I'm considering a new laptop, looking for experiences.

Jeffry Smith jsmith at alum.mit.edu
Sun Apr 15 20:45:19 EDT 2012


On Sun, Apr 15, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
>> You have to pick `what kind of business you are' *before* you pick
>> what broad class of device you want to look at.
>>
>> I hate other people's ontologies, sometimes....
>
>  Dell is particularly bad when it comes to this.  Their various
> business units and/or sales groups often offer quite disconnected, to
> the point where the company sometimes seems schizophrenic.  Seasoned
> Dell customers will know you can even get their different sales groups
> into a bidding war with each other.  This might even work for single
> purchases -- after spec'ing the config you want, save the cart, and
> then call the phone sales group and see if they can get you a better
> price.
>

Worst case I know of (from personal experience) - consumer group had a
replacement part I needed, but they wouldn't ship to an APO address.
Business group ships to APO, but they don't have the part.  You would
think it would be easy to just move the part over, but no.  Turns out
(at least at that time), the two groups did NOT work together.  I
ended up buying the exact same part from a 3rd party (and cheaper to,
despite it being a Dell part) that had the part, and would ship to APO
address.

I've avoided Dell since then - at least for consumer / personal stuff.

HP, well my current laptop has a bad DVD drive - known problem with
his model laptop.  The answer appears to be "yep, it's a problem."

Sony, won't go there - anyone who ships rootkits on purpose (never
mind their proprietary stuff like memory sticks, etc).

I'm running out of options - but thinking about Lenovo (IBM always was
good, not certain now that they've sold it), system76, other Linux
boxes.



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