How-To Geek

This is going to be a hotly debated topic Kate. Me thinks you have a cruel streak, so I'll start the ball rolling then sit back and enjoy.
Least reliable, Hewlett Packard = the worst manufacturer ever. I say the name and spit.
Have found Toshiba solid and early tests on a Samsung look promising.

Harry

Thanks Harry and Mark,
Thats good for a start,
Lol!! Harry,didn't look at it with any 'streak',just thought it would give us some interest.....:):)

My preference,
Dell, and then Sony.

I have a Packard Bell laptop, it is great and I haven't had problems with it so far (bought it last summer)...

/Eric

PS. You may have noticed that I have been kind of inactive the last two or three weeks, I have been really busy in school and I have also been in Greece...

Of the 4 computers we have in 'use', 2 are Dell's, one HP, and one Sony.

All are 'good', and in that I mean if there were problems, it wasn't because of the manufacturer but the components used.

Sony, had a hard drive fail within 3 years. Only problem it experienced.

HP, video card died after 4 years. Wireless mouse that came with it literally needed to be fed AA batteries twice a month... replaced the mouse.

Dell's, older one had CMOS battery go (never had this happen on other computers at any age) at about 4 years. Both RAID drives died after 4 years and within weeks of each other. WD to blame for this, not Dell.

Newest Dell, 2 years old I use daily, myriad of problems. I had a DVD drive destroy a CD and itself. Couldn't use my existing UPS, had to get a 'server' version to work with its PSU, and the media card reader 'disappeared' on me.

Dell service on both machines (these are XPS and the older one got US special service, the newer one XPS only service) was good in that 'they' sent someone out to do the 'work'. The only bothersome one was the media card reader. They (Dell) replaced the reader and then the motherboard (under 90 days of me getting the system) and it didn't fix it. I later discovered that is the power cord was removed it RESET the device and it worked fine until the next 'bad' shutdown (usually a BSOD, which DVDFlick caused often at that time). Dell has never fixed this problem.

Oh, I should tell you the older DELL was initially an XPS Gen3. I had a problem where for no reason the system fans would take off, it had 3 or 4 fans in it, I forget the count, but even with nothing happening it would sound like a bunch of high speed hairdryers were in it. Dell replaced the PSU, then the motherboard, then the whole machine with a Gen5.

I also have an very old Dell 8100 that is not in use now. It had a network problem with the built-in device. It would drop often. I was living in Austin at the time and had 'access' to some Dell employees and contacts. Dell replaced the motherboard and the problem was not solved. I was able to determine that the engineers knew about the problem. I gave info to Dell support on who to contact and I was sent a higher revision motherboard within weeks that fixed the problem.

I've been buying Dell's since then for the performance machine I want. My wife doesn't want to wait when she wants one and gets whatever looks good to her in the store.

NOTE: I always buy the extended warranty. Dell can be expensive for 4 years, but others we bought for my wife in Best Buy and Circuit City (no defunct) had much cheaper warranties. The HP is the only one that I'd say we 'lost' money on. The Dell's, well, most of the problems were within the 'standard' 1 year warranty but all machines have had calls before the warranty did expire.

YMMV

Irv S.

:)

old dells usually get pitched, not all but some. i rarely see a new one any more. i had a stack of toshiba satellites all with bad screens, all were pitched. i never heard if they had the class action law suit against them yet. h/p are the money makers, they come preloaded with so much h/p garbage they barely run. i highly doubt vista was the problem on h/p's. i have an acer aspire sitting behind me that just needed new memory but the case is so ugly i cant even give it away. it also seems to be extremely underpowered. i'm finding midrange builds are hard to sell, people love cheap junk.

Kate,
I think we all have our favorites. Dell overall is good I have two of them. Warranty service was also good until the warranty ran out then it's like everyone else out there.
Have an Acer that is very good also and a couple of builds that run like clocks.
Just gave my grandson my old Compaq Armada that was about 15yrs old and still had win98 on it. His work needed a slow computer for an old program. Sort of felt a little sad when it was gone. Didn't do anything but keep the battery charged and boot it up once a month just to see if it still worked.
The big one now is the IPad and the Kindles. Lot of power in a small package. MS has to bump it up a notch if they want to stay at or near the top.
This oldtimer still seems to be content with my PC's.

One thing that is overlooked is buying a Mac. Yes, hang me. A Mac. But the computer has twice the potential, you can run both Windows and OSX on it (although it is rare, windows occasionally run OSX, but it's WAY advanced). Not to mention that they have great support and are very stable.

Good morning.

I had a Medion pc - dvdburner gave in after a couple of months, had to send the whole tower back to them, cost me a fortune in shipping and I had no pc for three whole weeks. It came back, hard drive was wiped with new install of Vista (so all my files, programs etc. etc. lost - fortunetely I always keep images at hand) and the hardware problem wasn't solved. Talking about lousy customer service ...
In the end I put in a new dvdburner myself (cheaper then the cost of shipping and certainly better than the tremendous annoyance of trying to talk normally to these people who seem to think system restore will magically resolve hardware problems) but it voided my warrenty on the pc and then when in fact it still fell within the warranty period the motherboard gave out on me.
And would you believe it, they still responded with 'have you tried system restore?'

I now have a Dell. So far it looks good, but time will tell.