Chief Delphi - Buying a Laptop!

Quote:

Originally Posted by BobC (Post 538307)

DO NOT BUY DELL.
When you do decide what to buy make sure you buy an extended warranty. When they make laptops they will have parts to make 2000 of them. Then a year down the road it breaks the parts will be hard to find. I bought a laptop fours ago took out a four year extended warranty it has been replaced three times parts were not available to fix it when it broke. When my son went to college last year a bought a new computer foe him and a four year warranty. When he came home for the summer a couple of keys were sticking. Also the wireless was in and out. I would put his computer next to mine his would drop signal and mine stay hooked up. Two weeks before school started I bought back to the school bookstore told them what was going on. They put in a new keyboard and put in a new wireless card NO CHARGE.

What beef do you have with Dell? Here I am, typing on my Dell Latitude D520. I noticed that when it came, the hard drive was saturated with Dell-branded spyware. After I wiped it and reinstalled from the XP disc, it works fine. That's my only grumble. And my one experience with Dell support was fine.

Were you speaking of Dell in the post I quoted? If they replaced the keyboard and wireless card for no charge, why bad-mouth them?

I just believe in backing opinions up. Like this:

I personally would stay away from eMachines--the desktop I got from them came preloaded with Windows ME, which we all know was one pile of software that should not even be called an OS. That's not the only reason, though. The machine was not meant to be user-servicable. To open the case, you have to break a warranty seal. Also, eMachines support declined my request for device drivers (which were not anywhere on their site--they were on the "Recovery CD") because I upgraded to WinXP which is an unsupported configuration. I don't think I need to say any more.

I like Dell, but I also like the feel of the Thinkpads, and if I hadn't gotten this Dell, I would've probably gotten a Thinkpad. Those things are beasts. We have a bunch at school that are something like 5 years old; they've been tossed around pretty nicely, and yet they still work great. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have gotten this machine because my old Dell Inspiron cracked at the hinges--a big reason I got a new one. But I like it, and haven't had any problems (except a blue screen of death when I installed the National Instruments Labview stuff, but I hardly think it's Dell's fault). The battery still lasts 3.5 ish hours of internet time. I think it's alright.

JBot