Taps for my laptop

[AdamZ]

I think it has finally happened, I think my Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop has kicked the motherboard or something. Yesterday I was on POA of course and Blam I get this Royal Blue Screen with white print telling me about some error and the message to restart and if it happens again yada yada yada. So I shut down and now when I turn it on it powers up I get the Dell and pentium logo that pops up for about 1.4 seconds then disappears.

The laptop is on but there is nada on the screen. You can tell its getting power because the screen while dark is dark like when the power is turned off. I tried letting it rest for a few hours popping the batter and AC adapter out all for naught. I've had it to the computer guy 2 or perhaps three times in the past two years. Since then the "W" key has comeoff its about 4 or perhaps 5 years old, old enough that about a year ago the orginal batter would only hold a charge for about 15 minutes so I bought anotherone and something just tells me its soul has been launched into cyber space.

Does anyone think its worth seeing if it can be fixed again.

If Not I could live off my desktop but my wife and I really like toting the laptop around the house and working and surfing from the couch or big old chair.

I've been thinking about getting a refurbed or open box model since funds are particularly tight. I saw these below anyone have any thoughts?

Usually the laptop is used for home use. letters, web surfing, Excel, perhaps watching hulu or a movie now and then, viewing DVDs, I have used it to lug to arbitrations to do a power point presentation on occasion.

Geeks has some decent prices on refurbed models but not sure if they come with the Office softwear, so I may have to get that seperately, PC Connection I think comes with the office suite

http://www.geeks.com/products.asp?cat=NBB

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MD2614U-R&cat=NBB&cpc=NBBbschttp://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=MD2614U-t=NBB&cpc=NBBbsc

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=P-6822-PB-R&cat=NBB

PC connection has some good prices too

http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Sho...=202851&Sort=Price+Low+to+High&DefSort=N&Term=

 

[SCCutler]

Adam:

1. If you had Office on the Dell, you should have the distribution disks to load it on your new PC, and assuming you only us it on one, you should not be considered as violating the license;

2. Why buy MS Office? You can use OpenOffice, which, while it works quite a bit more reliably than MS Office, soes have the down-side of being distributed for free. www.OpenOffice.org

3. I got an Acer One Netbook (tiny little thing), and am tickled with it; it works great, the batteries last 5 hours (really), and it weighs next to nothing. Downsides? Not for you if your eyesight is weak, and you need to buy an external DVD/CD drive to load software and burn disks (which is not a big deal, but still worth mentioning).

4. I am not terribly fond of Gateways, but I can't remeber why. They may be great. Forget I brought it up. I have had excellent luck with Lenovo.

 

[Anthony]

Adam. My laptop's motherboard died a little while ago and I got a Toshiba Satellite at Best Buy for around $500. Works great.

 

[RJM62]

I've been an AMD man for years, but I'm not too crazy about the Turion. I think the Core2 Duos / Quads give more bang for the buck.

That said, I've always had great luck with Acer laptops and consider them a bargain. The one I use for work (Travelmate 4200) has been riding in my backpack, on the subway, in the trunk of my car, and occasionally in airplanes, for several years now, and it still runs like a top. It's also frequently used by my nieces / nephews / godchildren on a frequent basis (at least on the Linux side; it's a dual-boot machine), and has never complained a bit.

As for whether your laptop is worth fixing, hard to say. It could be something like a loose ribbon cable (usually easy and cheap to fix), or it could be a bad mobo (neither easy nor cheap to fix), or any number of problems in between.

-Rich

 

[mikea]

1. If you had Office on the Dell, you should have the distribution disks to load it on your new PC, and assuming you only us it on one, you should not be considered as violating the license;

I dunno if it's only for teh Enrprtise license, but Microsoft actaully made teh Offcie license amazingy tolerant.

You are(were) officially allowed to use the license from your desktop computer on a laptop at home.

You might want to ask a lawyer buddy to take a glance at your license.

See below.

2. Why buy MS Office? You can use OpenOffice, which, while it works quite a bit more reliably than MS Office, soes have the down-side of being distributed for free. www.OpenOffice.org
...

Ya forgot to mention Spike, that OpenOffice doesn't have the feature that Microsoft Office has where it not only saves all of your documents in a format that can't be read by other software, they can't be read by previous version of the SAME MS Office software, so your just hafta to get everybody in the world to buy the new version, and somehow that seems perfectly reasonable.

 

[RJM62]

I dunno if it's only for teh Enrprtise license, but Microsoft actaully made teh Offcie license amazingy tolerant.

You are(were) officially allowed to use the license from your desktop computer on a laptop at home.

You might want to ask a lawyer buddy to take a glance at your license.

See below.




Ya forgot to mention Spike, that OpenOffice doesn't have the feature that Microsoft Office has where it not only saves all of your documents in a format that can't be read by other software, they can't be read by previous version of the SAME MS Office software, so your just hafta to get everybody in the world to buy the new version, and somehow that seems perfectly reasonable.

It's beyond my comprehension that businesses still standardize on MS-Office when a better, free alternative is available. Makes no sense at all to me. I've always had both (MS gives copies away to their "partners"), and I've always much preferred OOo.

-Rich

 

[mikea]

It's beyond my comprehension that businesses still standardize on MS-Office when a better, free alternative is available. Makes no sense at all to me. I've always had both (MS gives copies away to their "partners"), and I've always much preferred OOo.

-Rich

It is literally the case at bigco's when one user gets "Office 2016 - the Ultimate Professional Productivity Prevention Edition*" and email a document to coworkers, they can't read it. The new version has "Save As previous" but that doesn't work either. MS says "We working feverishly on the problem and should have a fix in 6 months but it the meantime why don't just upgrade all of your mumble-thousand desktops? We'll give you a a deal." And so they do.

* What other company would have the very answer on the FAQ be, "No. You cannot remove the ribbon."

 

[wildwobby]

Get an EeePc. They are cheaper than most other things on the market, and work the same. Asus is a great company, and the computers are powerful enough to do what ever it is you want it to for a laptop. They are just small.

 

[Ghery]

4. I am not terribly fond of Gateways, but I can't remeber why. They may be great. Forget I brought it up. I have had excellent luck with Lenovo.

Excellent luck with both. I have a Gateway that I bought a few years ago and it's doing fine. Until recently all my laptops at work were IBM/Lenovo. Bulletproof. Lugged them all over the world with no problems.

I've been an AMD man for years, but I'm not too crazy about the Turion. I think the Core2 Duos / Quads give more bang for the buck.

I've never been an AMD man, but it might be because my paycheck comes from the folks who make the Core 2 Duo/Quads.