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The dismal story of new laptops.


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There is something badly wrong with the IT industry. This is the story of my laptop buying career;

Sony Vaio at over £1000 a few years back. Stone dead on arrival. The supplier, DAB, were awful beyond belief and almost impossible to contact.

Toshiba from PC World sent out incomplete. No further stock so replaced with another type.

Acer Netbook Aspire One, dead on arrival. Touchpad not connected.

Sent back to Acer in France and returned with touchpad connected and keypad hanging out.

Sony Vaio bought recently and still working, though Vista hangs up reliably.

Yesterday, new Acer Aspire One, 11.5 inch version, worked for forty minutes then shut down and opened with a blank screen. Stone dead. Now to be returned.

I make that a success rate on new computers of one in five. (Or two out of six if you include the replacement for the incomplete Toshiba, though that machine died in 2.5 years.)

No more Internet buying for me. Next time it will be a shop. The staggering waste of time in sending and collecting and trying to get a human to talk to is just not worth it. I'll pay the extra hundred quid if necessary.

Desktops don't do this to me, by the way.

Olly

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Ahhh you have had a very poor run indeed. I haven´t had as many problems as you as most of my stuff has been ok. I had some problems with RAM a while back but fortunately they exchanged it for me.

The problem is the customer service, if it isn´t good then a problem becomes a depressing experience of phone calls and chasing after people who should do their job properly and phone you back.

At work we had some problems with some viewsonic monitors years ago and they were excellent. They got us to box it up and then they sent out a courier with a replacement and the courier swapped them over. They did all the hard work and cor it made it a lot easier as most companies want you to send it back for them.

still, hope you get it sorted.

Neil C

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I bought a Vaio a few years back and it has behaved impeccably. I used it for teaching so it travelled a lot as well. I bought it from a posh dealer in Tottenham Ct Road so probably paid over the odds. I would be very cagey about buying from internet dealers, in fact I have yet to do it for the reasons you state. There is nothing quite so definite as walking back into the shop and eyeballing someone when you have a problem.

Dennis

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Its a sorry tale that Olly.

I bought my 1st, and current, laptop from would you believe, Toys are Us! Its a Gateway 1.46GHz and came with 256Mb ram, which is now 1.5Gb ram. Other than tis it has cost me nothing other than a new power supply as the 18v cable broke, which was my fault.

I do believe though that when buying something like a computer then there is no substitute for a high street shop and the comfort of the knowlege that should it go wrong you can grab someone by the throat!, I mean go talk to someone in person.

Anyway, hope you get things sorted mate......

Gary

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Olly

That is unlucky to have so many faults with different manufactures.

I have a friend at work who purchased a Compaq laptop and the plug in power supply packed in within 3 months.

PC World said to him, we will have to send it back to Compaq meaning the laptop and the power supply.

Needless to say he was not impressed that PC World would not simply replace the faulty power supply.

Buying from a shop may not be hassle free.

Paul

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I've only used Dell for buying laptops/desktops, and found service and price to be good enough. I have a Compaq laptop I use for guiding, exposure control, webcaming, etc, made in 1999. I bought it two years ago off a guy in a carpark for £50. It hasn't missed a beat, hasn't crashed once, it's pretty slow, but just shows they don't make them like they used to :D

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Iv'e never known anyone be that unlucky with new laptops, they are usually fine at least for a while. If you keep on like this eventually you must be due a massive dose of good luck to ballance it all out, perhaps you will win a large sum of money, or maybe a meteorite will land at your feet tomorow!

good luck

chris

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My experience with laptops is dismal as well

Viglen - worked ok but if you ever needed a rebuild to the HD (and back then with Win95 you'd need to do it once a year) the drivers were AWFUL - you had to install about 10 zillion drivers and if you didnt do it in the right order the machine would simply die when the rebuild was complete.

Toshiba - worked ok for about 3 months then packed up with a blown motherboard. Endless aggro with Toshiba. Also ran off its own batteries for ooohhhh at least 20 seconds.

HP - Dreadful load of junk. Screen was rubbish, machine was so slow it was almost unsusable. Probably processor fault but I just shipped it back and, after a tussle, got my money back.

