nutmac said:
Price is non-issue: IBM ThinkPad T42 or R51.
Looking for better value: HP zt3000 or dv1000.
Although IBM is more rock solid, I recommend extended warranty with both, particularly HP.
I had a thinkpad T20, it pretty much completely died 2 years in (for no good reason ... and i'm not exagerating) and everything was replaced (Hard drive, Monitor, Motherboard, Keyboard ... I think the plastic shell of the bottom half of the computer was the some one I had before. So you should DEFINITELY get more than a 1 year warranty. Other than that, it ran perfectly for 2 years, had everything replaced, and now, 2.5 years after the replacement, it still runs perfectly.
Now, I have a HP zx5000 for work, it's fast and the price was good (for the performance), but very big & heavy, cheap looking & feeling, the lid is very scratched from being in my backpack (rubbing against the zipper when sliding in? pens at the bottom of my backpack?), and that was noticeable after less than three months.
And it has some serious flaws, such as:
The fact that the heat vent is on the right hand side, and blows out so much hot air (seriously uncalled for amounts of heat, and it's on a good deal of the time) that I have to put something in front of hit to deflect the heat back so it doesn't make my hand really hot while mousing.
And whenever it's in sleep mode, a led on the front of it blinks, this is acceptable, if only it wasn't accompanied by a strange interference based (probably) hissing noise with the blinking. Loud enough to drive me mad to the point that the computer _MUST_ be turned off if I'm going to sleep in the same room.
And (along the same lines as the previous complaint), the hissing noise also pops up when a lot of network (ethernet or wireless, especially wireless) is taking place, but it's even louder, to the point that when transferring a large file, I will often place the laptop in another room to do it.
And the battery locking device is slid back (towards the back of the computer) to remove the battery, unfortunately, it's right where i grab the laptop (middle-ish) when picking it up, so 1/2 the time, i hit it and the battery falls out. This is _VERY_ annoying (and there is no backup battery to keep it running in sleep mode like in my powerbook).
Next time I get a computer for work, I'm going to fight a lot harder to have a higher budget so I can buy a better computer.
I've also had some experience with a dell, all I can say about them is that their tech support was so terrible that I refused to buy one. I called to get a hard drive replaced, and they had me on the phone for 4 hours (to someone from india probably) running dell diagnostics (don't loose those cds!!) to confirm something that I told them right from the start. All just to have them ship me a new hard drive so I could replace it and reinstall everything. Seeing as a fresh install of windows xp has been shown to last less than 20 minutes on the internet, how they expected an average individual to do this is beyond me.
Both IBM and Apple will send you a box that you can send them your laptop in, then mail it back to them (all paid for by them, if under warranty). Apple does it all overnight, not sure about IBM.
Ok, I spent _way_ too much time on this reply, hopefully it helped.
