and it took me several months to A. Admit that they’d received it, and B. Send out a replacement.
What compatibility problems are you worried about, exactly? I’ve had absolutely none working simultaneously with an IBM Thinkpad and an Apple Powerbook for the past six months.
OS 9 was a different story, but OS X plays very well with Windows.
On the other hand, Apples are fairly expensive. You definitely get better hardware with a PC, but it’s up to you whether you consider the superior software on Mac to be worth the extra money.
Assuming you still want a PC, I’d say buy a Dell, and spend your extra money on RAM. Spending money on a fast processor will only get you incremental improvements, and extra hard drive space is cheap and easy with USB/Firewire drives, but you’ll a notice a difference in everything you do if you have a lot of RAM. Especially if you’re doing editing work.
Sonys always seem overpriced to me, and I’ve heard they have horrendous support.
That should be to “get them to admit that they’d received it.” All of the tracking information was in order too, so they knew that it had gotten to Tech support, they just decided to lie.
The editing software I use apparently does not come in a Mac version. I know Mac has audio editing software, but I prefer Audition because it’s professional-quality and pretty much the industry standard.
I did compare Sony and Dell, and while I’d have to customize the Dell, they’re roughly the same price-wise. (The Dell is somewhat more expensive, but I get a student discount, so they’re roughly the same.)
I’ve been using notebooks since before they were even called “notebooks”. I’ve bought , sold, and occasionally repaired, many, many portable PCs over the years. You are certainly entitled to your little snarky little soundbite of an opinion, but it is glaringly obvious you have absolutely no farking idea what you are talking about, and apparenlty think the use of the word “toshitboxes” gives you some kind of credibility.
Toshibas are, in general, perfectly fine notebooks and can go toe to toe wtih virtually any manufacturer in terms of product quality. There are three basic tiers of notebook build quality in the Windows world.
1: Upper level circa 2000 and newer IBM Thinkpads - Internally and externally engineering and build quality is a noticeable cut above the rest. Occasionally there’s a clunker, but these units lead the way (this may or may not change now that ownership has recently changed).
2: Sony-Toshiba-Compaq/HP-Sharp-Dell etc - Generally good quality workhorse notebooks by solid, name companies.
3: Second/third tier and “no name” notebooks. Some can be quite acceptable, and some are even OEMd by the same Asian OEM manufacturers making notebooks for category 2, but overall fit & finish quality, fine engineering detials, and longer term hardware support support is lacking.
A student discount? How’s that? I have been trying to find a laptop for myself and I can’t seem to make up my mind. I have been looking at Dells because they are generally pretty good. Then someone mentioned Eurocom, but I can’t really find any reviews of them. What a trial!
I’ve had a Dell Inspiron 5000 as a work machine for almost five years, and it’s still running well. I won’t claim it’s been completely trouble free (the clock stops when it goes to sleep and never starts up again) but it’s been pretty reliable.
I do know that the batteries they sell with their bargain-basement laptops are terrible (can’t even keep the laptop running for an hour), so definitely upgrade the battery if you go that route.
The Dells, HPaqs, and Gateways of the world are not for people who need it to not break and live a long and fruitful life. If you buy one, you almost have to add some maintenance dollars to the final price, because chances are fairly reasonable (10-20%?) that something’s going to break within the first couple of years. I can’t imagine that you’re better off with one of these then you are with, say, an Acer , or even a white box, if they price out better.
If you’re willing to choose reliablility over features, and you’re really willing to go up to $1500, then I’d stick with an IBM Thinkpad. Add another 256MB to this, and you’ll be set for years. (Note that there are cheaper IBM thinkpads on that site, but I picked this one because it was the cheapest one that had a real graphics processor. If you’re not doing any video editing (and not much gaming), you can probably get one of the ones with the Intel graphics. ) If you’ve read a lot of my past posts, and you’ve taken a guess at who I work for, the fact that I recommend IBM laptops over the others mentioned should mean a bit more than otherwise.
I don’t know enough about Sony or Toshiba these days to give a good opinion.
While I don’t have as much extensive experience as you, oh glorious laptop master, I have owned and known the owners of several different laptop brands for the past few years.
My boss bought five Toshiba Tecras of differing configurations for various people in our startup. They constantly had issues with overheating, mechanical failures, hard drive crashes, and general wonkiness. When visitors in the office heard about our woes, nearly every one of them had similar stories to tell. They’ve since been replaced with Dells and IBMs, with no problems.
People I know who’ve owned HP, Compaq and HP/Compaq laptops talk about them pretty much like you’d talk about a cheap Korean car: they work okay, but there are better choices out there for a bit more money. And don’t expect them to last very long.
I’ve personally owned a Dell Inspiron 8200, which I’d compare to a Toyota or Honda. It’s an appliance that gets the job done with minimal fuss and has a good warranty behind it, even if all aspects of it aren’t perfect.
I now own a Thinkpad T42 and an Apple Powerbook. The Powerbook is a BMW (a small price premium, good performance, with some niggling little issues), the Thinkpad is a Porsche (fast and bulletproof reliability).
The fact that my opinions differ from yours does not automatically mean that they’re wrong.
Personally, I think that saying that Dell is a step ahead of the HPs and Toshibas of the world is an opinion that’s about a year or two out of date. They were a step up, but then HP put too much price pressure on them, and they responded by lowering their prices, shipping support off to India, and lowering their quality. Of course, this is all just my opinion.
Given that the hard drive on my mother’s computer just up and died due to a manufacturing defect (no joke – the repair guy she sent it to apparently has some forensics experience and checked it for evidence of a virus), and given the lousy tech support I got when it first died, I am putting Dell close to the bottom of the list. Nothing speaks louder than a bad personal experience.
I’ve had a Dell laptop for three months - I got it to do some low-quality video editing, and just for fun.
Two weeks ago, one of the memory modules crapped out on me. They refused to replace it. I wanted to upgrade the memory anyway, so I went ahead and bought a 512. They promised to credit me for the difference between the 256 it shipped with and the 512 I bought from their site.
Still haven’t seen the credit.
This is my first experience with Dell, and so far, I’m not very happy. I had a Sony Vaio laptop that I used for three years and really liked, so I’d recommend a Vaio over anything. Especially if you’re going for any kind of editing purposes - I found it pretty good for that.
I only use Thinkpads. They’re reliable, take a beating, well put together and black*. If you want your machine to last, I say spring for a Thinkpad, particularly the T-series.
I know the plural of anecdote is not data, but there is a group of about 6,000 students that will tell you the Thinkpad is no good.
RPI (the school I attended) has had a mandatory laptop program since 1999. The laptops have always been thinkpads, and they have always caused more problems than one can count. Just off the top of my head:
Battery will die just after one year (after the warrenty runs out) even if the utmost of care is taken (i.e., letting it discharge completly before charging.)
The screen are sub-par. I would say about 10% of them had at least one pixel that was bad. When I say bad, I mean permanetly blue, red, green, white, or dead. One pixel douesn’t seem too bad, unless it’s right in the middle of the screen and bright green.
Can’t handle resource intensive programs. Several programs like Maple (a math program), Solidwork (a CAD program), Form Z (a drafting program), and so fourth would cause them to crash. For a normal user, this might not be a problem, but since you say you need it for audio editing, which can be hard on hardware, this may be an issue.
Granted, that last problem could be fixed if we just got laptops with more RAM, but the school decided to get the ‘middle of the barrel’ Thinkpads. Not completley low-end, but not really up to the tasks which they had to do.