Dell (1) - worked ok so long as it was run off the mains. Batteries a non-starter. Lasted about 6 months and then had a catastrophic HD failure.

Dell (2) - worst of the lot. Came out the box and literally blew up - huge bang, flash and puff of smoke from the PSU. Total write off. When I called Dell some clown wanted me to run through the diagnostic disk despite me telling him the machine was fried "yes I know that Madam but I cant help you if you dont follow these instructions - can you put the recovery CD in the machine and power on yaddah yaddah yaddah" worst support of anywhere with some johhny no-stars telling me it was a software problem despite the fact the screen had melted.

Viao (1) - worked ok (sort of) but was very stroppy - all sorts of weird bugs which were never resolved. Refused to ever recognise USB stick memory. Wouldnt run some external USB devices.

Viao (2) - about the same. USB worked ok but it was full of weirdness with endless unexplained crashes, slow downs, brown outs, inability to read standard CDs etc.

Fujitsu - solid gold runner, few problems with the batteries when new.

Just about to splash out on a new Fujitsu so I'll let you know how it works out.

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I've only used Dell for buying laptops/desktops, and found service and price to be good enough. I have a Compaq laptop I use for guiding, exposure control, webcaming, etc, made in 1999. I bought it two years ago off a guy in a carpark for £50. It hasn't missed a beat, hasn't crashed once, it's pretty slow, but just shows they don't make them like they used to :D

My name is Dell-Boy too :)

Only ever bought Dells whether it be laptops, Desktops, printers, monitors despite the fact that I have the know-how to easily build my own rigs. In fact I am typing on a 2001 Vintage Dell desktop right now. Still going strong with not a single hardware failure.

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I'm noticing a distinct lack (in this thread) of the letters I, B, and M. :) Having sold and/or serviced many, many of the makes you've all listed, I have to say that despite their ugly-as-sin appearance, IBMs (now Lenovo) are the most rugged, reliable S.O.B's I've ever used. I'm still using a 5 year old Thinkpad T-42 which has been on countless external jobs with me, and taken untold amounts of physical grief. Granted, it's had it's HD replaced, RAM upgraded and keyboard replaced, but none of those were for hardware failure... simply improvements, or in the case of the keyboard; large, heavy item collision. My fault entirely...

FWIW, my experience in the last ten to fifteen years is this :

IBM (now Lenovo) : As mentioned, pig-ugly, but will generally outlast the user. The newer Lenovo builds have been somewhat less reliable, although haven't been around long enough to gauge longevity.

Dell : Lottery. If you get a good 'un, it'll be as reliable as it is pretty. Avoid the huge lit-like-a-stadium show-off variants unless you don't mind 15 minute battery-life, and numerous hardware/software glitches due to the light-show being controlled directly by the BIOS :D.

Fujitsu-Siemens : Budget. Avoid unless no alternative available, in particular the Amilo family.

Acer : Avoid. Like the plague. We've had more of these heaps o' Rubbish written-off than any other. Same goes for their PCs. However, that may be at least partly attributable to them being so damn cheap; parents tend to buy them to placate careless, demanding teens and pre-teens who harbour an insatiable social-networking habit, and are incapable of eating their junk-food and juice at a safe distance from sensitive technology.

Sony : Tetchy. Expensive. Horrible to work inside, assuming you can actually get inside it. Stupidly expensive for Sony-specific replacement parts. Reliability seems good though, abuse notwithstanding.

Toshiba : Used to be reliable if ugly, but now seem to have hit a rather unreliable patch in the last two years or so.

HP : Most Pavilion models are as heavy as a house, and require just as much power... which usually comes in the form of an exceptionally big, hot, and heavy PSU, which has the most non-standard (and unreliable) connection ever devised.

Of course, YMMV. This is just my (and my colleagues') experience.

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We now have 4 ASUS 900's at home, all work fine..two sitting in the obs as we speak running soak tests... all running XP or Windows 7 (stripped down, as it's still sluggish compared to XP). My HP also is a workhorse, that's a bit slow now, but works perfectly after 4 years (ZD7000 Pentium 4 laptop...runs as hot as hell :-))

Dell - shonky screens...had 3 ...all failed

Sony - usless piles of doo doo, utter waste of time (development machines)

Epic - Make the Sony's look good

Alienware - Great for games, pretty lousy for much else (devving again)

Macbooks - Very nice, still have two which are years old now..robust and solid

Desktops - HP, Apple all good...

