sincere | Laptop Crisis!

Dell laptops are good if you have the extended service plan, which is admittedly pricey, or if you NEVER FOR ANY REASON need to call customer support. Chris had the extended service plan, and they were great to him. I had no service plan, and constantly got transferred to techs that did not appear to understand what I was saying.
Vaios are good, but hella expensive.
Be very careful with Random PCs. Chris had a Random PC (an Acer, I think) which developed a cracked screen far too quickly and then had no options for repair other than to send it to their Texas-based depot for an Undetermined Amount Of Time, or to order parts from them and get a third party agency to install stuff, and ... gah, it was bad and you don't want to do that. At least don't get an Acer, even though they look good on their face and are cheap.
(You could get a Mac and dual-boot it, now. That would be what I would do, because the Mac hardware is indeed better and it's nice to have options. And I know you said not to tell you about Macs, and I'm not listening la la la. :-D)

When I worked with Dell's tech support through the AU vet school they were fantastic, helpful, and spoke perfect english - but we also bought 800 computers from them. So they loved us. I think the service plan thing that phinnia mentioned probably makes a lot of difference. I dont have much experience with them though other than playing on Adam or Jason's dell laptops. I would never buy a desktop from them because I can build something comparable for half the price, but that's not really an option with the laptop ;)

. . . I have an HP Pavilion. It has not yet burst into flames. In fact, I'm very happy with it. Then again, I've only had it for a year and have taken frighteningly protective care of it. Not exactly normal use. So you probably don't want to hear about non-dead HP computers.

Don't get a Gateway. Just . . . don't. We had one for a while. It started glitching spectacularly immediately after the warranty expired, and by the end it had a mind of its own and a hard drive made of swiss cheese. It once bluescreened 28 successive times in a row.

No particular advice on brand, although AlienWare is pretty. But I advise you to go to a BJ's wholesale club if you know of one in your area. They're having a big laptop sale this whole month I believe.

I have a Gateway, it's been really good. It got screwed up once when it got hit by lightning, and their toll free tech support guys were really nice and helpful. I think I got this one for about $1450, I'd recommend it.

Really? I've had a Gateway for a year and a half, and it's been awesome.

We had (have? It's a paperweight now...) a Vaio that Jason used for work and travelled with for two years, and then survived a couple more in the house with me, the kids, and a very accident prone cat (who managed to knock out a couple of keys with his fat butt). I think it's the most reliable laptop we've had so far, not including the fancy-schmancy notebook thing his new job gave him that I'm not allowed to touch.

I will share one quick horror story from the having of my Dell. I don't believe they sell the model I had anymore, but it's still a factor to keep in mind, particuarly since through research I discovered the problem had been found before I bought mine (direct from them) and yet wasn't addressed at all by Dell themselves.

Certain models of Dell laptop are apparently striken with a design flaw that causes overheating and results in the motherboard warping. When this occurs, here's what happens when you try and use your computer... It blinks out. More and more frequently until it comes to the point that you can't move it at all if you do manage to get it to start, because the case puts enough pressure on the motherboard to send you off to having a black screen of nothing. The computer itself doesn't shut off, you then have to hold the power button until it does, and you lose everything you were working on, pretty much.

When this happened to mine, it started as an occassional thing, and I thought it was something minor with a pressure point on the bottom of the machine. In the end, earlier this year, the machine broke down entirely and even the slightest motion caused the problem. I was informed (by both Dell and an outside contractor) that I could have the problem fixed, but it would cost me anywhere from $500 - $750 to do so. And the contractor claimed he could keep it from happening again, but Dell couldn't offer the same assurance.

In the end, I scrapped the Dell and bought another laptop. Because of this, I'll never buy another Dell, no matter how many positive things I hear about the company. I have a Toshiba now, and have had absolutely no problems with it. But. Judging by your poll, you aren't interested in one of those. XD

(I want an AlienWare machine, but they're pretty pricey.)

*shall not tell you about Macs*

well, I just bought a toshiba (literally last week... it's supposed to come via UPS tomorrow, I AM SO EXCITED?!?!?) and you will definitely hear about it if it bursts into flames!

