buying an inexpensive pc laptop

[rexrzer]

There is no freakin' FREE LUNCH with a "cheapo PC notebook", Trust ME on this idea.(td)

Take the advice, good advice, already given here and get your daughter a MacBook, run Parallels and XP on a partition, and be happy.(tu) You have no idea what you're getting into with a "cheap PC laptop", but you may as well throw the $$$ out your car's window down in Skid Row so at least the bums there can reap some benefit from it.

PCs are nothing but trouble, trouble, and then MORE trouble. And just try and get something "fixed under warranty" when it does go wrong, and it will. PC manufacturers, all of them from Gateway to Dell to Sony and Toshiba or Lenovo, whatever, they all don't give a good gol dang about "customer satisfaction." And forget Best Buy as a retailer for a PC laptop!

My daughter and I are presently suing Best Buy and Gateway in Alameda County Small Claims Court because both entities have refused to repair a so-called "excellent" Gateway PC laptop (retailed for more than $1700, bought for $1275 on sale plus BB's $298 "warranty" that's supposed to "cover everything possible") that has gone South in just 12 short months of judicious, careful use. Gateway replaced the entire lid of the piece of crap (the LCD screen, hinges, cables and components) and never even turned it on, apparently!o

If they had turned it on, they would have seen a jagged 2"-wide line of distortion that goes from one corner of the *now new* LCD, all across it down to the bottom, making viewing anything cohertently impossible. It's been back to Gateway's "factory repair service center in Texas" three times, and has been in Best Buy's "repair facility" twice, and the problem remains the same: there's something wrong with the "brains" of the machine that generates the video signal (probably the ATI 128MB Mobility Video Card/CPU), and nobody wants to fix the damn thing.

Best Buy claims the problem is "outside of the warranty perameters" to quote the store manager, and Gateway seems incapable of repairing/replacing the laptop. Ludicrous!!:S:X

I gave the Best Buy store manager one last chance to honor their own warranty and replace the laptop, since Gateway won't fix it, two days ago and he refused, so we filed the court papers today. I can't say that it's what I wanted to happen, but it's what IS happening. So we'll get our day in court in 3-4 weeks, and I will personally be there to assist my daughter's case, since I've been paying for the POS laptop and have been through many litigations before this with 100% success--against makers of defective automobiles, sprinkler systems, and other consumer items. I've done this before.

You really don't want to be throwing your good, hard earned $$$ away on an "inexpensive PC laptop"...spend the $1099 for a MacBook and be happy. Dont' take a chance on something like what has happened to my daughter's so-called "excellent" PC laptop.B)-

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[mrlynn]

In fairness, all PCs are not POSes. Our docs have carried Fujitsu tablets all 'round the office for two years and (knock wood!) haven't had any problems (aside from the horrible malware infestations soon after launching, which I suspect came from Fujitsu's own website). I have had remarkably good luck populating our office with USED Dell Dimensions and Optiplexes (bought off-lease from PCexchange.net, which happens to be right down the street from me—they have used laptops, too, mostly Dells).

And you hear horror stories like that one from rexrzer about Macs, too, from time to time.

But we run PCs in the office because our software requires them. I use Macs for myself, and always have. The real problem with PCs is Windoze. It's just an annoying experience, at least for anyone used to OS X.

By the way, watch out for PC idiosyncracies. No. 2 Son's fiancé has an HP Latitude laptop. It has an S-video port, so I figured we could hook it up to a TV and look at her photos. Nope, that port is only for watching DVDs, using some cockamamie HP software, not a Windows program, that requires a reboot and turns the computer into a DVD player!

/Mr Lynn