Notebook recommendations

I like the Gateway Solo line of notebooks. Good LCD quality, battery life, and all that. Most important, good tech support and customer support. Well second most important. After all nothing beats a computer coming in a cow spotted box. Oh, and the solos are pretty easy to set up in linux. Done it on two of them now.

Someone I know just bought a Dell notebook and got shafted by their customer support people. And besides the notebook he bought was ugly.

I know this isn''t what you''d asked for, but..

Do NOT get CTX. I got a CTX notebook as a gift from my parents when I graduated college, and it has been a total piece. The hard drive crashed (taking with it all of my Europe vactaion photos), and it took them three months to replace it. It gets so hot that when you take out the PCMCIA cards, you can burn your hands--you need ice, not kidding. The install disks that come with the computer cannot be used to install after you reformat your hard drive (or buy a new one). Their customer service is just the worst--during the whole hard drive debacle, the charged me twice for a hard drive that was out of stock. For six weeks straight I got the answer, "It''ll arrive in two weeks." This was talking to supervisors, not just grunts.

Do not, for any reason, buy anything from CTX.

I agree Stoffel! CTX is a company that should have been obliverated years ago given their crud equipment. We''ve got Dell desktops at college and they suck! They''re pretty stable, but do anything fancy like turn on Font Smoothing in Win 98 and they will only do it in the Display Properties preview window. -shrug- On top of that, they were outdated the day they were ordered. I can''t say anything about the notebooks, but they''re supposed to be good.
. NO Compaqs. NO CTX. No Kaypro. NO Packard Bell. Compaqs run, but are a %!%$* with peripherals. Want to use a printer? Turn off the computer, plug it in, turn it back on. Want to use the CD-ROM drive? Turn it off, take out the floppy drive, put in the CD-ROM drive, turn it back on. You get the idea.
. Personally I like Toshiba. Not the greatest, but the CD-ROM drive reads CD-Rs and CD-RWs and has a nice spindle that grips the inside ring. You can plug just about anything in while it''s running and it won''t flinch. And both the floppy and CD-ROM drives are in the side [one above the other thanks to a slim design.] The batteries run pretty good [2 to 2 1/2 hrs], just don''t overcharge them EVER. The life goes down by about half an hour and you''ll get overestimates of battery time left.
. Sonys are very nice, especially the VAIOs, but are pricy. I don''t know about other brands, so check around for some reviews. Try ZDnet or Cnet.

There is nothing wrong with Dell notebooks. I have bought several for the company that I work for, and have had very few problems with them. We have about 200 on hand right now.
Our laptop user base is comprised of complete morons, and even they don''t break/screw up very many of them.

Dell''s customer support does suck though. It is MUCH easier for us to just take care of the problem ourselves rather than attempt to get them to fix anything.

Toshibas and Sonys are very nice as well. I can''t buy them because of some unsolved compatability problem with some of our older DOS apps/utilities that we use around here, but if it weren''t for that I would buy them.

SiCrane,

You are the first person that I have ever heard praise Gateway support.

I got a Dell Latitude CPt in August and I like the product a lot. You can swap the cd-rom and floppy drives out without rebooting and you can add the floppy via parallel port dongle without rebooting. It has a 14.1 inch screen (which 1024x768 shows up real nice). My only gripe about it was that the graphics subsystem didn''t accelerate 3D. Oh, and another gripe: the system gets hot quickly. An example: I am playing a 3D game (Jump on the ''net, Mechwarrior demo) and the fan suddenly starts. I have less than 30 seconds to quit the app before my laptop shuts down!
Another example: I had to write a program for one of my classes a while back--a real number cruncher--, I had to use an ice block for the program to complete its task. So, to sum things up:

1. Make sure that the system won''t get too hot frequently.
   
2. Make sure that if you''re going to do programming (of the game variety), then it''d better have a 3D accelerated graphics subsystem.
   
   JoeG
   

quote:

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Original post by DarthSpanky
You are the first person that I have ever heard praise Gateway support.

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Maybe, I just got lucky. Seriously, I''ve always received competent technical support. I won''t buy a desktop/tower from them ever again, because last one I got I had to send the motherboard back 3 times. But each of those times, I didn''t get any runaround, and they didn''t insult my intelligence. All replacement parts were shipped promptly, including the time I needed a replacement laptop hard-drive. So no, I''ve got no complaint about their tech support. This is in comparison to Compaq, Micron, and Dell, all of which I have had seriously bad times with their tech support. Maybe Gateway tech support isn''t the best, but it''s far from the worse.

My advice would be to get a Toshiba, maybe from the Satellite familly! I know that they tend to be a bit more expensive, but the quality of the stuff is great!! Just keeps going and going....(maybe that was Duracell?)
Anyway, the Toshiba Satellite is great, good support and nice computers, they even got the design going now.

Well, apple''s powerbook G3 is an excellent buy right now at about $2,499. It has the best lcd ive ever seen on any notebook computer, this is probably due in part to its great video card: an ATI Rage pro LT. Apple will also have another powerbook out by then end of this month or the middleof next month sporting a 500MHZ G3 processor and plenty of RAM, as well as a video card that is comprable to most of today''s desktop PC''s.

If Macs arent your thing, then go with a PC laptop.

Heh, from what I''ve read on the Net, and yes, I did do my research before posting, the Apple Powerbooks (not iBook) is probably the best notebook on the market at the moment in terms of LCD quality, support, battery life, performance, price and anything else. My problem is the fact taht I want to do Windows based programming, so I''m stuck with a Wintel notebook. I came here because most of the opinions I''ve seen on notebooks are pretty dire, though some are good (see the the person who thought Gateway support was good above). It appears the best are the Sony Vaio (505 series, the Superslim brand) and Dell''s Inspiron brand. I guess it''s just a matter of buy and hope for luck.

Unfortunately, being in Australia, Sony don''t sell Vaio''s here, so my options are pretty much Toshiba, Gateway, Dell, IBM, and Acer, with Toshiba with the most market penetration. Problem is when I start leaning towards something, I read something that makes me change my mind. It''s a lot of money and I don''t want a dud purchase.

One word: Argh!

hey thats cool, if i were to spend money on a pc laptop id only go with sony. im sure you can buy one online somewhere,id definately make a huge effort to find out how.

You can. Sony has an online service based in the USA and UK. Unfortunately, this is bad for any tech support to occur seeing as I''m in Australia. However, I''ve also heard that Sony''s battery life ain''t that hot... These are the two things stopping me from leaning to wards the Sony.

BTW, interesting post timestamp you have up there firahs