On Wednesday, Aug 6, 2003, at 09:29 Europe/London, abower@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Urgh! Sony suck, if your laptop breaks in warranty (very likely from my experience) put it in the bin as their warranty is worth nothing at all they send them off to Belgium and if you are lucky you will see your laptop in around ~3 months.
My experience with Sony is also not good. I bought what was apparently the last replacement battery they have in Europe for a 2.5-year-old 266 MHz picturebook and it cost about £150. Far too expensive.
Toshiba are not to bad on the warranty front but unfortunatly you end up having to return them every 3 weeks because something else broke at least my experience of them was this.
My only bad experience with Toshiba was that they wouldn't service my Libretto 60, which I'd milled the bottom out of to take a larger disk. ;-) But that was mostly because I'd imported the machine from Japan. On the plus side, their service centre was (is?) in Chelmsford.
I feel that Dell are about as bad as other laptops (ie likely to break often) but at least it seems all new Dell laptops come with a 3 yr onsite warranty.
My Dell *desktop* machine is still running, 7 years on. But their laptops don't impress me -- though two of my colleagues have been using Dells for a year or two without any problems, even with their batteries.
I also agree that Thinkpads are the bees knees of x86 laptops, although most people say "its 40% more than the equivalent *" but don't realise the benefits you get from them, things like stocking parts for years after they finish production is the first that comes to mind.
I concur. My 486-based 750C still runs fine about 10 years on, though the NiCd battery is pretty well shot now. (This machine is of historical significance, as it was used in the early days of porting linux to the TP.) My one experience with IBM's support (Welwyn Garden City) was also positive.
On the same note, I might say that my Fijitsu-Siemens laptop's Li battery was totally shot after about 9 months -- which is a pity as it was otherwise an excellent little machine. So it seems there are different qualities of Li battery, as my usage pattern (mostly plugged in) doesn't vary much.
My Apple powerbook looks to be doing well, with ~3.5 hours battery life; but we'll see how well it does after 9 more months' abuse from me.
..Adrian