Recommendations for new laptop please

[stevenrw]

Hi everybody
HID's HP lappy mobo had gone bang after only a couple of years, so I need to get her a replacement. Rumour has it that HP and Dell laptops are best avoided, Vaio's are great but pricey and no, I can't afford a Macbook.
Does anybody have any views on a good brand to narrow my search? Midrange - £500 ish? Toshiba maybe?
Any assistance from you good folk would be appreciated.

[Rik]

You could do worse than look at the Acer range.

[Rik]

Oh, and Samsung.

[Ray]

I'd agree with both of those, Rik.

[pctech]

Hi everybody
Rumour has it that HP and Dell laptops are best avoided,

ANYTHING with a Dell badge is best avoided.

Would agree about Acer and Samsung and also Toshiba are good too.

[Glenn]

Like I have said in the past, I believe only a handful of the hundreds of Dell D620 we have here, have ever had an hardware problem in the 4 or 5 years we have used them. I also have a Dell Mini 9, a basic Dell server and a D630, all of which have been problem free.

[Technical Ben]

I had an old HP, worked like a dream, but was more a desktop replacement than a laptop. But I don't have experience with there newer models, or those at the £500 price range. Just saying they are defiantly not as bad as Dell!

[Baz]

two years ago I got my wife  toshiba and one son an Asus  both very good.filled with the usual garbage they insist on you having but ok apart from that.Last year my other son got an Asus too and I have to say they are very good,build quality is solid,looks good,get good extras with it,backup disc, good manual etc.

I would get another Asus

[pctech]

I ordered one of their flagship XPS systems (dual graphics cards, dual hard drives in RAID 0) , when it arrived it looked as though it had either been built from scrap parts or kicked around the factory.

Started it up and the fans inside sounded like they were about to pack up. plugged in the speakers and sound wasn;t working (found out later they had loaded buggy drivers for the sound card I had specced, a Creative X-FI Xtrememusic)

Ran system for about half an hour and put my hand next to one of the top vents and the heat coming out was extremely hot.

Shut it down and could hear hissing for about 5 minutes after.

Came back next day and ran their own diagnostics which threw up a thermal warning and fan controller issue, rang XPS technical support and waited on hold for 45 minutes. told guy about problem and that I was an MCDST and did tech support for a living, asked to re-run diagnostics and call back after full cycle had run, he laughed and said this will take about 4-5 hours.

Did this and called back but department was closed.

Over the next couple of weeks I rang several times in the evening and had to wait up to 1 hour on hold, during these weeks all kinds of bizarre suggestions were made such as re-imaging using the recovery utility which of course would not cure a machine that was cooking its insides.

Finally got through to someone who took on board what I was saying and said he would get a new system into production for me and get someone to call me next day to tell me this had been done and to arrange collection of the faulty one.

He rang me next evening as I was just coming through the front door and asked whether anyone had phoned me, noone had and his reply was 'I didn't think they would so I'll book the collection now for you and can tell you I've ordered your replacement system'

This restored my faith a little bit.

The system was collected the following week and the couriers phoned me to arrange delivery, I asked for a Saturday and booked the day off, they said between 8 and 2, nothing arrived by 1.30 so rang the couriers to be met with a message that the office closed at 1.

Rang Dell and told them, they of course couldn't do anything.

Rang couriers on the Monday and was told the box was damaged when it came off the boat from Ireland so they had rejected, asked why noone had throught to phone and let me know he couldn't answer.

Rang Dell and told them I had been told the system was on its way back to them, they put a new system into production.

Again another week passed and another phone call from the couriers, booked a Saturday delivery again and another day off.

Again nothing arrived so rang couriers and again office closed.

Rang again on Monday from work and was told box was damaged again and had been rejected.

By this time I'd had enough so rang Dell, told them and asked them to refund me.

I don't doubt business customers get what they order (we have quite a few Dell desktops at work) as to aggrevate a business customer is not a good move but I really wouldn't deal with them as a consumer.

Ended up buying my mini tower from Mesh Computers who also market Asus laptops (my system has an ASUS mobo) and when I had an issue they were excellent.

[esh]

Hmmm, Dell are hit and miss, but if you want really powerful laptops you don't have much choice. We've had 5 or 6 dell laptops here now. I shall give a little bit of history;

The first one was an Inspiron range back from the late 90s. The Inspiron range are now generic cheap customer model, slightly above Vostro (avoid). Back then they were considered a workhorse model. It wasn't a bad system, it was actually better than my desktop at the time, but the components had an iffy shelf-life. The internal HD died. The internal CD-ROM died. The internal network card died. So it ended up being some kind of frankenstein as I replaced or added bits to counter for these failures. That said, it's still working today.

On the other hand, when I went to Smithsonian/CfA in the states I needed some real cruncher and didn't want a massive shipping fee for a tower workstation so I bought one of their Precision line laptops. These are high-grade mobile workstations aimed at business and I have to say this one was pretty fantastic. For a machine in the early 2000s, having a laptop with 4GB of RAM and dual processors was just the ticket. When the internal soundcard glitched, they sent someone out within a couple working days who fixed it up there and then at no charge. Sadly after six years of intensive use it has started to melt itself (after a strange crash when I was operating it at an altitude beyond its specification I noticed the paint on the bottom was blistered and peeling). So it doesn't do heavy stuff anymore, but again it works...

