Laptop Advice

[bill traynor]

On Wed, 2004-02-25 at 18:42, Taavi Burns wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 06:17:20PM -0500, Sidney Shapiro wrote:
> > Howdy all, I am looking for a laptop to use for school (essays and computer
> > science) somthing good, with a built in wireless network card and a computer
> > which will last. I am looking at spending about 1500-2000, any suggestions of
> > where to look and who to buy from?
> 
> You can get an iBook for under $2000.  University bookstores get an
> educational discount, so they're probably your best bet.  You can get
> your Word or Appleworks fix if LaTeX doesn't suit you, and all of
> your standard UNIX utils are handy for all your CS needs.  The battery
> life is great on those boxen, as is the "don't need to dick around,
> it just works" nature is great, particularly when exams come around.
> 
> You can always put Linux on it if OSX _really_ gets your goat.  I tried
> it just to see, and it ran more smoothly than I would have expected...
> but still less smoothly than OSX.  ;)

I've had an iBook (G3 700Mhz) for a year and a half or so and
unfortunately it sat on the shelf for 4 months.  Around August 2003, the
video went crazy, eventually fading to black.  This happenned three
months outside of the 12 month warranty and I didn't have Applecare
which extends the warranty to 3 years.  Through much collaboration with
other sufferrers of the same problem on the Apple discussion boards as
well as many nights troubleshooting hardware, it was discovered that the
video chip solder points had loosened causing the chip to move.  This
resulted in over 3000 (I thik at last count) iBook users getting
together to mount a class action lawsuit against Apple.  Well, on Jan.
28th, Apple came clean and offerred a free logicboard replacement
program to all iBook owners within a certain serial number range.  This
saga is actually still unfolding as replacement boards are now failing. 
For more info on this see www.blackcider.com

Anyway, the moral of this story is that Apple portables are no more
reliable than any other portables, regardless of what the marketin
material may say.

If I were to spend 1500-2000, I'd probably get the best used Thinkpad I
could find.

Cheers
Bill

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