I custom-built mine to have the same hardware and stats as the black macbook (which is quite the nice machine; my friend has one and I LOOOOOOVE the magnetic latch and power but I just didn't want to deal with how all my apple-loving friends were like IF YOU'RE NOT GONNA MOSTLY USE IT TO RUN OSX THEN DON'T BOTHER SHAMING IT WITH YOUR WINDOWS NONSENSE and I was like fine bitches and bought the toshiba).

I've heard nothing but bad about Dells; everyone says if you get one, get the extended service plan also (later I will probably get this for my toshiba also). My friend's boyfriend has had one about 2 years and they have extended service, which has been great for them since he's had to have almost every part of it replaced, sometimes twice.

it sounds like you have more money than I did, so why not check out the lenovo thinkpads? my friend does IT for his company which includes fixing everyone's laptops and he said all the lenovos he's seen have been very nice reliable machines... they were a bit out of my price range, but they should be within yours.

I am of course telling you to go for a Vaio because I and everyone I know who has one has loved it. They're reliable, sturdy computers. Your link up there goes to the S series models which are more pricy, but it looks like the FJ or FS series would be nice, too, and they're a bit less expensive. As a note, the FJ series come in the most awesome colors ever.

The Sony website gives you the option to build your own computer, so it wouldn't be too hard to get something that'll do what you want and still stay withing your price range, plus if you buy today, shipping is free and you can trade in whatever your old computer is for credit. Pretty sweet deal.

All this said, my only beef with Sony is how overpriced they are. WAY overpriced... at least last time i bothered to look :)

They may well have improved since then. This was five years ago, with Windows 98 (not even Second Edition). But the problems we ended up having with it were enough to make me swear off getting one ever again. But I'm glad yours is good. &hearts

Hrm, I have a fat clunky Dell (inspiron 1150) laptop that was my dad's for about half a year or more, I think we got it for about $1000-900, pretty cheap. It's been mine for a little less then a year. It works fine except during the beginning of the summer I started to notice it would get REALLY hot on the keyboard, especially when I was working it pretty hard with Photoshop. I started getting worried that it would fry itself so now I have a small desk fan aimed at it whenever it's on. I also put little erasers underneath it to increase air flow. Yeah, it's pretty retarded. It almost always stays home though. :P

~~My Mac is fantastico!~~

My experience with Dells has not been great. It seems like they garner problems and spyware, which I personally think is a pain to remove. Sometimes there have been random inexplicable issues popping up which I find confusing and distressing.

If you're going to go the non-Mac route, I think the Vaio would be the best to go for. From what I've seen when hanging out with Abby, it looks very shiny and reliable. So I'd go for that.

What happened to your Toshiba? XD

Sony and Toshiba are both top-rank brands--especially Sony, lately. If I were in the market, I'd probably go for a Vaio. Everything I've heard says they're really nice machines, with decent battery life, and I've never had any problems with any of my other copious Sony products. (Hell, my original first-year PS1 still works without a hitch!)

I do recommend putting out the extra to get XP Pro instead of XP Home, though; Home is buggy as all shit but I have had precisely one problem with Pro and that was solved by an auto-update.

Also, Dell and Gateway are both horrible, horrible, HORRIBLE places to get computers from. It's not that the machines are bad, it's just that if anything goes wrong--and with demons inside them, something ALWAYS goes wrong--you are raped up the ass with sharp points on customer service issues.

You might also try Kehtron (http://www.kehtron.com/). They're a small company, but we've gotten something like twelve machines from them over the past decade or so, and when we've had problems (such as losing a driver disk, or a hard drive crapping out after three years of hard use), the owner has made real nice with us. Like, fixed problems for free kind of real nice, and given us huge deals on parts, etc.

Admittedly, all the machines we've gotten have been desktops, but they do do their own laptops, too, so I can't imagine they'd be LESS wonderful.

>.< Wrong journal, sorry!