The last one was a high-end consumer laptop I got in the past year; I didn't fancy dropping £2k on another Precision line system. It's pretty beefy though, 8 virtual processors and a GTX 260M for a little over £1k. The downside was only 1 year of warranty and a mere 15" screen instead of the lovely 17" I had on the Precision. Has an LED screen over the old CCFL models, which I have to say is quite lovely -- careful though, cheaper models have far less uniform illumination with LED screens which makes me feel rather ill. CCFL always tends to give a more uniform illumination but the lamps fade after a year or two. LED screens are far better if you might be using your system in the outdoors.

Dell customer service with the Precision system was great. This seemed to operate entirely different to anything else, but it may have been luck. For example, when I phoned about the failed CD-ROM drive in the Inspiron machine, the next thing they immediately asked was for my credit card number. Etiquette for you. On the order for my most recent Dell system, it was utterly baffling. They changed the order number several times until it could no longer be tracked as none of the package IDs checked out, phoning the sales support was either engaged or resulting in a person I could barely understand. Technical support through email was far better; not super-fast but fast enough.

I think what I shall say here is -- if you need a really powerful laptop or one configured to a specific need and like a reasonable build quality then the higher end Dell systems usually deliver (as long as you don't need to contact them for every minor little thing, some tech knowledge helps...). The low end Dells have very poor quality in general though, and as such I would recommend looking elsewhere at the sort of budget you are looking at. There was a period about a year or two years ago where all laptops in that kind of price range were stuffed with NVIDIA 8700M chipsets which basically melted themselves because of a poor choice of materials upon NVIDIA's part, leading to companies such as Dell and HP pushing out BIOS patches which made the fans run 100% full time to try and stop the process of self-immolation. Not very popular with the customers as you can imagine. Fortunately the new chips seem quite good. I would always try and avoid Intel graphics unless a) you really don't want any graphical acceleration at all, or b) you run Linux (in which case it can actually be a GOOD thing).

[Niall]

You could do worse than look at the Acer range.

My sister just got an Acer that cost about £400. It doesn't have built in speakers, but is more than capable otherwise.

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalog?q=acer+aspire&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&cid=16568105386560829742&ei=rUhmTNeLB9S7jAelyenkDA&sa=X&oi=product_catalog_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CEIQ8wIwAw#

I think it was a variation of the above, but it's a dual core laptop with 4gb memory with a 250gb drive. It was under £400 at the time, but I forget from where and as I've just installed a new o/s I don't have my messenger logs any more, so can't check

[Glenn]

Aldi may still have some available http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/9794.htm

[stevenrw]

Thanks guys - great response as always. We ended up with a Packard Bell from Currys.
Don't laugh.
It was a pretty good deal, 4gb RAM, 320gb HDD, Pentium Dual core T4400 2.2 ghz, and screen and build quality seem very good. Sure, it has the normal B******s bundled, but usefully it does have Photoshop Elements bundled.
All for £450.
I'm quite pleased so far. The spec was better than the Toshes and the Samsungs we looked at.
So we'll see....

[Rik]

 

[pctech]

PB are now owned by Acer rather than NEC so you should be ok.

[stevenrw]

Thanks guys - always appreciate the great help and advice to be found hereabouts.
...of course now I'm having problems setting up the network between my XP desktop and the new W7(64bit) machine, so stand by tecchies! 

[Glenn]

Take a look here Steve http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-networking/2510-windows-networking-fixed-windows-7-xp.html

[stevenrw]

Thanks for that Glenn - I tried all that when the initial setup didn't produce the desired results.
I can see the printer, but can't print to it, I can see the shared folders but can't open them - I get an eror message to the effect that I don't have access rights.
I've checked the sharing and updated the drivers for the printer.

Any ideas anyone.

[Glenn]

Is this one any use? http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15247/complete-guide-to-networking-windows-7-with-xp-and-vista/

[stevenrw]

OK guys, I'm almost there. I now have shared printer(s). I just kept on adding and deleting them on the W7 machine (I have two printers) until it finally picked up the correct drivers.
I just need to pick your brians once more on the file sharing.
The folders that I've set up to be shared on the W7 machine, are visible on the XP machine under the MSHOME network but trying to open those folders on the XP machine gives me a message telling me it is not accessible, you may not have permissions to use this network resource. Access is denied.
If checked the sharing on the W& machine and its telling me that the file is shared. File sharing is on, all the steps outlined in Glenn's previous response (thanks again Glenn) have been done.
Any ideas please? Could it be a firewall issue? I use ESET Smart Security and the Windows firewall is off.

[Steve]

This regedit seems to work

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7security/thread/23369f35-bc45-4147-9c3e-74a47d530757

http://www.sevenforums.com/network-sharing/90509-folder-sharing-problem-xp-7-a.html  post 6

and this http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/53830-file-sharing-between-xp-w7-vice-versa.html#post779729