Thread: considering laptop, need opinions

It all depends on what you want to do with the laptop. I've never been a fan of the Pavilion line,or Presario or Inspiron, etc, the "home" laptops. So what you need to decide is are you going to carry the laptop around or is it just going to set on a desk. You can feel the difference between a Pavilion and Omnibox (HP's home and business lines). The homs ones just feel flimsy, you can usually twist and flex the case. Also notice it doesn't specify a Pentium M processor so I bet it has a desktop cpu, which to a laptop means hot, heavy, and bad battery life. I carry my laptop everywhere and the home ones just don't hold up.

I purchased a laptop off of ebay a year ago. I bought a Compaq Armada, which is their business line. I had been watching some auctions but not bidding and then I emailed one seller whom I thought had their Buy It Now price set too high.

I asked her if nobody bught it if we could work something out. As it worked out I ended up with a PIII 850 mHz with DVD ROM and 2 4.5 hr batteries for $700. I have had no problems with the laptop, in fact it has been one of my best purchases.

Compaq and HP are somehow connected now so I don't know if that meas they use the same components or what. But I can say that my laptop has been great, it is surprisingly quick for a PIII and is very reliable.

Yea, the Armada line has always been pretty good. The old 1500's and 1700's had a few problems when they got older but otherwise were a pretty sturdy stable machine. My last two were a 1500 and 1700 and I my third would probablly have been an Armada, but the model I wnated didn't have a touchpad so I went with the Dell. The only complaint I have with the Dell is USB1.1, running my vmware's off a external drive is slow. The Armada's Omnibooks and Lattitudes are my three favorite.

When I worked for a reseller we sold a few toshibas to the state and had a lot that had to be sent back for repair multiple times. Several wouldn't power on and a few floppy drive and keybaord problems. We sold a lot fo compag and repaired a few, but seemed like Toshiba had a higher failure rate, plus you had to send them back to toshiba as they wouldn't authorize anyone for field repair. All the HP's and Compaq's I sold I could repair in the field and Dell does the same. I'm not with a reseller anymore and we have a lot of dell boxes. Anytime I call Dell I tell them I'm authorized (they don't verify) and they send me the part so I can swap myself. I don't think I have had a failure on one of our dell laptops, just a hdd and power supply on the desktops