laptop with international warranty & support

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

At 03:04 PM 23/09/2003 -0400, Chris Aitken wrote:
>I'm moving to Europe for a year. I want to buy a laptop to use for multi 
>track music recording and I want to take it with me. I don't want Windows 
>to come with the laptop- I'd rather use the 500 bucks to buy an external 
>sound card like the Extigy. Foremast in my mind is international warranty 
>and support. Anyone out there have any experience with any of this? Maybe 
>email off-list.

IBM has international warranties and I can attest to the fact that they 
work. As for not having Windows on it, at one time, IBM used to sell 
laptops with Linux installed. I do not know if they still do that. I 
followed the recent thread about the Dell and Windows refund saga and some 
people were advocating off brand clone laptop manufacturers as possibly 
being more accommodating to selling bare machines. I have used and sold 
various brands of laptops and personally, I would not touch an off brand. 
Laptops are very proprietary so one is usually completely dependent upon 
the manufacturer for most spare parts. Some of the clones, like Eurocom for 
example, use desktop CPUs in order to have the fastest CPU. Desktop CPUs 
consume more energy and therefore run hotter. Hotter electronics in tight 
spaces usually leads to premature failures, though admittedly, this is a 
generalization. I have no idea what, if anything, Eurocom does to address 
this problem.

I stick to and recommend name brands like IBM, HP, and Compaq. Their prices 
are not that much higher, if at all, and I think they are better engineered 
and assembled. If you shop carefully and do not buy machines that are on 
the leading edge of the technology curve, you can often find pretty good 
deals. I put a premium on display (1600 x 1200 is very addictive), keyboard 
feel (IBM and HP have the best keyboards in the business), pointing device 
(I prefer the little eraser head pointing sticks though some laptops come 
with both track pads and eraser heads), disk capacity (you can never have 
enough), and RAM capacity (256M is a good starting point these days). I 
will not pay much of a premium for a faster CPU since virtually any new 
machine sold today is overkill for almost everyone.

One last point: I cannot imagine any OEM version of Windows that is likely 
to be running on a laptop costing anything close to $500. I would not be 
surprised if the "Windows Tax" was more in the $50 range for big brand 
products. Granted, $50 is not zero and one should not have to pay for 
something they do not use but I suspect that it is cheaper for the big 
brands to sell machines with Windows preloaded than it would be to sell 
bare machines. Variances from the norm cost money so it may very well be 
that one would have to pay more than $50 for the special handling that 
would be necessary to ship a bare machine, which takes us full circle. 
Lesser known brands might be more accommodating to special needs but I 
think you would pay for it down the road when it comes time to get service 
for the machine. Parts like RAM and hard disk are more or less standard but 
what would you do if the keyboard in your lovely ASUS laptop started acting 
up? I pick on ASUS in particular because we sold a few and regretted it. 
Support was pretty much non existent. Parts had to come in from California. 
The keyboards had to be replaced every few months because the pointing 
stick would get jumpy and eventually stop working altogether. Once the 
machines were out of warranty, which was a measly one year anyway, the 
users stopped using them as laptops and attached external keyboards and 
mice to them. Having to attach external keyboards and pointing devices 
defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place.

Regards,

Clifford Ilkay
Dinamis Corporation
3266 Yonge Street, Suite 1419
Toronto, Ontario
Canada M4N 3P6

Tel: 416-410-3326

mailto:clifford_ilkay-biY6FKoJMRdBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org 

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