We go through a lot of machines at work...we never ever order Sony's any more...

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I have a Dell laptop, had it for a year and a half, and it really has been faultless. Still get 4hours plus out of the battery. I did spec it myself.

I build all my own PC's and have for a number of years. I would never ever buy a Dell desktop. The quality of the parts and upgradeability is poor at best. Laptops from them I recommend.

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I have a Dell laptop, had it for a year and a half, and it really has been faultless. Still get 4hours plus out of the battery. I did spec it myself.

I build all my own PC's and have for a number of years. I would never ever buy a Dell desktop. The quality of the parts and upgradeability is poor at best. Laptops from them I recommend.

Oh good, glad I'm not the only one who has had this experience with Dell desktops. I had a very bad time with my "un-upgradable" Dimension. Needless to say I built the one I am using now with parts from a trusted supplier.

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I buy all my computer stuff online. I principally buy from Cheap Laptops, Hard Drives, LCD Monitors, TVs, Televisions and more at Ebuyer.com as their customer service is very efficient. When I bought a new monitor recently and it arrived DOE, they sent two replacements immediately and collected the old one. Now that's what I call efficiency! But seriously, maybe I've been lucky but I have never had a serious problem with online buying. My experience is that companies that have premises you can walk into are no better and sometimes worse than their on-line compatriots. No company can afford to get a bad reputation as people will stop buying from them. Why do so many people on this forum buy from FLO? because they are a reliable and cost effective box shifter. As for reliability, I'm writing this on a six year old HP desktop which has been a model of reliability considering it has been used almost every day. My other computers, a four year old Dell desktop and a four year old Dell laptop have been similarly totally reliable mechanically (wish I could say the same about the operating system!). And my old AMD 500MHz desktop I built in 1998 (based on a 1994 case) still works too!

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Indeed... a great example of why a "Your mileage may vary" comment should be an automatic accompaniment to almost any review or opinion of any computer. Sure, there have been some known technological turkeys produced over the years, but in general, you'll get hugely varied reports about most machines, and that variance increases in near-direct proportion to the number of reports that are compiled.

Speaking of which... your AMD 500MHz... it isn't by any chance a silver-topped K6-2? If so, you've provided a fantastic example of how this variance can affect even the aforementioned "turkey"s! :D Seriously though, at the time, we started building PCs using K6's and K6-2's due to the vast reduction in cost compared to the Intel CPUs, the Slot 1's in particular, but there were two distinct caveats; 1 - They were a real pest to setup initially, with different core & I/O voltages across the entire range, with manual FSB/multiplier ratios that had to be set at build-time, and back then in the days of jumper-jungle motherboards, it was a fiddly PITA procedure just to get the damn thing to boot at the right speed. ...and 2 - Stock coolers available then generally ranged from poor to despicably bad, with Rubbish-plastic fans that became snap-ably brittle within a few months of use. That said, if maintained properly, as you've found, they could outlast even the workhorse-like Intels of their day.

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I've never bothered with laptops, just not worth the hassle. My friends have all had new laptops fail on them within 6 months of owning them and i've had to fix them all for them.

Ive had 2. My first lasted 2 years then I sold it for £300. My current one is 1.5 years old, and has never even stuttered, I now have a netboook, and that is also running great.

Were they Acer ASDA specials by any chance?

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Speaking of which... your AMD 500MHz... it isn't by any chance a silver-topped K6-2?

It certainly is! I remember having to set jumpers and dip switches on the AI5VG+ motherboard when I built it. Pretty slinky for 1998 with 128MB RAM. Wow! Those were the days. The only problems I've had with that computer are the graphics card died and I'm on my third CPU cooling fan. But to be honest, it doesn't get used much these days. Win 98SE is a bit of a museum piece!

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Though...just trying to revert one of the ASUS boxes back from Windows 7 (just too sluggish to justify £160 on a copy of pro with) to XP, and whoooah...partitions and hal.dll errors galore... will have to delete all the partitions etc...

Why are MS such a pain in the proverbial :-)

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