This is Ri/Lissa, who used to be

caffeineaddict long ago. Add me if you want? :x

Anyway, I bought a Gateway laptop back in April, and I am so madly in love with it that words cannot explain. I know Gateways used to be awful computers (after their brief stint as amazing computers), but they've really changed a lot of things around and I could not be happy with my affordable yet powerful Gateway. He is everything I ever wished for, and his display is gorgeous.

Just throwing my two cents in. :D

(Options? On the contrary. I've spent the last several months troubleshooting Macs and it's been my experience that their idea of options are extremely superficial and have absolutely no bearing on the operation of any given program.)

(I could fill up PAGES with my utter loathing of Macs. Suffice it to say that god forbid anything ever goes wrong with a Mac, because the so-called Apple Geniuses believe all their propaganda about how Macs never break and so when you call with a genuine problem that can't be solved by reminding you of how EASY it is to UNINSTALL lolomgbbq they are baffled........)

Stopping now. Suffice it to say that as appealing as Macs are, and even though a tiny part of me still appreciates them as nice and quiet and smooth, I should just stick a nail into my eyeball.

I'm a bit wary of Big Company Random PCs -- like Acer is just big enough of a name to feel like I'd be a cog in the machine but not a big ENOUGH name for me to feel confident that they might actually produce something reliable. But smaller third-party groups like WidowPC are right on the edge there -- and they swear up and down about their personalized customer service, so...

Yeah, it's a real shame. I had my desktop custom-built for next to no charge, more or less just the price of its assembled pieces, and it's beautiful, runs like a charm, I've had it for what must be like three years now and it's just. a blessing. Never ever had a problem with it. It's my love, my baaaaby.

But you really can't do that with a laptop. The closest I could get is the third-party Widow.

Basically, what all the above links come down to is that I could get a comparable machine from all three places for more or less the same price -- $1700-1800. So I'm angsting. XD I'm including the 3 year extended service plan on the Dell, and the Sony plans are....... kind of confusing and expensive and would push me over my dollar amount. The WidowPC warranty I'd only be able to get for a year without jumping way over my price range, but apparently they offer excellent customer service regardless. So hmm.

My HP Satellite was nothing but problem after problem, terrible customer service -- seven months of sending it back and forth for the same problem, every time which they claimed they had fixed -- and eventually it did, in fact, end with spontaneous internal combustion. I heard similar bad stories from other users of HP Satellites -- maybe it's just that particular line -- but HP also owns Compaq now and they suck too.

Anyway. Laptops are devilishly hit-and-miss, I think. I tend to abuse mine more than most people and thus require a bit more durable a laptop. XD

(Oh, blue screen. How we love you.)

AlienWare is pretty, but so are Macs, and I'm not buying one of them either. X3

That's a great idea, I should look and see if there's one nearby...

...got hit by lightning?

That's probably a good recommendation towards a Vaio. XD An active household is probably more dangerous to machinery than I could be just using it extensively.

Well, I lived in Tampa. Some power surge during a storm fucked it up or something. It worked out though.

Gah, overheating is the bane of my existence! As you can see, my HP laptop literally combusted before it died of melting, and my Toshiba laptop has been overheating something brutal lately -- around once a night it shuts itself off without warning from the heat, no matter how careful I am to keep it on a flat hard surface and elevated etc. (What model of Toshiba?)

My desktop is big and beautiful and custom-designed by a third party gaming vendor and has never, ever given me a single problem, and it has fan power to the max. My computer is always touchable, but you can feel the heat coming out in a solid wall from it ~~because I leave it running for weeks at a time even in oppressively hot weather~~ thanks to the powerful cooling system.

*coos at desktop* who loves you baby??

;_; Oh good. I'll just tell you, my Mac user experience has been fraught with tragedy. I walk into my employer's office, first day on the job at an organization that uses Macs, and the first thing that happens is we have a very simple problem that could have been solved on a PC in ten minutes and which Apple tech support can't decipher. It still remains to this day, nine months later: we just work around it. The next week we buy a brand new printer for my brand new iMac G5 and I'm on the phone with tech support for literally four hours trying to make the printer work.

