Notebook advise

Dave Siciliano

Dave Siciliano

Final Approach
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Feb 27, 2005
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Dave Siciliano
Dropped my old notebook computer this weekend on the Houston trip: es ist tot! Won't even come on.

So, I was looking to move to a new Dell. They suggest the D420 or 620. I'm looking for something light to travel with; 60 gig HD; DVD read right; wireless connection 12.25 or larger screen. Wondering if y'all had any suggestions.

Best,

Dave
 
Dave, I bought an HP NC 2400 about three weeks ago. So far I'm very pleased -- it's got a keyboard with a great feel to it and both touch and stick pointing. I got mine at pcconnection.com -- free shipping and no sales tax!
 
I'll second a vote for HP.

Dell's customer service has not been good lately.
 
We are still using the Dells at work but we did dabble with the HPs year before last. They were not as robust as the Dells. That is setting a new low for computers let me tell you. Go MAC!
 
I just had a recent excellent customer service experience with Gateway.
 
Just to toss another name in the arena... I loved my Acer laptop until I needed the money and had to sell it. :D
 
wsuffa said:
I'll second a vote for HP.

Dell's customer service has not been good lately.
Click to expand...

I would concur. HP laptops are pretty solid. If you want to go a little cheaper, I've also had pretty good luck using (and supporting) MPC laptops).
 
I have beat the living snot out of three IBM laptops (now Lenovo) over the past four years. The T42 takes it on the chin and keeps on going - I got one to last 2.5 years (a personal record)

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
I currently have a Gateway Tablet. I like it.
 
Thanks guys! Dell was very responsive. I haven't shopped. Big article in the local rag about Michael taking over again; hiring new execs and cutting red tape. I'll ask my IT expert to look at some of your suggestions. We have several machines: he likes knowing how they work and the fewer types, the simpler for him.

Would you go to Vista or stay with XP pro now? I was gonna wait until the first service pack was released. Let me get a little farther and I'll post what I'm looking at. Not the high power user some of you are.

Best,

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Would you go to Vista or stay with XP pro now? I was gonna wait until the first service pack was released. Let me get a little farther and I'll post what I'm looking at. Not the high power user some of you are.

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

You may not have a choice, depending on the machine.

Personally, I don't see enough difference to switch my machines to Vista at this point - and Vista is new, I don't like to buy V.1 of anything.
 
wsuffa said:
You may not have a choice, depending on the machine.

Personally, I don't see enough difference to switch my machines to Vista at this point - and Vista is new, I don't like to buy V.1 of anything.
Click to expand...

Dell is giving me the option, Bill. XP or Vista for the same price.

Best,

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Dell is giving me the option, Bill. XP or Vista for the same price.

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

As a techie friend said to me: "Don't even think about Vista until they release the second service pack!"

I think he's right -- Microsoft has a history of serious bugs in early releases.
 
the only thing i can add about Vista, is...You can always download the service packs free in the future, and learn how to use its new features now. Since it will be the OS of the future, like xp is now...might as well get what others will be using in the near future.
 
Our standard at work is IBM (Lenovo). My experience has been that they are bulletproof. And I've gone through a few over the years. Windows XP Professional with plenty of our IT department's bloatware added.

My laptop at home is a Gateway that I picked up last April. 14.1 inch screen, 1.4 GHz Celeron M processor, 512 MBytes RAM, 60 GByte (?) HD. I don't think the DVD drive will burn them, however. IEEE 802.11b/g built in. Windows XP Home Edition.

I just built a new home computer with a Core(TM) 2 Duo processor, ASUS MB, 2 GBytes of RAM, etc. Windows Vista Home Premium for the OS. If you are thinking Vista, think MEMORY and lots of it. A presentation by an Microsoft rep at a HomePlug Alliance meeting last October gave a good indication of what you need. I asked about memory and the answer was that he had two laptops. One had 512 MBytes of RAM and it would run Vista. But, as he asked, you did want to do something other than run Vista, didn't you? His other laptop had 2 GBytes of RAM and it worked fine. My new machine with 2 GBytes is doing fine. Oh, and I've got a GForce 8800 GTS based video card with something like 660 MBytes of RAM in it. Take the realism sliders in Flight Simulator X and shove them all the way to the right and go. No delays in frame updates whatsoever.

Vista has been troublefree for me so far. I've got the demo version of Outlook 2007 loaded and it is working fine, too. You'll find it will take some getting used to as the user interface is a bit different. Bones had it right in the first Star Trek movie. "I know engineers. They love to change things!" :yes:
 
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Dave Siciliano said:
Would you go to Vista or stay with XP pro now?
Click to expand...

