Laptop Brands

**Drew Wilson** · May 5th, 2010, 10:49 PM

One things for sure, I'll never trust Dell laptops again. Nothing but problems these laptops.

I have been researching different laptops for a while and wondered if the good stories about HP laptops is shared here.

A good laptop I'm looking for should be capable of handling some heavy resource usage thanks to sound production. A large hard drive is a definite positive, but that's probably the easiest thing to research. Are HP laptops reliable in general? It's hard to be less reliable then Dell, that I know.

**w31n3r** · May 5th, 2010, 11:32 PM

Originally Posted by Drew Wilson

It's hard to be less reliable then Dell, that I know.

i'd put it the other way round actually. it's sad you had bad experiences with dell, and you should take it up with them aggressively, but i'd always prefer a dell any day for it's reliability and robustness. sure your bad luck could leave you holding a lemon, but that's always a chance with any brand. if you aren't going mac, i'd recommend dell every time.

HP's ok i guess, i'm not a big fan of their battery life but since you're doing heavy duty processing i guess thats not a problem for you since you're probably ready to sit near a power socked most of the time.

i've heard some very good things about asus laptops, don't have any first hand experience so can't say for sure but might be worth checking out since you've grown to hate dell :p

**Signa** · May 6th, 2010, 01:26 AM

Toshiba all the way. Cheap, reliable and powerful. This baby will play modern games on low settings.

**Drew Wilson** · May 6th, 2010, 09:26 AM

Originally Posted by w31n3r

i'd put it the other way round actually. it's sad you had bad experiences with dell, and you should take it up with them aggressively, but i'd always prefer a dell any day for it's reliability and robustness. sure your bad luck could leave you holding a lemon, but that's always a chance with any brand. if you aren't going mac, i'd recommend dell every time.

HP's ok i guess, i'm not a big fan of their battery life but since you're doing heavy duty processing i guess thats not a problem for you since you're probably ready to sit near a power socked most of the time.

i've heard some very good things about asus laptops, don't have any first hand experience so can't say for sure but might be worth checking out since you've grown to hate dell :p

Was this experience you had with Dell on an XP machine? I have a Dell desktop and the only thing that went wrong was a hard drive failure (after, I believe, 8 years of use and that's with heavy p2p known for adding wear and tear on hard drives) That, I thought, meant Dells were good, but with a laptop and Windows Vista, the hardware clashes were astounding. Batteries do NOT last on inspiron lines because after a while (give it a year or two), it just refuses to take a charge. Sleep mode required going in and disabling an obscure feature, otherwise the system crashed trying to go in to sleep mode and booted back up. I think I mentioned elsehwere here that, at times, I managed to get an average of 4-5 BSODs a day (rather moody though) There were a number of other issues, but that was OS related.

Toshiba all the way. Cheap, reliable and powerful. This baby will play modern games on low settings.

Cool. I'm seriuosly considering picking that up. The only thing I see being a bit of an issue for me is the hard drive space (my sample library is up to 60 gigs and if I have a change to install the larger plugins, that'll balloon to around 100GB.

**Signa** · May 6th, 2010, 03:20 PM

So am I. It has its deficiencies, but I think you would be hard pressed to find a more functional lap top for under twice that price.

**Drew Wilson** · May 7th, 2010, 01:52 AM

Hmm... I can't seem to find this thing on the Canadian version of the site. Wierd. :\

**Potato** · May 7th, 2010, 04:16 AM

I've had positive experiences with Toshiba laptops.

I know there are a bunch of mac-haters too, but I love my macbook.... I'd live without the prompts to link every goddamn thing on the machine though.

**HelenaP** · May 7th, 2010, 06:18 AM

We gave our daughter a Toshiba for graduation. It works very well. It has far more than she needs in a computer (RAM, HDD space, etc.).

**RACKnRAIL** · May 7th, 2010, 01:21 PM

It looks like Toshiba by a landslide.

