Brands

[FarmerJon]

I was recently looking about for a new laptop, & saw loads of seemingly great deals, but was warded off by friends saying they'd had bad experiences with one company or another. Is there any way we can get together a list of lappy brands which are reputable & people have used without problems first hand??

[nichomach]

On the face of it, it's a good idea, but one has to be careful; I've bought brands before now where one product line was good and rock solid, but another was assembled by semi-trained chimpanzees on minimum banana allowance...

Maybe a qualifier would be a good idea - like X company's Y product line is good, but avoid the Z product line?

[rory1984]

I would only buy laptops from either IBM (T and X series) or Apple (iBook and Powerbook) but only up to 14 inches. Otherwise, little point in a laptop, really...

[nichomach]

Oh well, for you possibly; but given that the sales of desktops are either static or declining and have been for a couple of years, whereas laptop sales are still on the up, plenty of people disagree. Actually, for the average home user who wants a machine to do email, write letters and surf t'web, there's a lot of point and all of those people want different things. I had one chap recently who wanted me to find him a reasonably light machine with decent battery life, for use on his boat, another who wanted a straight desktop replacement - a machine that could easily be moved around the house (and no, by the time you've shifted a keyboard, monitor and all the attendant guff, an SFF system is NOT as easy), but with a nice big screen that'd run off the mains. Lots of point for both those people, they just don't use a PC in the same way that we might.