I will not be switching our company to Vista until something forces me. XP works. People understand it--you understand it. There is nothing you are going to gain with Vista other than decreased productivity and potential for problems.

Stick with XP.
 
Vista offers significant enhancements in security, manageability, and support for 64-bit computing. For an individual or a small business, it's not terribly compelling and won't be until there are apps that NEED it. For organizations with high security requirements, or large organizations (hundreds or thousands of desktops), Vista is an improvement on XP. It's also pretty good for superduper power users running multi-core systems as it's support for huge amounts of memory is great.

I ran a late Vista Release Candidate on a Sun T2000 with 8 cores and 32GB - was sweet.
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Dell is giving me the option, Bill. XP or Vista for the same price.

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

I should probably keep my mouth shut because I'm an idiot in this field, but my understanding is that if you are getting the Core Duo processor, you are not going to be able to take full advantage of it unless you go with Vista. Me, when I manage to get a new computer that has true multitasking processor ability, I am dang sure gonna want the OS that lets me take advantage. MS has always been pretty good to me about dealing with problems, but I've got a super secret phone number to call from some charter yacht guests, so YMMV.

BTW, for small and light I've been using an OLD Toshiba Portege, things over three years old and still at it, and I HAVE dropped this poor thing on several occassions and I am not nice to my computers and they live in some bad climates and conditions. It kinda reminds me of the old Timex commercials...
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Dave, I assume you mean read/write? Or are you having a lot of read errors? ;)
Click to expand...

Yes Kent. Thanks. I'm kind of blasting things out between work demands. Should go back and proof better, but you know how it goes!

I really appreciate everyone's thoughts. I think I'll price a Dell with what I'd like; then, compare a bit. The IBMs always had pretty significant premiums in the past. I didn't drop my laptop, a friend did getting my luggage--I won't dwell on it. I don't usually have a ruggedness issue :p

Best,

Dave
 
Order an HP Business Book (not a consumer model) direct from HP or a high-end dealer who handles the business models. There are more local service centers. Very few exist for the consumer lines such as Pavilion, etc. I have two HP's and although I've had a couple problems, the service toward repair was fantastic. One is in the car full-time and takes a lot of abuse between high heat in the summer and cold in the winter.

Previously, I had three Toshiba's. The first two had been to service and the third was headed to service for a known defect. It hadn't affected me yet but before it could, I got it traded back for full value toward an HP.
 
wbarnhill said:
Just to toss another name in the arena... I loved my Acer laptop until I needed the money and had to sell it. :D
Click to expand...

I bought my daughter a low end laptop from Acer and the battery died in a weird way (computer wouldn't complete the Windows boot process with the battery installed, and it wouldn't charge) almost exactly the day after the 1 year warranty ran out. The original battery life was awful as well (about 1 hr) but it's been fine other than that and the new battery which I found for about half the price that Acer wanted lasts close to three hours.
 
Leslie and I have about four or five laptops between the two of us. The smallest and most portable is my Dell Inspiron 710m, but I upgraded the HD to 100GB myself and am using the larger battery, which gives about 4-5 hours. The keyboard sucks, with no throw to the keys to speak of. It was giving a real whine on the fan earlier this week, but that has stopped. I've heard horror stories about their outsourced Indian technical support these days. Haven't used it yet to comment.

Leslie, OTOH, got an Acer for less that a quarter of what I paid after rebate. A much nicer screen and keyboard, though only about 2 hours battery life and much heavier.

As far as Vista goes, wait until at least the first service pack. Yes, they've been working on security and quality, but there are still going to be programs that won't play well with it, and there'll be some security holes in the first release. Just make sure that the hardware is beefy enough to run it. On a laptop, that generally means that you do NOT want anything with an embedded video controller, a la Intel. Spec it as if you were going to be running MS Flight Sim X.

Edit: Invest in an external USB HD and back up to it religiously. Laptops WILL fail more frequently than desktops, and it's frequently cheaper and easier to just replace them. Plus, if you need to send them in for service, there's no guarantee that they won't just swap out for a new (refurb) unit, and they are under no obligation to save your data.
 
