Just over a year ago I had the misfortune of buying an Acer Travelmate 8104, It worked very nicely, I was happy with it until a few months ago when it just died for no reason, after sending it to Acer they told me it would cost £1100 to fix it so I told them to shove it, and bought a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo PI 1536 – which has double the Acer’s specs.
On the arrival to Kingston Lloyd’s laptop (which is also an Acer Travelmate 8104) gave up the ghost as well, seems like these things are prone to overheating problems. While having it diagnosed we were both looking around at laptops to see if we can find something similar to mine.
One thing that becomes clear when looking in PC World, Comet, Curry’s and Ebuyer is manufacturers don’t seem to build machines with good specs, all of the ones on the market currently lack in most if not all areas. You can get one with a decent CPU, decent RAM and decent Hard Drive but with integrated graphics. For laptops that come with Windows Vista already loaded they’re really scraping the minimum specs barrel.
Seriously, we’re starting to plan putting people on Mars, why can’t manufacturers put decent graphics cards in their products, there’s no point in buying a laptop if it doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card if you plan to use Vista. For all the millions that was spent on the Vista launch its let down by rubbish machines that can only just handle Vista Basic.
[...] the laptop being far too much to be worthy of a repair, I went on the hunt for a new laptop, and as Myles blogged at the time, the number of decent laptops in the high street are few and far between, [...]
i’m just glad my laptop went wrong and the factory had a fire else i wouldn’t have got a better newer and more expensive laptop (which i didn’t actually have to pay that bit more
) GREAT STUFF! but if you don’t want it all messed up, don’t go to staples unless you’re 100% that in your area they know what they are going on about!
I bought a packard bell laptop 2 years ago and- touch word- it works brilliantly still. the only reason for this, and well recommended was the store i bought it from had a “whatever happens” warranty policy- if you can find anything like that when buying a computer or laptop, go for it. all repairs that needed doing are sent away for like three days with no charge. they even upgraded and gave me a larger harddrive with no additional cost.