Without hijacking the thread, does anyone know anything about tablet pcs? What are the good makes of those?

 

^ agree with Acer and HP.

there's only one brand below Macintosh I choose and that's HP.

 

" Thank you for calling Snell Computer Service my name is Bob "

" No really whats your real name?"

" My name is Bob "

"Bullshit"

"Where"

"Click"

Great customer service... liar.gif phone.gif


Sorry, TC- Latitudes are considered the business class laptops. I have a Latitude C 610 and love it. Its not the fastest in the world but compared to new laptops it has some 'heft' and 'bulk'. I don't feel like im going to break it in half. What version of AutoCAD are you going to be running? Thats a pretty big program to try to get running on a laptop. Everything else can be handled by anything out there today.

 

I've had two HP widescreen laptops (dv1000 then dv6000) and both were/are great. I actually just sold the 1000 yesterday finally on eBay for $350, not bad. Both worked like champs, the only thing is tht in both of them, the IE1994 (4-pin firewire) jack kind of broke, I'm guessing cause it's so small and I was gentle with the wires. Oh well, 5 year accidental warranty FTW!

 

I dont know about Dell...I had a laptop from them and the hard drive broke twice (within a year), and then the connector to charge the battery stopped working. Their cs stinks btw..you cant understand what those people are saying..

I got a Toshiba, I was supposed to get an HP but they ran out so I got this one. It hasnt been bad..hard drive failed once in the past 1 1/2 which is better then the Dell.

 

ive had compaq, acer, and now this one is an HP. I broke the 1st two, and the compaq was crap when i had it. Love the HP though. Got it on sale at best buy for $748, Comes with Vista (which i hate but owell) Nice memory stuff, built in cam/mic (great for deployments) and all that good stuff. I think ill stick with my hp.

 

dell - good - get the latitude series, inspirons are cheaply made.
mac - overpriced - you pay for it to be pretty and to be a mac owner - look for a laptop you'd like and increase the price by 30-50% and you have the mac price... for the same hardware.
ibm/lenovo - best - solid/reliable and they start out in the 500's just like dell.

the hp/compaq/acer crap you get from best buy is just that.

hp/compaq is typically underpowered and acer's fall apart kinda like the cheap dell inspirons

however the last hp laptop I worked on was alot better, I think they are shifting their crap lines off on compaq.

edit: btw, I still don't get the "i hate vista" comments. It's just like when xp came out. Everyone hated it. I've been using it since beta on a desktop and laptop and have found it to be a significant improvement over xp.

 

^Yeah, Ive heard the same thing about Macs. So maybe after I have my own business going, I dunno.

So right now I'm looking at Dells again. Anyone heard anythign or have any experience with the new Vostro series?

I can get the Vostro 1500 for $599. It's got 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, and 120 GB hard drive, and is just 5.72 lbs and has a 6 cell battery, with a 15.4 inch widescreen. It also has a CD/DVD burner and 128 MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 8400M GS (whatever that means, I assume its the graphics card). Plus what I like is that they have this new cooling tray for it which redirects heat away from the laptop.

Otherwise, they have the Latitude D530 at $649 which also has 2GB DDR2 SDRAM, and 2 GB hardrive, but only a 15" screen (not that it makes much difference). I'm not sure if it's worth the extra $50.

These prices are only good until the 14th, and I didnt wanna buy one just yet, but we always get offers like these in the mail so I could probably get them for about the same prices later on down the road.

 

tons of people say Macs are overpriced and the same as any other computer... but they work.

You don't have to fumble around to get the wireless to connect, it just works.
You don't have the OS slowing you down from simple web browsing, no OS crashes or memory failures, it just works.

Macs just work.




but for three times the price of a cheap Dell, I'll deal with the hassles of Windows and cheapness of Dell. When the hard drive crashes in 3 years, I'll just buy another. Just make sure to buy a USB external hard drive and keep your Dell backed up.

 

yeah, this is now the second Dell hard drive that's crashed on me, lol. Luckily I had nothing too important on there, and what I did I emailed to myself and printed out.