Which laptop manufacturer?

[Mikeyscott]

Been asked to get a laptop for a friend with a budget of around £1500-2000.

Having always been given work laptops etc. which manufacturer would you recommend. I like HP, but then I use it etc and as the place I work for is a HP partner.

Toshiba
Dell
HP
IBM
Sony
Asus?

 

[RichardMoran]

I've bought several laptops over the past few years, each of them having good points and bad.

With a fall in laptop prices over the past year, you should be able to get a really good system. I've mainly experience with Toshiba, HP, Sony and Dell.

The HP machines have always been okay, nothing special, but good value for money.

Dell have always been reliable, and they are often first to include later technologies.

The Sony laptops have been very reliable in use, although you always used to have to pay a little bit more for their name/design etc.

The best of the bunch has been the laptops from Toshiba. We bought top of the range machines at the time, so they were nicely designed, and have performed really well. The reason why I recommend them is the quality of the support that I have received. A couple of the laptops developed a problem, which I believe was fixed by replacing the motherboard. Each time we reported the faults, they arranged to collect the laptop either the same day, or the following day, and they were fixed and returned within 3 working days! One machine was collected on a Friday morning, and returned on the Monday morning. I've never before experienced such a quick turnaround on repairs.

Whilst I love Sony kit, I have heard horror stories concerning the time it takes to get things fixed.

I would be happy to recommend any of these brands, but would advise you to check what support is provided as standard.

From a more practical perspective, when you have drawn up a short list, try to see if you can demo them in a shop somewhere. Laptops tend to be more personal than PCs, so you need to ensure that you/your friend are happy with the appearance of the screen, that the keyboard 'feels' okay, and that if you are likely to carry it around alot that it isn't too heavy. You may prefer a wide screen to a normal one, you may prefer using a 'nipple' to a touchpad. For the budget you propose the technical specs will not be an issue, as they should all be top notch, but it's a lot of money for an individual to pay out, so make sure your friend is happy with it as an overall product.

Rik

 

[ycelong]

Personally, I prefer the IBM ThinkPad series. We have had great succes with them. We used to be a Dell shop and after a series of trouble with their laptops, we ditched them for IBM. IBM's notebooks are very solid and they offer outstanding support, either on the website, phone support, repair personel and also their integrated tools package called Access IBM. The IBM laptop offers both the touchpad (called UltraNav by them) and the eraserhead mouse along with a full size keyboard. The casing itself is very sturdy and as far as motherboard failures go, I have not experienced the first one. We have been using IBM for 4 years now.
IBM offers all different sizes and weights of laptops with the lightest being just under 4 pounds (X Series) to desktop replacement models. They offer a 3 year warranty with EZ-Serve (send the laptop to them)as standard with the option to purchase onsite service. We have used both EZ-Serve and onsite. They ship you a sturdy box and shipping label to send the laptop in and the turnaround time has always been 3 days or less (usually less).
I guess you can tell, we are very satisfied with IBM's offerings.