GMAT Club Legend
Joined: 05 Apr 2006
Affiliations: HHonors Diamond, BGS Honor Society
Posts: 5916
Given Kudos: 7
Schools: Chicago (Booth) - Class of 2009
WE:Business Development (Consumer Products)
[#permalink]
11 Mar 2007, 19:15
Sonys are crap. They look slick, but if something breaks sony charges you a RIDICULOUS amount of money. Spare batteries, etc. Too much custom crap inside too. Driver nightmare. My Sony vaio? A nice machine that wasnt worth the price.
HP and Compaq are cheaply built and have poor maintenance records. My Compaq laptop? Cheap, and it showed. Broke after six months, RMA'd, repaired.
My HP laptop? So far so good, but its not especially light and it runs insanely hot.
Dells are just pieces of crap. Period. They are built in cheapo plastic, they are oft overpriced for what they are, and they are just not quality machines. Take it from someone who used to work on them daily... they suck. I've owned 3 from work, and they all sucked. The fans went out, the screens got dead pixels, etc etc etc.
Now IBM.... here's a laptop. Solid machines, well built, lots of good options under the six pound mark, including the T series. I've owned 3 of these and had 2 from work. They have all worked great. I had one fry on me and IBM replaced it the next day.
In my mind? There is no question - if you want a durable quality laptop, IBM is the way to go. There's a reason they are the laptop of choice for so many companies and consulting firms.
The only thing I'd seriously consider instead? Maybe an apple. With the advent of parallels with cohesion and bootcamp, the mac can be a windows machine - but of course, with all the mac goodies as well. They are quality machines, and if any of the rumours are true - leopard launch soon, built in h 264 encoder and decoder, etc, then well, it's worth seriously considering. One of the things that is most impressive is the new mac backup system (go check it out on apple's leopard pages). IT's basically a differential backup thats all graphical. It's got a wow factor, that fer sure.