Laptop Shopping Advice

[CoolGuy]

I have a Thinkpad, which is one of the most (if not the most) solidly built laptops you can get. It's black, ugly, and all business; I love it. I bring it back and forth to my classroom everyday, and even let my students use it. I would recommend it in a heartbeat, especially for business or professional use.

If you want something nice, sleek, and pleasant, the Sony should be fine; however, I've heard good things about the HP Elitebook and Envy.

[DickButtonFan]

If any of you don't like the color of your lap top you can get skins for them. I went to gelaskins for my iPod, they have skins for just bout most devices.

[kedrin]

I also love my Thinkpad- I've taken it to Cambodia several times, so it's pretty sturdy.

[pat c]

I have a dell, son has a dell, daughter had an acer (piece of crap), then went to an HP which works very well.

I've had my dell laptop for 3 years and haven't had any issues, son's seems to be working fine as is daughters. So another vote for dell and hp.

[sk8pics]

I hate my Dell laptop which is now 4 years old and having more problems by the minute. I'm trying to schedule time with my company's computer support people to see if they can fix it or if I should start begging for a new laptop.

I have known people who had good results with a SONY and a friend of mine (who is really not very good with computers) just bought a Toshiba and says she likes it a lot. I think the suggestion to check on the quality of tech support in your area is a good one.

And as far as Macs go, I have to say, we Mac users are damned if we do say something and damned if we don't! LOL.

[NancyNC]

I have a Thinkpad, which is one of the most (if not the most) solidly built laptops you can get. It's black, ugly, and all business; I love it. I bring it back and forth to my classroom everyday, and even let my students use it. I would recommend it in a heartbeat, especially for business or professional use.

If you want something nice, sleek, and pleasant, the Sony should be fine; however, I've heard good things about the HP Elitebook and Envy.

Our laptops at work used to be Thinkpads and we all loved them. They switched to Dell a few years back. Meh.

[Christina]

I've had a Toshiba, which was fine until the video or graphic card died. It is on the motherboard, so it was cheaper to buy a new laptop than to replace it. I then got a Dell, which was a piece of crap.

Then I got my Vaio. It's pink. I absolutely love it. No problems so far, and I've had it for two years. One of the keys on my keyboard went wacky and I had to replace the whole keyboard (don't ask, it was a freak bending thing), but I got one on ebay for about $20.

I highly, highly recommend the Vaio.

[ainouta]

I have a plain black Vaio, SR series. It's super light (lighter than a 13-inch MacBook, in fact) and seems kind of delicate, but I abuse the heck out of it (I take it everywhere, whether it's class or an international trip) and it's held up on me just fine, absolutely no issues save the time I got some water damage on the screen when someone spilled a drink on it (but I mean, that's no fault of the laptop!) It's also deceptively capable - I do a lot of work with Photoshop and InDesign, and I honestly haven't had any issues with performance as long as I'm not like editing 14 4000x3000 images at once.
I would recommend the base EA model, or maybe one with a couple upgrades - 4 GB RAM and the cheapest discrete graphics option should suffice and let you run the Sims 3 on full settings. If you have money to burn, the Sony Z is perhaps the most beautiful and powerful ultraportable available today, but you definitely don't need it.

[*Jen*]

I've taken my Asus everywhere too. It's been from Australia to Europe and back 2.5 times, all around Europe, to uni and back every day for a year, to work sometimes...

I think it's pretty durable and was happy with it.

It's just the service in Europe that I can't recommend

[skatefan]

I had a Dell laptop which was great, replaced it with an HP Pavilion Entertainment laptop and I hate it, would replace it in a heartbeat if I could afford to! It's been back to the manufacturers at least three times. I would get another Dell and have had the Sony Vaio recommended.

[myhoneyhoney]

My 1st laptop was a Compaq that was purchased 5 years ago. It doesn't even have 1 gig or ram and only 75 gig hard drive. That said, my kids use it now and works great for their needs: using it for research projects for school, typing up reports, listening to music, and playing games. As long as I clean and defragment once every other week, it runs perfect.

This past Feb. I purchase my HP Pavilion dv7. It's a 17" laptop with 4gig ram and 500 hard drive. It has lightscribe and plays blurays to boot. It came with Corel PSP and VideoStudio along with a bunch of other useful programs. I can do multiple things at once without a hitch, that includes surfing the net while it renders my homevideos taken on a 1080 hd camcorder. I LOVE my laptop!

I did extensive research before purchasing this HP but I also came across another brand that usually had excellent reviews: Asus, NOT Acer, ASUS. I probably would've bought the Asus but I saw this HP on a great deal: $698!

[Ajax]

I've owned both Toshiba and HP laptops and had an absolutely miserable time with both.

With the Toshiba, the screen stopped working after about a year - it would keep flickering on and off for hours. There were also problems charging the battery. When I took it in they said the motherboard would have to be replaced - 500$!! Thankfully I'd bought the extended warranty so I didn't have to pay. They replaced the motherboard, and three months later, had to replace it AGAIN when the same problems reoccurred. They also told me that mine was a common defect in that model but did Toshiba do a recall and reimburse customers? Of course not. Instead they chose to rob customers of 500$ to replace motherboards :-/ Interestingly, my roommate bought a Toshiba laptop 4 months ago and her screen doesn't work either!

The HP pavilion I got to replace the Toshiba wasn't much better. The wireless card stopped working four months after I bought it and the battery after ten months. I couldn't use it unless it was plugged in. It was also slow as hell, would keep crashing etc.

Finally I got a Mac and lived happily ever after

[oleada]

Just an update on the original post - my hard drive died last night (in the middle of finals writing. A meltdown ensued), and after a not at all positive experience with Dell Tech support (which is not my first), I went ahead and ordered a new Sony Vaio EA today. 500HD, 4GB ram, the i5 processor, etc. It's PURPLE (and they tossed in a new keyboard skin for free which I got in pink, wheee, so glam, my new laptop).

The NYU computer stored helped me get my files and pictures back, so it all ended well.