Sony VS Dell VS Acer VS Toshiba... My laptop dilemma

wheatln2

Hey everyone, so I've read through a load of the different threads here over the past few weeks and have also wrecked my heading reading reviews at notebookchecknet and whatlaptop.co.uk...

Anyway, I'm a final year multimedia student who for the past few years has had a truly brilliant Inspiron 8600. Anyway, it's just getting too slow to be working projects full time, so I figure I need to upgrade, and here's where you guys come in... It needs to be,

• Relatively Portable - I tend to bring the laptop home or up to college pretty regularly so I think a 15.4" screen and about 3KG is about as big as I want to go. My friend has a 17" Inspiron 9400 and it is a beast, and very annoying...
• Pretty powerful - I will need it to do lots of image work, some video editing and gaming. So I figure Core Duo, 2GB of RAM is needed.
• Connectivity - 2 USBs are not enough right now, the changing of my external hard drive, mouse, creative zen and camera are irritating. Ideally I'd have 3 USB and maybe a card reader...
• Widescreen - I really like the 8600's resolution of 1680x1050; any bigger and my eyes beging to hurt! A lot of the models I've been looking at have much smaller resolutions like 1280x800, I presume I'd get used to this though?
• Good after sales - One good thing about Dell has been their excellent after sales service. Anything that has gone wrong, while they make you work for it with a series of "checks" (is your computer turned on etc etc), they will always get a result speedily if they deem it necessary.
• Nice looking - OK I'm a loser, but the current line of Inspirons all look really dull and bland. The new Acers and Sonys are awesome looking. I don't want a Mac as I use them enough in college to know about them and much prefer the windows setup, so while the MBP looks great, it's not for me.
• Some customisation options - What irritates me about some models is there lack of customisation options. The Sony outlets just sell one spec. Another plus for Dell is their shopping basket options they offer.
• This is a random necessity but I need to run a TripleHead2Go off the system so need it to be compatible, *list of cards that are compatible*

With a budget of about 1700-2200, right now, I'm leaning toward the Sony FE41Z *link*l. It looks great and the only negatives are the screen resolution and slightly underwhelming video card (GEforce 7600 - only 128MB i think). I also have my eye on a Dell Precision M65 as it looks a bit cool and has really great performance; though my concerns with it are it doesn't seem to have dedicated video memory (though one page says it has an nVidia Quaddro 350...) and perhaps it's businessy looks would get old quickly? I also know that Toshiba are a great name in laptops and have looked at some of their models, and some of the high end Acer laptops really do look good and have great specs though I've heard their after sales service isn't great...

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

wheatln2

wheatln2 wrote:

With a budget of about 1700-2200, right now, I'm leaning toward the Sony FE41Z *link*l. It looks great and the only negatives are the screen resolution and slightly underwhelming video card (GEforce 7600 - only 128MB i think). I also have my eye on a Dell Precision M65 as it looks a bit cool and has really great performance; though my concerns with it are it doesn't seem to have dedicated video memory (though one page says it has an nVidia Quaddro 350...) and perhaps it's businessy looks would get old quickly? I also know that Toshiba are a great name in laptops and have looked at some of their models, and some of the high end Acer laptops really do look good and have great specs though I've heard their after sales service isn't great...

Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, thanks.

You can probably add the Asus V1Jp *link* to the list now as it seems like a pretty good value machine in terms of the awesome spec you get. Has anyone in ireland bought Asus before, if so where? I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone with one.

BostonB

if I were you I'd pick the res you like working with. I have a 9400 and have to say I like the res 1920x1200 for doing somethings. But I generally bump up the DPI to make the text bigger. I usually use a 17" with 1280x1024 and overall I find that easier on the eye for office stuff. Depends really what you are doing.

wheatln2

Thanks for the response BostonB, I am nearly certain I'll go with the Dell Precision M65 as it gets a great review here and in lots of other places like notebookreview.com

BostonB

wheatln2 wrote:

Thanks for the response BostonB, I am nearly certain I'll go with the Dell Precision M65 as it gets a great review here and in lots of other places like notebookreview.com

Another place to check out is http://www.notebookforums.com/

From what I've read, in general the Dell biz laptops get decent reviews. Bit pricey is about the main complaint. The screens seem to be better quality than on the Inspiron's which are hit and miss in my experience. The Inspiron's are much cheaper though.

wheatln2

BostonB wrote:

Another place to check out is http://www.notebookforums.com/

From what I've read, in general the Dell biz laptops get decent reviews. Bit pricey is about the main complaint. The screens seem to be better quality than on the Inspiron's which are hit and miss in my experience. The Inspiron's are much cheaper though.

Thanks for the link, the site was somewhat familiar but I hadn't read up much lately so it was nice to have a look round there. The M65 had a decent review so I think I will go with it, it's probably the most sensible solution considering what I need it for.

wheatln2

So I have decided to go with the Dell, the fact that I've had such good luck with them in the past has lead me to hope it will continue with this one.

