laptop with international warranty & support

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Sep 24, 2003 at 10:15:39AM -0400, CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> 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.

Compaq seems very willing to use desktop athlon's in their laptops.
Emachines seems to use proper mobile athlon chips on the other hand.
Sure shows in the battery life.  A friend got an M5310 recently, ad it
sure is nice.

> 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.

Well I have mostly worked with IBM laptops, so I don't have much
experience with other brands.  I have met some compaq's I didn't like,
and don't get me started on toshiba and panasonic.

Lennart Sorensen
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