Then -- oh yes, then I became employed at a computer consultant group, and I was the only one with Mac experience, so I became the Mac Guru. Every time I go over to our Mac-loving client I want to die. They have so many arcane problems and even Apple doesn't know how to fix them because... Macs don't break! D: Have you tried... downloading new widgets??

*hug*

...Huh, I poked at a Lenovo thinkpad and customized it to be simialr in configuration to what I'm going for with the Vaio/Dell/Widow up there, and it's actually like $2000 cheaper. I'm very hard on laptops, though, so I wouldn't want to do it unless I was sure of the customer service.

That isn't much of a recommendation for a Dell. XD

Macs are attractive and appealing but GOD I hate their OS like fire, so GOOD FOR YOU. And I have good news in that my Toshiba has been okay and did not catch on fire (I just happened to have purchased a model released with a defective motherboard, and muuuch trouble getting my local service outlet to get their shit together). It was my HP laptop that spontaneously combusted.

New laptops are so exciting. ♥

............where $2000 != $2000. More like $300-400. Where did that number come from?

It's a wonder the computers are even still running. ^_^;; Though we have replaced more keyboards and mice than I care to admit. I was very proud of the little laptop, until it finally overheated for the last time and refused to start ever again.

But sales tax holiday. D: Also, I'm really indecisive. XD I'll probably angst about this until Sunday at the least!

The FJs are adorable. XD And solid computers too. *ponders*

That's not retarded! It's good. I've been doing that with my Toshiba and it doesn't stop it from overheating to the point where it turns itself off. ;_; It's becoming a pain. Be happy it works for you!

Well, the trade in thing is an ongoing deal, so it's not like you'll miss out on that. From getting my wireless router, I've seen some okay premade Vaios at places like Best Buy and CompUSA, but if you can manage to wait the few extra days, I'd really recommend custom making yours in the website.

Also, the FJs are clearly the computers that should take over the world because come on! Pink! Green! BLUE! ♥

About the 'bursting into flame' thing, apparently regularly cleaning or replacing the fan should prevent that from occurring.

(This is literally the only thing I know about laptops.)

You DO have the world's worst luck with electronics! Maybe you should consider buying a protection charm while you're at it, because Jesus H. Christ, Kay!

That aside, I've had V for two years now and she hasn't failed me yet. She's getting a little clogged (alas, she only has 30 GB of memory!), and she's kind of heavy, so I'm considering upgrading (but keeping V, leaving her with Ma). I would gladly give my ~~father's~~ money to Sony again. I really love my Vaio. My only issue with her is that I can't seem to get the Optimum Battery Life power setting to be her default setting.

Mac hardware, AFAIK, is overpriced crap and you can't really customize the machines. I like the OS, but god, when I can make a superior PC for $1,000 less, there are problems.

It's probably better since they switched processors, but you still get less power/processing speed/RAM/what have you than for a similarly priced PC. And upgrading the Mac to specs I'd find tolerable-- not buyable, but tolerable-- would have cost a fortune.

Laptop fans (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?DEPA=0&type=&Description=laptop+fan&Submit=ENE&Ntk=all&N=0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&Go.x=0&Go.y=0) are shiny, even if you don't have intake vents under your laptop. I have a fan that I run underneath my Dell, partly to elevate it off of the dusty, dusty surface, and because it makes me feel better.

*nods*
The fundamental difference here is that Apple is a hardware company who sells its OS as a secondary product to run on its hardware (it's trying to sell the hardware) and MS is a software company whose software runs on a lot of hardware. That's why Apple could come out with Boot Camp and not worry about it - because it's already achieved its objective by making you buy the hardware, what you run on it is not relevant to apple at this point even though they'll say it is. (Not my theory. Neil Stephenson's theory. :-D)
Macs are built to last a little better than PCs, but they are admittedly much more expensive.
Personally I think all tech companies are evil, they're just differently evil, but the fact that they're evil is to be expected; it's the cost of doing business in a corporate world.
Disclaimer: I am a happy Mac user with a husband that works for Microsoft. *picks up salt shaker, talks into it* We love you, Bill.

