My wife's Dell computer has died, according to our son who is a computer expert. I am looking for suggestions on brands to buy and to avoid, when we go out looking tomorrow. She is looking at PC World and Consumer's Reports for info, but I thought some opinions from the trenches was also important. Suggestions to buy and/or to avoid.
Thanks
You might consider getting a 2nd opinion. Your son probably doesn't want to fix it for free. Also, if the unspecified model Dell is fairly current, it might be possible to get Nvidia to fix it for free:
It doesn't work like that. Every brand of laptops has their winner and losers. Often, if a manufacturer has a winning line of machines, they will recycle the name and model number series on their latest models in the vain hope that maybe some of the good karma will rub off on the new models, or that the customers won't notice that they're totally different models. In other words, it's really difficult to shop by brand name or even product line.
Most laptops are made by a collection of Chinese and Korean OEM manufacturers. Just about all the brands have at least one product line made by Quanta, Compal, or Wistron/Acer:
I've gone down this list and attempted to correlate the OEM manufacturer with my observed failure rate, and failed. They all seem to have similar problems.
If you as a repairman what should your buy, you'll get a list of machines with which they have had experience. That's fine if you want to know which machines break and need repair. However, a better question would be which machine do they *NOT* see coming in for repair. As a hint, I see large numbers of HP, Compaq, Dell, and Asus late model laptops. I see a few Toshibas. I rarely see Lenovo, Panasonic, or Acer.
Avoid generalizations, Consumer Report, and PC World reviews. One size/type laptop does not fit all applications and budgets. If you must read reviews, I suggest CNET.
First, some questions:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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bAll good comments, Jeff, I have seen most of your posts and you are almost always right on. My wife will use the laptop for general purpose stuff, no high-speed or great memory requirements, just a basic wireless internet connection. She had a older Dell Inspiron
1000 which was pretty much bottom of the line when she got it at least 5 years ago. Right now she is leaning toward a Toshiba.Our son gets paid for his work, he has solved many problems for us over the years, and has built complete laptops using parts cobbled from other machines. So, when he says it is final, I totally believe him. In fact, my wife is using my rebuilt machine from our son right now, and I am using my desktop machine while my wife has my laptop. I'll post whatever we buy tomorrow, as a blizzard is forecast for Tue and Wed and I leave Thursday for a skiing vacation and I will need my laptop to use while away from home.
Our extended family has 6 Dell's. No problems. So we will continue with Dell if we purchase any more. WW
Piece of junk. I've inherited a few from customers that have had them blow up on them. Typically, a 2GHz P4 Celeron CPU with no internal Wi-Fi. Slower than a snail, even fully loaded with RAM. Probably a good excuse or time to replace it.
Two of my customers/friends (the customers pay me, the friends do not) have purchased various Toshiblah laptops recently. No problems. Get one with an Intel i5 processor. The i3 is too slow, and the i7 is too expensive. 4GB RAM is about right for Windoze 7.
Some Toshiblah deals at Best Buy:
Amazon has them cheaper, but you'll have to wait for the sales and closeouts.
Ok, he seems to know what he's doing. If he can't fix it, it's not going to happen.
Fairly good weather here in California. Warmer than usual, light rain, a bit of fog.... my kind of weather.
It takes me about 6 hours to setup a typical "ready to run" Windoze 7" machine. 2 hrs to get Windoze 7 up to date. One hour to remove the junkware. One hour to load it with my favorite collection of utilities.
(a bit out of date and XP specific, but close enough). Another hour to load Office 2003 and updates. One hours to show the customer (your wife) how to use it. Probably a good thing to do while it's snowing.
Have fun skiing.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Avoid Dell, HP, Acer.
Look into IBM, Asus, Toshiba, Panasonic.
-- Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse
On Sun, 30 Jan 2011 23:45:27 -0800, Jeff Liebermann wrote: (blah...blah...blah)
...and just when you thought it was safe to buy a new laptop: "Intel hit with chipset design flaw in Sandy Bridge rollout"
"The faulty support chip has only been shipping since Jan. 9. Customers impacted will be those that bought second-generation Core i5 and Core i7 systems."
Swell.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Several of us are assuming you keep a boot-to-a-desktop Linux CD on hand for first-eschelon tests of hardware vs OS. This one works on just about anything.
A company I avoid in all matters is Sony.
They've screwed up way too many times for me to trust them.
As the other Jeff has said, most of the stuff comes from just a few factories these days; what matters most is how you are treated AFTER the sale. Sony FAILS.
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