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Ghery said:
There was a time when that advise would bother me, but now that they're using my company's processors, go for it. :D
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Ghery,

The other nice thing about that is that buying a Mac is no longer a risk. Buy it, try it, if you absolutely hate it or for some reason can't function with it as a Mac or a half-and-half machine (dual boot, Parallels, CrossOver, etc.), then you can just wipe the hard drive clean, install Windows, and you've got a really nice Windows machine. It certainly removes a lot of barriers to entry! :yes:

OBTW, Apple opened a call center in India... And closed it again within a month due to customer complaints. All tech support is now still in the good ol' US of A. :yes:
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Ghery,

The other nice thing about that is that buying a Mac is no longer a risk. Buy it, try it, if you absolutely hate it or for some reason can't function with it as a Mac or a half-and-half machine (dual boot, Parallels, CrossOver, etc.), then you can just wipe the hard drive clean, install Windows, and you've got a really nice Windows machine. It certainly removes a lot of barriers to entry! :yes:

OBTW, Apple opened a call center in India... And closed it again within a month due to customer complaints. All tech support is now still in the good ol' US of A. :yes:
Click to expand...

The insidious little secret is ...most Windows veterans who get Intel Macs are amazed after a while that they never use Windows. With Boot Camp you have to partition part of the hard drive for Windows. They will use run a for a while, decide they need more space for the OS X partition, and maybe carve it up all over again. Then they decide they almost never boot into Windows so they don't need the Windows part at all.

Steve Gibson is one who had that experience.

Resistance is futile...

I never tried Boot Camp. I use Parallels when I have to run Windows to get into work over VPN.

Now if I could just figure out the magic dust that gets Apple "AirPort" WiFi o my MacBook Pro connecting with WPA-anything on a new AT&T DSL wireless gateway. Apple's latest Airprot patch makes it flaky and keep disconnecting. As both are wont to do both sides say there's no probelm although teher are lots of trouble reports online. In a month or so there will be an OS X update that just happens to fix "reliability issues with AT&T WiFi gateways."

I could call AppleCare but I've already dealt with the support in India and I will go ballistic when they tell me I'm the first to report the problem.
 
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I have a Sony Vaio 13". Very light and compact. Worth every penny.

I had a Toshiba before, and it overheated constantly and shut down. That's a common problem with Toshibas.
 
JohnR said:
I have a Sony Vaio 13". Very light and compact. Worth every penny.

I had a Toshiba before, and it overheated constantly and shut down. That's a common problem with Toshibas.
Click to expand...

One of my co-workers has an E-machines laptop that overheats by (flawed) design. The wisdom on the web is to open it up, remove the heat sink over the CPU, and replace the heat sink goop. He has to do that once a week! :hairraise:
 
JohnR said:
I have a Sony Vaio 13". Very light and compact. Worth every penny.

I had a Toshiba before, and it overheated constantly and shut down. That's a common problem with Toshibas.
Click to expand...

John:

The Viao is what I dropped. The machine was reasonable once I got rid of all the c**p software they pre-loaded. Took me a long time to get rid of stuff I didn't want. Their support sucked! But, maybe it all does now.

Best,

Dave
 
In the back of my mind, I've wanted a lap top that would show enroute and approach charts. I'm in a pressurized plane; so, cabin altitude should be 10,000 or less most of the time. Does one of the machines discussed fit that profile? What if I'm in a non-pressurized plane and want to go to the mid to high teens? Anything fit that along with what's been discussed?

Best,

Dave
 
jeez you all are talking about vista. pretty sure my dads ole antique computer is still running windows 98.
 
Well first of all .. I wouldn't necessarily just chuck it yet. My fiancee
dropped hers and it wouldn't come on. She took it to a repair place
and they replaced the hard drive and that did it. It's an HP.

We use a lot of HP stuff at work and seem to get good service out of them.
However .. in the course of trying to get a recovery CD set for hers I
called HP's support and was very disappointed. I must have talked to
6 different people for a simple thing like ordering a recovery set. 5
of them were from either India or Pakistan or some such place and it
was all I could do to conduct a conversation with them. Their English
was awful. And they all have names like Steve or Jim or Nancy .. yeah right.

RT

Dave Siciliano said:
Dropped my old notebook computer this weekend on the Houston trip: es ist tot! Won't even come on.

So, I was looking to move to a new Dell. They suggest the D420 or 620. I'm looking for something light to travel with; 60 gig HD; DVD read right; wireless connection 12.25 or larger screen. Wondering if y'all had any suggestions.

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...
 
TMetzinger said:
Vista offers significant enhancements in security, manageability, and support for 64-bit computing.
Click to expand...
The security isn't proven. The 64-bit computing isn't going to do crap until there are 64 bit applications that really do require it. There are some--but they are in the high end video arena. Plus a current laptop wouldn't handle them anyways. Manageability really doesn't come into play until you get into the Enterprise level of things and to take advantage of it you must really understand it. None of that is a factor for the small business user buying a laptop to get work done.