Nyah. You are a tad bitter. :P *hugs her iBook*

I... might be a happy Mac user if I didn't buy my laptop with World of Warcraft in mind.

"What do you mean, your fastest processor is 1.5 Ghz?"

"It's a Mac with less overhead!"

"So spring for a faster processor like EVERYONE ELSE and be even more awesome! And, what the hell, only 512 mb of RAM!? On your top end machine!? *foams at the mouth*"

The sales assistant then realized that he's dealing with someone who isn't all "so cute! teehee" and told me to talk to the floor manager. I admit, that experience kind of tarnished my opinion of Macs.

Macs are definitely more durable than PCs, but as my laptop is mostly an easily portable desktop, I didn't really care about it. And, I don't care what people say, my (albeit blurry) Dell (http://img48.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dsc004341uv.jpg) is so much sexier than any Mac. Ever. XD

Though if I get a laptop for carting around, it'll probably be an iBook. They're so damn cute. And portable. But I tend to think of Macs more as toys than a workhouse.

I actually don't find that WoW lags my Mac much, oddly enough, and the only mod I made to mine is that it's running 784MB RAM instead of 256 ... sure, i get lag in IF, but who DOESN'T. I'm probably going to spring for a bit of a RAM upgrade in the next few months though, because why not.

Also, I have it on good authority that the processor problem should be fixed with the newer generation of Mac notebooks; the problem they were having previously was that they couldn't make a G5 notebook that wouldn't seriously overheat, which was part of the reasoning behind the switch to Intel. (That and Motorola bailing out of the processor market, which made the PowerPC processor difficult to find.)

I figure on upgrading to the next generation of MacBook Pro in a few years, and probably dual-booting Windows on it, because there's some software I'd love to be able to use (not to mention the new MS iPod-killer looks pretty tempting.

I don't get lag in IF! >D *cuddles her 2 gigs of RAM*

In fact, the only time I do lag, it's because the server's got a hiccup. And that stupid boat to Theramore. Ugh.

I used to have 1 gig. Sure, maybe 2 is too much, but it's the best splurge ever.

well, I wish i could have afforded the lenovos or a vaio, so if you can go for one of those high-end machines, do it! :D mine shouldn't be too bad though... it's got the same stats as the black macbook, like I said, which means 2gHz duo core intel processor, 512mb RAM (I'll buy more later from newegg, it's easy to upgrade yourself up to 4 delicious gb!! and they just rape you for it if you get it from the manufacturer), 80gb HD (ditto, if I need bigger I'll just buy one), not to mention more USB ports (4 lovely ports!!!! it may be almost enough!?!?), weighing apx 5-6 lbs. And a 14.1" screen WHICH I PAID EXTRA TO HAVE god wtf, how come a smaller screen costs more (at every single place?). the 12" vaios cost like 5 billion dollars. srsly like every single manufacturer I checked charged more for a screen that wasn't a massive 15"+ screen. I don't understand. >_<

it cost the same as the white macbook, which is pretty cheap btw. the similar lenovo or vaio would have cost about $300 more so yeah. XD

as for mac OSX... eh... I haven't had to work with it much and it's been pretty okay on machines belonging to my friends, but other than feeling a tragic sadness that I can't video-iChat with my friend in australia and that iTunes will never respond as fast as winamp (I'd go back and just use the winamp ipod plugin, but I'm addicted to playlists now, and let's face it, every single other music program has shitty playlists comparitively), I have zero reason to want OSX. Whereas I have lots of reasons (read: windows-only programs) to keep Mr Gates' crappy product. There was ONE program I wanted really badly to be able to run on the mac... but it's an OS9-only program and won't run on OSX anyhow. D'oh.

if i had bought the macbook I would have just installed windows and never used OSX and then I was worried about if the hardware would be compatible and such. Although I am sad about the magnetic power plug and the magnetic latch. SRSLY SO COOL ZOMG. XD

oops that was me btw XD

Laptop Crisis!

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