Which notebook?

[gussy1]

I'm looking to buy a good notebook and have seen the Area-51m from Alienware - it looks great but is not cheap!. Can anyone give me any advice on what high-end notebooks are good and more importantly, which are bad?

Thanks

 

[Newposter]

I've had terrible luck with Compaq; most of their 1200, 1600, 1900 series had reliability problems. The most common was that a charging circuit for the battery would fail. Replaced battery, charger board, downloaded patches, to no avail. Motherboard was bad. Their forums show this as rampant.

I've heard good and bad things about Dell and Toshiba. I bought a Sony Vaio laptop in April, love it, no trouble. One of the few that holds CD drive, floppy drive and battery all at once without swapping. Also can remove floppy drive and install 2nd battery. Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[gussy1]

What spec is the Vaio processor, RAM, Graphics etc.

Have you heard anything about the Alienware?

 

[Chiefobs]

I keep hearing all of these folks who complain about Compaq computers and I guess I am either the luckiest person in the world or they are the unluckiest. I bought factory built systems for years until I stumbled across a retail Compaq 7000US for a really great price. This was about four years ago. I have since upgraded the video card,CD/RW, RAM and sound card. But none of these upgrades were due to a parts failure. I just wanted to maximize my computing. I only called tech support once and agree that the wait plus the overall incompetence of the tech's is a draw back to a newbie. But I usually trouble shoot my own problems. 90% of which can be traced to something stupid that I did myself.(i.e. crummy software installation, cheap hardware installation, poor upkeep , etc. )
Three months ago I go a line on a Compaq 2801CL notebook computer. I keep it clean, scanned and defragmented on a regular basis. So far it has exceeded my expectations. I compared it to Dell, Toshiba and IBM models and for the price and specs it came out on top. Good luck to you and happy computing.
Chiefobs

 

[Newposter]

Gussy, I bought the Sony VAIO PCG-FXA47 laptop in April. There are now newer models (same style, just faster). It is a 1.0 GHz, 256MB RAM, 20 GB HD 14" AM-TFT 1024x768 display, with 8x CD-RW/DVD player, with built-in ethernet, modem, 2 USB 1.0 ports, 1394 firewire, video jacks, battery, floppy and CD drive all installed simultaneously. It was $1499 at the time. For the same money I'm sure you can now get 1.6GHz or faster, with bigger HD. This one was capable of holding 512 MB RAM, and there was a 30GB HD and a 15" display. It comes with Windows XP and a lot of audio and video editing software. Sound quality is excellent.

It runs typically 2 hours on battery, a little longer if you're idle part of the time. The floppy drive can be removed to install a 2nd battery and double that, but the battery lists for $249 (!). Newposter
"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment."

 

[ToryG]

I'm a big fan of the Dell Notebooks. Just personal preference though. The inspiron 8100 is great! Dell support is definately the best I've used out of Gateway, Toshiba, Dell, Compaq and Sony. I used to work for Microsoft doing Windows 2000 Pro support, so I had to deal with these vendors support quite often.

ToryG