What laptop brands are best?

[IATIA]

Seriously, after all the labs I did in University for physics, I've come to the conclusion that anyone obsessed over needing MS Office is a dumbshit.

Painting with an awful broad brush there, aren't we?

I'd rather use free software, but I have a few spreadsheets here at work that still, to this day, make OpenOffice & LibreOffice puke their guts out.

Same here. I do things with spreadsheets that Open Office and the others cannot do.

[TaraJo]

Gah! Now I'm pissed with the people in this thread! >

I went out and got an Asus, largely because it was so well liked here (not to mention other sites thought it was great, too). I had the thing for about six months and the hard drive dies on me. I had to send it to Asus to get it fixed and that was about two weeks ago. Crazy thing is, before I got my Asus, I had a Dell. Everyone said Dell was junk, but my Dell laptop was still running (although it got stolen after I lent it to a friend). My Dell lasted longer than my Asus!

[LastPoet]

Gah! Now I'm pissed with the people in this thread! >

I went out and got an Asus, largely because it was so well liked here (not to mention other sites thought it was great, too). I had the thing for about six months and the hard drive dies on me. I had to send it to Asus to get it fixed and that was about two weeks ago. Crazy thing is, before I got my Asus, I had a Dell. Everyone said Dell was junk, but my Dell laptop was still running (although it got stolen after I lent it to a friend). My Dell lasted longer than my Asus!

You do realize that the HDD is made for asus by other companies (WD, etc.), and that the HDD is the most vulnerable part of a computer due to having moving parts?

What happens to your reasoning if I say that my Laptop has almost 5 years and never had a malfunction, never had to reinstall the OS and its purring like a kitten? Yeah, anecdotes don't really count.

I would be glad if I were you, simply because the malfunction occurred during product warranty

[pocaracas]

The HDD on my ASUS went bad after some 3 years of owning it... because I punched the touchpad (and the HDD is right next to it)... what did you do to bust the HDD?

Did you check the brand of the HDD? Recently, a friend of mine (who owns a computer repair shop) told me that Toshiba drives tend to break a lot.

[LastPoet]

The HDD on my ASUS went bad after some 3 years of owning it... because I punched the touchpad (and the HDD is right next to it)... what did you do to bust the HDD?

Did you check the brand of the HDD? Recently, a friend of mine (who owns a computer repair shop) told me that Toshiba drives tend to break a lot.

Yep, those are the ones that malfunction the most. I have fixed many PC's with bad hard drives and like 3 out of 5 are Toshiba.

[TaraJo]

Oh, yeah, I am glad it's under warantee, no doubt. But even there, I have a little frustration with an aspect of that. See, I brought my computer to the store I got it from. They told me they're licensed to fix most computers..... but Asus is one of the only brands they aren't certified for. So they can't fix it and all they can do is send my computer to Asus.

Until then, I'm kinda jacking my boyfriend's computer. I hate doing it but, damn, it can be really hard for me to get things done without a computer.

[Angrboda]

Gah! Now I'm pissed with the people in this thread! >

I went out and got an Asus, largely because it was so well liked here (not to mention other sites thought it was great, too). I had the thing for about six months and the hard drive dies on me. I had to send it to Asus to get it fixed and that was about two weeks ago. Crazy thing is, before I got my Asus, I had a Dell. Everyone said Dell was junk, but my Dell laptop was still running (although it got stolen after I lent it to a friend). My Dell lasted longer than my Asus!

Asus makes good stuff, generally. Their only downside is that their after sales support has gone down the tubes over the past few years. I haven't kept up on things over the past years, but I haven't heard the things you claim to be hearing about Dell. It's true that Dell consumer crap is just about as bad as HP and so on, but Dell business laptops are or were very respectable.



(And Asus may not be as good as they were in their halcyon days. I bought an Asus motherboard for my file server 6 years ago and went through two samples of the first one that simply wouldn't run; I ended up switching to another board, but that still BSODs a few times a year. But that may just be the grade of the hardware. If I wanted better reliability, I would have bought an intel based server board instead of consumer AMD crap, but it's what I could afford at the time. [SLI solutions were still the exception rather than the norm, and I needed a 4x PCIE slot for the controller.])

(ETA: Hardware failure follows what is known as a bathtub curve, being that there is a high rate of failure during the beginning of the lifespan of a device, dropping off rapidly, followed by a long period of low failure rates until the hardware gets rather old, at which point failure rates start to climb fairly steeply, though not as steeply as the initial period decreased [thus the name, 'bathtub curve']. By six months, most hardware should be relatively stable — the bulk of early failures occur in the first 60-90 days. However, the simple fact is that even high quality hardware fails, and in particular, laptops tend to push hardware to its limits more than other platforms [likely a combination of high heat and being turned on and off frequently, in addition to being marginally spec'd to begin with; 'thermal stress' — the stress to a part that occurs from a rapid change in temperature, primarily from being turned on, is the main cause of electronic failures in computer hardware. A couple other statistics, just for the heck of it. 80% of hard disk failures occur in the electronics of the drive, not the mechanical parts, and, 80% of hard drives returned for repair have nothing wrong with them. [not implying anything in your case, just interesting info]].)

[thesummerqueen]

So, after all the Dell hate:

Here's my history: Compaq, Toshiba, Compaq, HP Probook, and now my father just bought me a Dell.

By far, the Compaqs were the most awesome, but they don't exist anymore. Those things were workhorses. After that, my Probook has done well, but started having battery issues after 1 year and buy now, on to the 2.5 year point, the battery doesn't last for shit. The Toshiba was shite. I finally killed it in a haze of electrical glory by spilling a dirty martini onto it.

I asked around before settling on the Dell, and by far the consensus was Dell or Lenovo. I went with the Dell, because at the price point the Dell had better processing power. I'm not a computer gamer - I just needed something that could handle editing mass quantities of photos. An engineer I know says he's been through every brand imaginable, and by far the Dells lasted the longest, and he had just purchased another one.

Only two people had bad things to say about them outside of this thread, and both were gamers saying they had inferior parts.

Also, my mother has had a Dell desktop PC for over 6 years. It may actually be close to a decade. It still runs - no joke, and while it won't play games or anything, it meets her business/e-mail/documents/photo storage needs.

I liked the specs on the Lenovos, but the Dell gave me more so that's what I went with. I also had a boyfriend who had an Acer laptop for some years that he really enjoyed.

Too late to give you the information now, but that's my 2 cents.

[RonaldReagansGhost666]

I'd suggest a Toshiba.

[Tonus]

I still have a working Toshiba laptop from... 1998, I think. I say "working" but it runs Windows 98 and I'm not sure anything that runs Windows 9x could be properly described as working. But it runs Civ2 like a champ.