Which laptop company is best

I would disagree. I have a 3 year old toshiba that I bought for around 1K and it's been very good. The only complaint I had was that it's battery life sucks. But I rarely run on batteries. I have since added 512mb of ram to max it at 1GB and a 7200 rpm HD. The wifi is excellent on it. I use it mostly for surfing, productivity, and non-graphics intensive games. As a matter of fact, it's what I use here on my combat tour in Iraq.

Buying a laptop is really about what you intend to use it for. The big issue with low-end laptops is that you're usually chinced out of sufficient RAM and the hard drives are dinky. Rarely are you going to get super-fast processor either. But if all you're going to do is surf and write papers then you don't need a fast CPU.

The first thing anyone who buys a laptop should do is ensure it is maxed out on RAM and the hard disk is fast. Too many laptops have hard disks that are excruciatingly slow and insufficient RAM.

As I said, its a matter of preference and for me past experience, of which I had bad service out of Toshiba. Mainly overheating and keyboard problems. I would say it was a fluke if it only happened on one. But on 3 different Toshiba's? THat is why I said I would not buy another one. So far I am happy with my Gateway. 120gb HD and 2 gig of ram is plenty for all my needs.

As Nodsu rightly mentioned, the best differs from company to company. Dell's Inspiron line is not that good, while their XPS line of laptops is of very good build quality. Similarly, Acer's TravelNote series is not as good as their Ferrari series.

I guess, what we see here is that all brands are good, the best thing i guess is to have very clear what do you want the laptop to? simple tasks? gaming? designing? traveling? and then with this in mind, go and check.
I had myself at work a Dell Latitude D800, and never had a problem, very fast one, wide screen, very good looking, but VERY HEAVY, not good for traveling.
Now i have a IBM T43 Thinkpad, it´s lighter, and works well for what i use it to, but they are uglier than ever!!!! i wonder why IBM makes horrible laptops, they look old.

And of course, always check for good guarantee terms.

Cheers

i'm quite new to all this but have never had any problem from dell.

It doesnt really matter what manufacturer you buy a laptop from, they all pretty much use the same parts. I would recommend a 3 year warranty but that adds cost and lowers the hardware you could buy. As long as it is not an emachines laptop, which I dont think they make them anymore.

I dont know what to say about Dell anymore, I had mixed results with them some terrible, some wonderful, even if you have the same model of system they often put different bands of parts such as cd-drives, lcd screens, etc. But there customer service is for the most part terrible. I just got a E1505 and its really nice and they start out $699 after $200 instant savings, with up to a core 2 duo and 2 gb of ram.

I doubt that helped much, but atleast I got my 2 cents in.

I have a dell inspiron and I've had nothing but trouble with it. Dells tech support isn't really much help either. They serviced my laptop and sent it back with the exact same problems it had when I sent it in, and it turned out that the main problem was just some stupid setting in the bios and the charger was bad. Those are problems that were solved here on this forum, dell couldn't even tell me my charger was bad when they had it and supposedly tested it. But, I will give them this, they are quick with replacing parts if you tell them straight out what you need. After the guys here helped me figure out the problem I hopped onto the dell support chat and told the tech that my charger was bad and needed a new one, and I had it the next day. I was actually quite impressed with that.

So, honestly I would say from my own personal experience, stay away from dell. But, there has been a lot of people I've talked to that never had any problems with their dell. Just thought I'd throw in my experiences with dell.

Yeah Dell is probably another laptop I would not buy. My roommate got so frustrated with his last summer that he ran it over with his truck in the driveway. Then mailed it back to Dell including a letter with a few "choice" words about his thoughts of their company and products. However I do have a Dell Axim PDA that has performed flawlessly for a few years now. Just doesnt like SD cards over 256mb for some reason.

Hi i am looking for a laptop aswell, is Sony any good.

Please reply back i want to know.

I dont not own a sony laptop, but I have heard about how they use cheap parts and over rpice the computers. Basicly they put very cheap parts in the laptops and desktops then sell them for way more than there really worth. Also I heard they fail a good bit but I dont own own so if anyone else has anything to say about sony please include it, but thats what I always heard.

No Sony laptops are not that good, built mainly for the "cool" factor than for reliability. HP and Toshiba sell pretty good laptops for daily use and school/university use.

Thanks for telling me.

As someone else said, it's all about personal preference. As far as quality goes though, I would have to say that Toshiba and ASUS are at the top, with ASUS being your best bang for buck. As far as price vs quality / features / reliability goes I don't think you can go wrong with an ASUS Laptop, you probably won't get a decent one as cheap as something like an ACER but it'll be much better while still not paying as much as you would have to pay to get a good Toshiba.
In my opinion the cheaper Toshiba's aren't that much chop and while the expensive ones are good, you can get something just as good with an ASUS without spending nearly as much.

