laptop with international warranty & support

[CLIFFORD ILKAY]

Hi,

At 05:34 PM 24/09/2003 -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>Compaq seems very willing to use desktop athlon's in their laptops.

Such a machine would come in handy on those freezing mornings when the car 
seems to take forever to warm up:) Seriously, I know the major brands also 
make compromises. All the major brands also have models that are typically 
sold in the retail channel and for the most part, target consumers and 
small business owners. I do not buy or sell consumer models of the brands I 
mentioned earlier. The typical warranty on such machines is one year as 
opposed to the "corporate" models which are usually three years. Warranties 
on laptops are worth real money. Virtually everything but the disk drive 
and RAM are proprietary and expensive so I would rather have the peace of 
mind of three years of coverage than not.

>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.

E-machines has only popped up recently in the retail chain. There is an 
after market for IBM, Compaq, HP and parts and service for them are not 
difficult to obtain. Who knows what E-machines laptops will be like? If we 
can use their desktop machines as a point of reference, they will 
essentially be disposable machines.

>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.

I avoided Toshiba for the longest time because even on their "corporate" 
models, they only offered a measly one year warranty while their 
competitors were offering three. I think they offer three now but I do not 
see them as a compelling choice when I have had good results with IBM, HP, 
Compaq. Of the three, IBM stands out for the best web site. If I have a 
model number for an IBM machine, I can find out just about everything about 
it on the IBM web site. HP's web site leaves much to be desired. As for 
Panasonic, I have only ever seen them at trade shows. I have never actually 
seen anyone using one. My impression was that they were built like brick 
outhouses but horribly overpriced. What is it about Toshiba and Panasonic 
you do not like? Anecdotal evidence is often the only thing we have to go 
by in this business.

Speaking of service, a friend bought one of the 17" PowerBooks a couple of 
months ago. It has a gorgeous display but I hate the keyboard, track pad, 
and Apple's dogmatic adherence to its inane policy of how a single mouse 
button is less confusing then three. Nonetheless, it is a nice machine. He 
was using it when OS X put up an unusual error message the details of which 
are not important. He shut the machine down and tried to restart but got 
whatever the equivalent of the sad Mac is these days. He took the machine 
in to the *authorized* Apple dealer that he bought it from and was told 
that it would be eight(!) days before they could even touch it. He was not 
happy with that answer so he contacted the owner of the dealership who 
moved him up in the queue so that it took "only" two days before the techs 
looked at his machine. They called my friend and told him that the service 
call could not be covered under warranty because the machine had been 
infected by viruses and there was no warranty coverage for those sorts of 
things. The conversation went something like this.

My friend: "Which anti virus software are you using?"

Tech: "Norton. We have already formatted the drive and are going to do a 
fresh install of OS X to revive your machine."

My friend: "What were the viruses that you found?"

Tech: ... rattled off a bunch of .exe, .pif, and .scr files from the Eudora 
attachments folder.

My friend: "Those are Windows viruses! They do not have any effect on OS X!"

Tech: "All I'm telling you is that Norton found viruses that you may not 
know about."

My friend: "Why is it that Symantec's web site does not have any viruses 
that affect OS X if these viruses that you found supposedly caused this 
problem?"

Tech: ... adamant that it was all the "viruses" that was the cause of the 
problems with the machine.

Long story short, after doing a fresh install of OS X, predictably, the 
machine was no better off. This time, they concluded that the logic board 
(motherboard) was defective and had to be replaced but they still would not 
concede that the Windows viruses that they found had nothing to do with the 
problem. They kept insisting that it was a combination of the viruses and 
defective logic board. My friend and I came to the conclusion that the 
techs must think that the viruses have some physical form, perhaps as 
nanobots, and can eat through silicon and copper:)

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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