News - HP Mini 1104 netbook aimed at students on a budget

[scaryjim]

Not my experience, the HP's in my possession have had less faults than the Acer's ...

Both my HPs have died horribly - one from a slow lingering death *after* it was warranty repaired (so that one died twice in less than 2 1/2 years). Both seem to have had issues with power delivery. It's put me right off HPs. The Acer's I've used / owned have all been very well behaved. Although if someone else was buying it for me (say, a work laptop) I'd probably push for a Dell.

[crossy]

Both my HPs have died horribly - one from a slow lingering death *after* it was warranty repaired (so that one died twice in less than 2 1/2 years). Both seem to have had issues with power delivery. It's put me right off HPs. The Acer's I've used / owned have all been very well behaved. Although if someone else was buying it for me (say, a work laptop) I'd probably push for a Dell.

Like I was saying to "Pancake" I'm sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with your HP's - although I don't work for the bit that does the laptops, it's still annoying. Not that I'm making excuses but it was well known that one of Mark Hurd's (pauses to spit) "innovations" was to cut quality control - the "just good enough IS good enough" mentality, which you'd expect from a fr**king bean counter. Witness the furore about the problems with the 6500 series laptops USB ports being less than totally reliable (I've got a 6510b in front of me and I had initial problems with one port in particular - the rest have been solid). Interestingly the new management are reversing that and the attitude now seems to be "make the best we can within the budget available".

With my "consumer" hat on I'd be real worried about the 1104's - the phrase "budget" = "made down to a price" in my book. Never indicative of bulletproof build quality.

Conversely, I've had nothing but good experiences with my various Dell's - most notably with a much abused D620 that I'm typing this on - it "takes a lickin' and keeps on tickin'", and I've got a full set of user and service documentation - the latter being necessary since I've upgraded everything on that '620 apart from processor and screen so far as needs dictated. Certainly I'd be happy to have another Dell - although an HP DV6 looks good spec-wise.