Do Sony laptop have good battery life and quality

An important aspect of laptop selection is reliability over time. We repair laptops and have seen an average of 10 a month since 1992... Inexpensive laptops are frequently more trouble because the manufacturer has to compromise somewhere... usually the screen, and cooling fans.
Avoid units that are designed to be too pretty. Look for those that offer a long warranty as an option.
We have seen the best laptops are IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads, Toshiba Techra (but support is bad and parts are hard to get), HP in the upper price range, Dell or Gateway in the upper half of their price range.
Sony is among the worst because of the inability to get parts when they fail, and the early failure rates. Compaq, though getting better, has been more trouble than Compaq, eMachines fail way too often, as do Alienware units. We like Gateway, Dell Latitude, higher priced Dell Inspirons.
If you intend to use the laptop as a gamer, you are asking for trouble.
The less expensive laptops have high failure rates of the LCD screens or the screen inverters.
No-Name or off-brand or unknown makes are a bad choice at any price because you cannot get parts when they fail.
I would avoid low priced Compaqs, Sony VAIO, Alienware, eMachines, and Toshiba because of parts and service. Do not buy online unless you have seen the machine to assure it has plenty of cooling fans and air vents...
A lightweight laptop is a bad choice unless it is an expensive Dell, IBM Thinkpad or the like... as it is more costly to build a lightweight unit.
Good luck.

I would definately agree, excellent advice from raybay.
Hope your laptop selection goes a bit more smoothly, now that you have a few opinions and are armed with a bit more knowledge.

Good Luck jujainlapet.

Can't say some are good than others, if you have one you got for $699, $799 or higher and is working without problems then your luckly. I seen a lot of DELL go bad right out of the box (mobo, cpu, ram, video (lcd panel) an etc. IBM last model for business T43 was one of the worst they had made before the China company took them over. T41 was excellent model. HP/Compaq are very rock soild. The ones sold at Wal-Mart are very good, but the Toshiba once known for good laptops have had a lot of issues lately.

ShopNBC sells the Dura laptop suppose to be the same one the US Army uses because you can stand ontop of it and it will still work. I never heard of the company before but those laptops are not cheap either.

Best advise is to shop around know what you want before you buy. Make sure it comes with good protection. You might not even need it, but you never know what's going to give our or not.

Remember if you buy a laptop make sure you get a notebook (laptop) cooler lap for it. They range from $29 to $39 bucks in most retail stores. Keep the heat off your lap and also keeps the laptop cooler.

tipstir said:

ShopNBC sells the Dura laptop suppose to be the same one the US Army uses because you can stand ontop of it and it will still work.

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Yeah I've seen a pic somewhere of one of them that took a bullet, supposedly from a sniper rifle (although the hole suggests it was of a far lower caliber) and saved some soldier's life in Afghanistan. It was on The Enquirer, if I remember correctly.

Also the Dell ATG is very similar to the Twinhead durabook as well as the Panasonic Toughbook, there mainly made for the business user/ frequent traveler, incase they drop the notebook its more less still in good workly condition and you most likely wont loose any data since they have anti-shock HHDs, also if you get water on the keyboard the system still should work. But normal laptops made by Dell lately have gotten more durable thats to there Road-Ready design. Which makes it better for traveling, making a sturdier laptop. Also it has shock absorbing material surronding the HHD to pervent data loss.

you know windows vista is it better than windows xp professional or not?

I don't want to make the mistake of getting a laptop with vista if vista's no good because then i'll have to install windows xp and sometimes windows doesn't work when you install it.it could wreck your laptop up.

There is nothing wrong with Vista. Some here will disagree, but so far I really like it. I have had a few issues with software incompatibilities, but nothing really that bad. If you do buy a laptop running Vista. I would highly recommend getting at least 1 preferably 2 gigs of memory though! If you buy one of the cheaper models that Best Buys is selling with 512mb ram, I think you will be somewhat dissaponted! Don't get home basic edition either!

halo71 said:

Thinkpads are very nice.

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Yes they are, and my personal choice.

They might be a little more expensive, but you get what you pay for, and the build quality is simple superb.

They are not multimedia centric, through - they will play games just fine and have DVD-RW, etc - but if you are looking for a machine that will plug into all sorts of other multimedia equipment quickly and easily then there are other options.

www.notebookreview.com is a good site to get reviews of laptops and get a good idea about what you are buying.

I always look for upgrade potential in the RAM and HDD - the two parts of a laptop that one can pretty much most times upgrade - so that I can get a good 160GB drive and at least 2GB of RAM in there. These upgrades aren't hard, and I've often found its best to go for a cheaper machine that doesn't have the big RAM and disk and then upgrade it, so long as the CPU and graphics were up to spec.

Also, are you going to be lugging this laptop around? If so, how big is it? How much does it weight? Have you thought about a bag for it? How long does the battery last, etc, etc...

Its a different mindset than shopping (or building) a desktop or server PC, but its basically the same kind of idea.