need powerful AND reliable laptop - recomendations?

[swhitten]

I'm about to reach my limit of patience with Dell Latitudes. Had a D600. Kept having hard drive failures. Upgrade to D630. Had to have the motherboard replaced 3 times in about 15 months. Had so many issues with that computer that Dell finally agreed to give me my money back, so I returned it about 3 weeks ago. Ordered E6500 as replacement. It arrived yesterday. Bluescreening right out of the box. Spent hours on the phone with support. Am sending this one back, and they are supposed to send me a new one.

But is it time for me to move on to another brand? I need:

VERY powerful business computer
large, fast hard drive (250 gb/7200 rpm)
lots of RAM (ordered 4gb on 1 dimm)

I run multiple instances of SQL and multiple accounting systems, along with heavy outlook and other office apps.

What are your experiences with Dell? Do they have quality issues? What else would you recommend that would be a powerful, reliable workhorse laptop? I can't afford to be down two days at a time or more, several times a year. It's costing me billable time with clients.

Thanks in advance for thoughts/opinions on viable options.

 

[vacunita]

I've had good a experience with Lenovo. Used to be IBM.

Lenovo Thinkpads are the top of the line in Business Laptops in my opinion.

They are quite customizable.

The offer Downgrade to XP right out of the box.
And also offer a Windows XP Recovery DVD.

Take a look at the X200.

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/...001CCF:&smid=6194D04805DF4296B0D1A64481A943A4

----------------------------------
Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[Grenage]

We lean towards Toshiba and HP laptops here, mostly Toshiba at the moment; HP seem to have dropped the ball a bit.

If a broken laptop is costing you business, it's probably work having a backup machine (be it laptop or desktop); computer do break down.

"We can categorically state that we have not released man-eating badgers into the area" - Major Mike Shearer

 

[BionicJohn]

I'm not sure why (probably a better procurement deal) but we stopped buying Dell (both workstations and laptops) a couple of years ago.

At the moment HPs are the laptop of choice. The models we get are not as powerful what you're after, but so far there's been little to complain about in terms their performance or reliability.

Delivery is the biggest issue. Lengthy delivery times and larger orders split arbitrarily.

Liverpool: Capital of Culture 2008
Anfield: Capital of Football since 1892
Iechyd da! John
Glannau Mersi, Lloegr.

 

[AndyH1]

AndyH1 (Programmer) Feb 11, 2009
I'd recommend HP laptops too. From personal experience wev'e used Sonys, Dells and Lenovos and HPs. My last HP lasted for years.

The problem is that you can get very individual experiences with laptops. My first Lenovo constantly blue screened but other people I know swear by them (rather than swear at them).

Our company have used a lot of different computers over the years. A lot liked Sonys, but whilst they are powerful we got a lot of problems and support from Sony is bad. Only the HPs have lasted and been very reliable.

 

[tresanus]

I 2nd IBM/LENOVO - That is our weapon of choice here (large government consulting firm), great business laptops.

 

[swhitten]

Well we ordered two new Lenovos this week - a T400 for my business partner and a T500 for me. (I like the bigger screen; she does not.)

We are returning the Dells for a full refund. I have to say they did not hassle us and try to charge a re-stock fee or anything. Am happy to have that done. Will be glad when I get all my money back.

We're keeping our fingers crossed that we'll be happy with the Lenovos.

One thing we looked at was the memory. The Lenovo has DDR3 memory. From reading, that sounds better than the DDR2 offered on HP?

I feel like we do a good job of specing what we want - large, fast hard drives, 4 gb of RAM, etc. But where I feel like we don't know enough is the more technical specs that probably greatly impact performance. The Processor offered for the HP and the Lenovo was the exact same thing, so no choice there. But not sure how else to evaluate.

Thanks all for your advice!

 

[wahnula]

You will be happier with your choice, Lenovo has been my default recommendation for a few years now. DDR3 usually runs at a higher speed but also usually has more latency. You probably won't see much difference overall, but going forward I would prefer to have a newer option (DDR3) than an older option (DDR2).

Don't worry about evaluation of your performance; if you want, you can run a benchmarking suite like SiSoft's Sandra to make sure your hardware is matching up to similar hardware, but in general, just everyday use will tell you all you need to know.

One place you might want to visit is

http://www.pcdecrapifier.com,

to help remove the bloatware I would expect on a new machine. Or, just do the old "delete manually". All those apps running at startup will affect your performance.

Tony

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