Thinking about getting a lap-top computer

[trevtheturner]

Alan,

Dell have been advertising heavily for the last few weeks and do seem to offer good value-for-money specifications, so I suspect Alf has hit the nail on the head.

Fingers crossed for you.

Cheers,

Trev.

 

[Vormulac]

I hope you get your new kit quickly, unfortunately my experiences of dealing with Dell have not been good. Replacing all the kit (desktop machines and server) for one of my customers through Dell (their old kit was Dell, so they insisted) resulted in *months* of problems including lost orders, orders being incorrectly filled and sluggish delivery.

And this was for a very high profile London restaurant! Ok, I wasn't ordering an entire warehouse full of goods, but for the money I expected better service than that.

Still, others here seem to have had more positive experiences Alan, so fingers crossed you get your daugher's machine without trouble. They're pretty good machines too

V.

 

[Anonymous]

The only Dell I ever had was really heavy (at Virgin's check-in desk at Gatwick the basic bag of laptop bits was heavier than their economy carry-on allowance of 6Kg :shock: !!!) and I quickly dumped it in favour of a Thinkpad (IBM). Even that is heavy once you add the power supply, plug-in CD, carry bag and a few bits of paper, mobile phone charger.... I've avoided a PDA so far.

My experiences with IBM have all been excellent -- they go on and on and on until the software eventually kills the system performance. My old iSeries 1480 is still a trusty backup and would do everything you need. If you shop around they're no more expensive than others -- and certainly less than £1300 (sorry!).

For most people who want to do a bit of word processing, quote generation and store a few pictures (and maybe browse UKW fora using broadband) an old 300MHz Pentium 2 will actually run quite fast enough so that you'd hardly notice the difference from a new machine running at 3 GHz. The Internet down't run at 3 GHz, so you're instantly limited by the speed of your connection. Even LAN's at work are usually 100MHz maximum. The only reason most people really need anything faster is to download music and play online games or DVD's....... unless you're a designer who uses complex CAD and graphics packages. Even then most systems have problems because the storage and memory transfer rates become the limiting factor, regardless of whether it's a Pentium 1 or a Mega-Giga-Pentium X-Squared. The rest is all marketing to an uninformed consumer public. Finally, beware of 'media' systems. They're nothing more than a standard system with a bigger hard drive and a £20 bit of software -- only they cost 50% to 100% more !

 

[AlanG]

Thanks V , Brian, everyone.

Dell finally delivered! But not without multiple phone calls, threats, complaints.

The machine arrived on Wednesday morning; luckily there was someone at home:

I was getting a little worked up about it, but it is a Christmas present for my daughter as a

reward for all her hard work at school this year. Hopefully she will remember me on her

way to fame and fortune.

This will be my first Christmas for a long time, without any toys ..er. Tools.

 

[tim]

Alan

I bought my wife an Inspiron for Christmas and I had exactly the same problem on the customer service side - being bounced around various Indian call centres, having to resort to threatening emails etc. I hope this is not the way Dell is going. It could be put down to Xmas overload but I did all this in October!

I hope nothing goes wrong with it because I don't have much faith in their back up now.

Merry Christmas

Tim

 

[PitBull]

I thought I'd read somewhere that Dell had decided to take their call centres back on-shore/in-company as the savings didn't make up for the loss of sales & reputation etc. I though it was Dell, but might have been somebody else ?

I've never owned a laptop, but have had a number of them assigned to me by various companies over the years. Nortel used to be big on Dells - the Latitudes pre-2001 were pretty good, but later ones (at Catapult) were more fragile, as were the Inspirons. Our sales team had Sony Vaio's - spent more time under repair than on the road. MataSolv put me back on Dell Latitudes - I had several of these and they all had keyboard and screen problems. Credit Suisse have just given me a new IBM ThinkPad - can't comment on robustness obviously, but the keyboard has the best feel of any laptop keyboard I've used in the past. Sadly it has WinXP and only 512MB RAM, so runs like a slug in treacle. If you want XP, get 1MB RAM minimum.

 

[PitBull]

Since some people have mentioned Dell customer service:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/15 ... r_selloff/

Sounds like the Hoover/Kodak situations all over again

 

[llangatwgnedd]

Sadly it has WinXP and only 512MB RAM, so runs like a slug in treacle. If you want XP, get 1MB RAM minimum.

Thanks for that PB

Thats what my laptop has and I find it much slower than my old desktop with nearly half the specs.

More ram will be on order next Month

 

[AlanG]

Happy Christmas everyone,
The new dell arrived and so far so good , much faster then my desktop (IBM Aptiva ).
The next challenge is to install a wireless router. I thought I was about average when it came to installing computer hardware but perhaps it takes a little more intelligence than I can muster. I spent several hours trying to get the better of a Belkin router, and in the end it won, I’m back on wires again .
Still, at least I’m in the house instead of trying to keep warm in the workshop. :wink:

Alan

 

[llangatwgnedd]

Alan,
I had no problem installing my wi fi I just picked the phone up and told my oldest son to get his butt around here. :lol:

The hic up he had was changing the password from admin to a new one and not realizing that he had to do it on both apparatuss (well he does work in the DVLA in Swansea) :roll:

The only thing I dislike with this laptop (Toshiba satellite A60 pro) is the inbuilt speakers so tinny other that Brill