Two random questions though, if I opt not to go for the Dell Business Support, where precisely does it leave me if something goes wrong? I mean if something craps out, do I have any comeback or right to a technician callout... Basically is it worth the €140 that they're asking... And also, and I know there aint any comeback on this, but why doesn't Ireland's Dell Outlet sell anything other than Inspirons and Dimensions. Grrr.

And thanks for all the responses so far, they're been great!

BostonB

wheatln2 wrote:

...And also, and I know there aint any comeback on this, but why doesn't Ireland's Dell Outlet sell anything other than Inspirons and Dimensions. Grrr....

I've said this before and I think its a little "odd". Someone else posted they've got biz models off it aswell. Which is weird as in a couple of years looking at that site I've never seen anything other than Inspirons and Dimensions either.

wheatln2

yeah, just had a look at the outlet options, and they're all inspirons. The American outlet has pretty much everything though, from servers to accessories and the precisions.

On the subject of the business support, the options that Dell offer are:

+++++++++++
Business Support provides direct access to a dedicated queue staffed with advanced level. Technicians who are A+ or MCP industry-certified. Business Support is designed to reduce time to resolution through software support, escalation management and seamless support with third party manufacturer's.
NOTE : The term of the Support service and Business Support must be the same.
To reach the advertised system price please select the No Business Support option below.
- No Business Support [subtract € 132.00]
- Business Support 5yr (incl. e-Learning Pack) [add € 73.00 or €3/month1]
- Vista Business Support 3yr (incl. e-Learning Pack) [Included in Price]
- Vista Business Support 4yr (incl. e-Learning Pack) [add € 51.00 or €2/month1]
- Vista Business Support 5yr (incl. e-Learning Pack) [add € 89.00 or €3/month1]
- 3 Year Business Support (incl. e-Learning Pack) DELL RECOMMENDS [subtract € 13.00]
- 4 Year Business Support (incl e-Learning Pack) [add € 38.00 or €2/month1]
+++++++++++

So I'm just wondering if I select No business support, what will that mean I'm entitled to.... Can I still ring them up and have them diagnose and/or replace problems/parts? I think this is basically what type of after-sales care I'm entitled to, and the e-Learning Pack refers to the different educational tutorials etc?

Anti

I personally would go for a sony just for the screen and build quality. The only problem with sonys is that they are pre-installed with an ass load of bloatware.

random_banter

I'm going to be getting that exact Sony you were talking about hopefully within the next month, I think its a better buy than the dell, certainly from a style point of view and the build quality is supposed to be excellent!

About the bloatware, does anyone know if there are any programs to get rid of it, a similar idea to the dell decrapifier perhaps? Or would one have to manually get rid of everything?

Glazun

Oh! and the HP Pavilion laptops are quite good, dont forget about 'em.

Glazun

Sony arent good with customer support. A guy in my class has owned 3 sony laptops, his current one has been replaced twice because of a faulty screen.. now its broken again, for the 3rd time. Sony told him that if he broke it, he has to pay for shipping, damage, replacement adding up to 500pounds.. o_O

So yeah I'm not getting sony.

Tom Dunne

Glazun wrote:

Oh! and the HP Pavilion laptops are quite good, dont forget about 'em.

I would say the exact opposite. I have posted here on numerous occasions about the problems I had with my Pavillion. I would certainly not recommend them.

jjohnson1984

Well I have had one myself for a few months and no problems, always bought HP and no issues at all, never bought Dell, never will, they used to be good but the last 18-24 months or so they have become more focused on value and less focused on making high quality machines with some of the most misleading advertising ever.

At the end of the day, any Company who advertises a system with 512MB of RAM and 64MB of that being used for graphics to be able to "EXPERIENCING WINDOWS VISTA IN STYLE" is clearly misleading customers. Also had to laugh at their recent advert for the Inspiron 1501.

Apparentley it has a HUGE 60GB Hard Drive. Someone bought it and it had 18gig partition for Vista, a 8 Gig other partion (I'd say recovery) and another 6 gig of bloatware, so I'd hardly call it huge if it is half full already at the time of getting it. It is also FAST TO BOOT UP AND FAST TO DOWNLOAD. I will not query the first bit, but the last bit is hillarious - The only way they can say that is if they provide internet access which they don't.

I used to like Dell, just gone off them completely now, We have Dell and HP Machines in work, and the HP ones which are exactly the same spec RAM and CPU wise are much more efficent. The older model Inspiron we have which is Same RAM, CPU and Graphics as the newer model is much more reliable - hence my comment about going downhill in the last 18 months.

Incidentally I am running Vista Home Premium on my Pavillion DV2104 with 1024MB RAM and Turion X2 CPU, fast as lightning, faster than Windows XP for me, so draw your only comparisons why people with Dell Machines with the same spec are having issues.