Laptops –any I should avoid?

DE
Posted By
david_evanson
Jan 11, 2004
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381
Replies
11
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Closed
I am thinking of buying a laptop as ‘backup’ to my main PC. I will install Office XP Pro and the full Adobe Creative Suite Premium. It’s not intended for heavy duty photo editing just transporting finished work and tidying-up etc. The two front runners at the moment are, Sony Vaio Z1RMP and HP Evo NX9005. Both have 512MB RAM and 60GB hard drives – the HP has a 15” 1024×768 display and the Sony a 1400×1050 display. Are there any issues with either of these makes with regards to Adobe software? Any help/advice would be appreciated.

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RL
Robert_Levine
Jan 11, 2004
There was definitely a problem in the past with Vaio laptops. You’ll have to search around to see if that problem persists.

It sounds like you need what I already have. Something to go back and forth to a client with type of machine.

I got myself a low end Dell Inspirion 1100 last month. Nothing fancy and a bit on the heavy side, but certainly cheap enough at $950.00 for a 2.6 Ghz Celeron, 30 gig hd, 512 megs of RAM. Included the case, shipping and tax.

As a matter of disclosure I own stock in Dell.

I don’t know much about the HP.

HTH,

Bob
DE
david_evanson
Jan 11, 2004
Thanks Bob – when I was looking at the Vaio I was sure I had seen some posts about them in here. I will do a search and also check out the offerings from Dell in the UK.
MM
Mick_Murphy
Jan 11, 2004
If you’re in the UK, then Evesham makes decent laptops and they are generally considered to be a reliable company. They usually come on the high side in the magazine benchmarks and their customer support is also well regarded in the magazines.

Which is why I got an Evesham laptop last spring – 2.4 GHz Pentium with 1G of RAM and 40G hard drive, NVIDIA graphics card, 15inch 1072×768 for about £1500. PSCS certainly flies on it. They provide a full WinXP backup disk which is important. Some companies (I think Sony and HP both) only provide a restore disk image which can be a real pain if you want to reinstall.

I would strongly suggest getting 1G of RAM for running PSCS when you buy as you will almost certainly need it and it will be a lot more expensive to uograde after purchase.

I have no shares in Evesham.
RL
Robert_Levine
Jan 11, 2004
wrote:

They provide a full WinXP backup disk which is important.

An excellent point and also one of the reasons I recommend and buy Dell. A full install CD for the O/S.

it will be a lot more expensive to uograde after purchase.

I’ve found it to be just the opposite here. But it pays to shop around.

Bob
GA
Gordon_Anderson
Jan 11, 2004
From a customer service standpoint, if you would think that a factor, I would rate IBM as great and HP as next to nothing.
RL
Robert_Levine
Jan 11, 2004
The Thinkpads are great laptops, but VERY expensive.

Bob
MM
Mick_Murphy
Jan 11, 2004
What I meant about upgrading the memory is that you would probably have to remove the 512Mb and replace with a 1Gb module. I haven’t taken memory out of a laptop since I had a PowerBook many years ago but I remember being in that situation and it was a big waste of the massively expensive 16Mb memory module which I had bought with the machine.

I have no problem with Dell either. I just gave away a 6 year old desktop which is still steaming away with never a problem. When I bought my laptop, I priced up Dell and Evesham here and the Evesham gave the better value I thought at the time.
G
GoldFrost
Jan 12, 2004
Gordon wrote:
From a customer service standpoint, if you would think that a factor, I would rate IBM as great and HP as next to nothing.

Gordon, if I read your post correctly, you’re saying that HP customer service is bad? If so, then I can definitely attest to that. I’ve gotten extremely poor customer service on the Compaq that I’ve been trying to get warranty parts for. They kept giving me the runaround such as long phone holds, dropped calls, unreturned voice mails, having to repeat the same problem description over to countless clue less first line support personnel. But, in their defense, I have to say that once I got a hold of a support manager at their corporate headquarters, things changed around drastically. To keep me as a customer they sent me a free dvd burner (worth about $250-$400 depending on where you buy) and after they found out that they could not replace the parts anytime soon, they are now sending me a replacement system that is a heckuvalot better than what I currently have (they’re sending a zd7040 w/17" screen, 512mb ram, 60gb hd, 2.8ghz, wireless 54g, they’re latest system 🙂 at no cost. I’m hoping that if anything goes wrong with the HP system that I’ll get better support as their Compaq support was really atrocious. :-p

Gary T
GA
Gordon_Anderson
Jan 12, 2004
Gary,

Yes, by next to nothing I meant pretty much non-existent. And I also tried numerous avenues, including trying to talk to people at the corporate HQ (guess I should have pushed further). It was so disappointing that I never bought another HP. But I’ve had two IBMs and the customer service is was even "more" than expected, meaning they even assisted with issues that ultimately were other peoples problems. Not that I meant to get into a computer binge but if I ever have computer problems I don’t want a company that acts as if I bought their product on the third world market.
DM
Dylan Mouratsing
Jan 12, 2004
wrote in message
I am thinking of buying a laptop as ‘backup’ to my main PC. I will install
Office XP Pro and the full Adobe Creative Suite Premium. It’s not intended for heavy duty photo editing just transporting finished work and tidying-up etc. The two front runners at the moment are, Sony Vaio Z1RMP and HP Evo NX9005. Both have 512MB RAM and 60GB hard drives – the HP has a 15" 1024×768 display and the Sony a 1400×1050 display. Are there any issues with either of these makes with regards to Adobe software? Any help/advice would be appreciated.

I got a 1.3ghz centrino for
SA
Steve_Archbold
Jan 13, 2004
I have a Sony Viao Laptop (SR1K) I use for the same stuff, no problems at all in 3 years+ of use, no crashes even!!

Steve

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