TMetzinger said:
For an individual or a small business it's not terribly compelling and won't be until there are apps that NEED it.
Click to expand...
And when those apps that come out that DO need it, this laptop will not have the power to run them anyways.

Tmetzinger said:
For organizations with high security requirements, or large organizations (hundreds or thousands of desktops), Vista is an improvement on XP.
Click to expand...
It might be. None of these orgnizations are going to be switching to it for "high security requirements" until it has a proven security track record. Things might look good on paper right now but that is all. There are some features of Vista that could make my job easier in the future but if I were to make a switch right now those features aren't going to make up for all the problems and lost of productivity. Some of the software our company runs just DOES not run on Vista. I've tested it.

Tmetzinger said:
It's also pretty good for superduper power users running multi-core systems as it's support for huge amounts of memory is great.
Click to expand...
This laptop is not going to have or support memory in excess of what XP can already do.

Tmetzinger said:
I ran a late Vista Release Candidate on a Sun T2000 with 8 cores and 32GB - was sweet.
Click to expand...
This laptop is FAR from a SUN T2000 with 8 cores and 32GB of memory.

Henning said:
I should probably keep my mouth shut because I'm an idiot in this field, but my understanding is that if you are getting the Core Duo processor, you are not going to be able to take full advantage of it unless you go with Vista. Me, when I manage to get a new computer that has true multitasking processor ability, I am dang sure gonna want the OS that lets me take advantage.
Click to expand...
Not quite the case.. Please look at the following:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/index.html
A series of benchmarks was ran by them to test application performance in Windows XP and Windows Vista. The CPU was more powerful than this laptop will have: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800. Windows XP beat Vista on almost every test by quite a bit. Vista pulled ahead once or twice but when it did the amount was negliable.

Windows Vista has some enhancements that will allow us to go into the future with hardware. That does not mean that it's going to run current applications with current hardware faster. In most cases it is slower.

Michael said:
the only thing i can add about Vista, is...You can always download the service packs free in the future, and learn how to use its new features now. Since it will be the OS of the future, like xp is now...might as well get what others will be using in the near future.
Click to expand...
Something tells me that when Dave uses his laptop he just wants it to work. He doesn't want to have to download all kinds of service packs. I have been using Vista since the early release candiantes on a daily business since it is vital that our company constantly be looking into the future. That said--there is no way in hell I'll be switching the everyday workstations of our employees to Vista for a long long time.

There is nothing about Vista right now that is going to give you any increase in productivity or performance on current everyday hardware. There are new security features but these security features have yet to be proven. I know our company is not going to be the test bed for that. All Vista is going to do is make you relearn where some common things are located and cause problems with software that may not work properly with Vista along with some hardware.

In other words. Go with XP.
 
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Dave,

maybe you can pick up a (cheap) identical unit on ebay, and shove your old hard drive in it (if the drive's still good).
 
Dave Siciliano said:
In the back of my mind, I've wanted a lap top that would show enroute and approach charts. I'm in a pressurized plane; so, cabin altitude should be 10,000 or less most of the time. Does one of the machines discussed fit that profile? What if I'm in a non-pressurized plane and want to go to the mid to high teens? Anything fit that along with what's been discussed?

Best,

Dave
Click to expand...

Dave,

Just to plug it again, the IBM (Lenovo) T4x series, with a DVD R-RW on board should do everything you want and thensome.

Oh, and like I said before, if it can survive two years with me, it means it can survive 5 or 6 with most anyone. Coffee, food, drops, kicks, dirty power, fingers on the screen, objects landing on it, heck, a cat even peed on my T42 once (long story!), and that thing kept on running like a champ.

Cheers,

-Andrew
using a T41 as he speaks
 
astanley said:
Dave,

a cat even peed on my T42 once (long story!), and that thing kept on running like a champ.

Cheers,

-Andrew
using a T41 as he speaks
Click to expand...

Well heck! That pretty well seals the deal <g> Sounds like your machine is the cat's meow!

Will it function at altitude if I put charts on it?

Thanks,

Dave
 
Dave Siciliano said:
Well heck! That pretty well seals the deal <g> Sounds like your machine is the cat's meow!

Will it function at altitude if I put charts on it?

Thanks,

Dave
Click to expand...

Interesting question. My T series have spent 100's of hours running on airplanes, but I'll also check with Lenovo to see if there is anyhting about operating above 10k'

Dave, I should be in DFW 26th-30th March. Dinner anyone?

Cheers,

-Andrew
 
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