I've bought two this year, besides the bloatware they're good machines.
takes care of the problem in a few seconds.
I also bought both machines with XP and would highly recommend sticking w/ XP (you get an upgrade coupon) especially if you work in a business environmnet. Vista does not support printers, scanners and othe peripherals more than a few years old nor does it work with my VPN (SonicWALL) or my wife's (Citrix). Also XP is FAST on these machines.
The last one I bought was absolutely bottom-of-the-line ($799) Core 2 Duo 1.5 but it came equipped with a single 1GB stick of RAM (good for upgrading) and a 160 GB HDD.
The only problem was I bought it from NewEgg. It seems they ship these through ABS computers in NJ, and the packaging was worse than terrible. I know shipping companies are brutal with things and pack accordingly...they did not.
It arrived in one of those large clumsy boxes that are hard to handle and prone to tossing and kicking, a way-too-big, odd-size box that had the laptop box in contact with the box floor with lots of room to move about + about 3 sheets of wadded-up paper on top, the box was so crushed and smashed I should not have accepted it. I did, there was a large ding on the laptop box itself.
When my wife gleefully opened it for the first time, plugged it in, hit the power power button...nothing. We double-checked all the connections, still nothing. It is so hard to get my wife excited about tech, this really sucked. She turned and walked away, I ran it to the office where I plugged it into an external monitor only to watch it boot loop. DOA in two ways.
Newegg tells me it's a 2-3 week deal, it's their option to repair, send back to the manufacturer for repair, or replace. No refunds, no cross-shipping, even with payment. I don't want a wrecked repaired laptop! It's like your new car rolls off the car carrier and gets totaled, they fix it and it's still your new car! NO!!!!!!!!!
After some discussion with Newegg reps they assured me they would replace it, but that means another possibly-disastrous trip from NJ to Texas. If the box is damaged I will refuse it. I also noted the serial # and wrote "DOA" all over the box...I better not get the same laptop!
All of this is to make the point to consider buying delicate and expensive items like this locally if possible, you may pay a little bit more but you have the option of return for replacement plus you are contributing to the local economy.
Tony