I am formatting an old Toshiba Satellite Pro for a friend right now. It originally had Win 98 on it's 13 GB HD with 256 mb of ram. Now with XP, I'm amazed that it works so well with so little. It's damn near an antique and this Toshiba still works great.

**Mels_Smileys45** · May 7th, 2010, 01:59 PM

I have been looking at laptops too and have not found one for sale in the general lap top category that I am totally satisfied with in any brand. I think that Dells' are usually reliable but every manufacturer can make some dudes ( see my posts on Seagate for my unholy rants! ).

I want a laptop with a 128 gig SD harddrive ( Great for battery life! ). That my main concern because it just makes a laptop SO MUCH FASTER! Boot up in about 10 seconds. Programs respond instantly when clicked and so forth. So many laptops come with old slow 5400 RPM hard discs. Scrap that ancient technology!

For a laptop designed for music creation I would get two 128 gig SD's in RAID and bounce all my music down to an external ( maybe even a FABULOUS external SD of great magnitude !!!$$$!!! ) drive. Team the SD drive up with a nice CORE i7 and your laptop will be better than most peoples PC!

I am thinking of putting together a good laptop a bit at a time instead of getting another PC. I can live with this PC I have now for a very long time because I only use it for basic purposes like watching movies, youtube and typing longs posts on ZP. I do not know much about graphic cards for laptops. Are they as basic as installing one in a PC? Accessible?

Netbooks are nice but they will need to be cheaper, much cheaper, before I consider buying one. It will be nice to play some EMU gaming on the go and finding wifi hotspots but the prices are inline with full laptops!!! Thats insain for what you get for the $. A screen, keyboard, mouse, CPU, small SD drive. Thats it for $300!!!! SUX!!!! I would like one for $99. Thats the break though price. There are some cheaply made units on Ebay for around $149 but most all of them are Windows CE ONLY and there is no way I would deal with that unless its got tons better than since I played with that 10 years ago!!!! CE was useless for most anything from what I remember.

Sorry to ramble, its been a long day!

**michaelhoffman** · May 11th, 2010, 12:59 AM

Toshiba. I've used others, but the Toshiba that I have now is the best. The battery can be a little iffy, but they are well built machines.

**Drew Wilson** · May 26th, 2010, 01:27 AM

OK, back to researching laptops mode again.

I found this one and compared it to the closest model I could find on the US version of NewEgg and the reviews makes it sound promising. Any thoughts on the specs?

**Signa** · May 26th, 2010, 02:19 AM

Well, the first one has an i3 processor, so it's going to be quite a bit more of a beast in processing. Don't plan on using it for any non-browser games though. Without a graphic chipset made by ATI/AMD or Nvidia, it's not going to do much.

It's amazing how much those companies processors affect game performance. My dad had a crappy laptop and a probably stronger desktop (Can't remember specs), and the laptop actually played games while the PC didn't. The laptop didn't even specify what kind of graphics it had, it just said ATI on them. The one game he played, it did work on both machines, but the laptop looked much better and played much smoother.

Now I know you aren't much of a gamer Drew, but the way I see it is if you are going to pay $700 for a machine, at least pay $50-$100 more (if it even costs that much. Half the time the graphics processor models don't cost extra) so that it will always do everything. You never know what the future might hold for your interests.

**Drew Wilson** · May 26th, 2010, 10:00 AM

Ahh, good point. My interests do change every now and then too. Well, I relooked at the page and did find this particular one that was a bit more pricier.

The only thing that made me a bit nervous about that one was a similar laptop I found on the US site where reviewers said parts started falling out and the graphics card began to fail after a month or so - granted the first one was an a500 and the US one is an a505.

I wish I could just shop on the US one, but I found out that NewEgg US doesn't ship internationally which is a problem for me since I don't live in the US. :frown:

Edit: BTW, really appreciate the help Signa!